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Mar 14

Collaborative Novel Object Discovery and Box-Guided Cross-Modal Alignment for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Detection

Open-vocabulary 3D Object Detection (OV-3DDet) addresses the detection of objects from an arbitrary list of novel categories in 3D scenes, which remains a very challenging problem. In this work, we propose CoDAv2, a unified framework designed to innovatively tackle both the localization and classification of novel 3D objects, under the condition of limited base categories. For localization, the proposed 3D Novel Object Discovery (3D-NOD) strategy utilizes 3D geometries and 2D open-vocabulary semantic priors to discover pseudo labels for novel objects during training. 3D-NOD is further extended with an Enrichment strategy that significantly enriches the novel object distribution in the training scenes, and then enhances the model's ability to localize more novel objects. The 3D-NOD with Enrichment is termed 3D-NODE. For classification, the Discovery-driven Cross-modal Alignment (DCMA) module aligns features from 3D point clouds and 2D/textual modalities, employing both class-agnostic and class-specific alignments that are iteratively refined to handle the expanding vocabulary of objects. Besides, 2D box guidance boosts the classification accuracy against complex background noises, which is coined as Box-DCMA. Extensive evaluation demonstrates the superiority of CoDAv2. CoDAv2 outperforms the best-performing method by a large margin (AP_Novel of 9.17 vs. 3.61 on SUN-RGBD and 9.12 vs. 3.74 on ScanNetv2). Source code and pre-trained models are available at the GitHub project page.

ProxyDet: Synthesizing Proxy Novel Classes via Classwise Mixup for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims to recognize novel objects whose categories are not included in the training set. In order to classify these unseen classes during training, many OVOD frameworks leverage the zero-shot capability of largely pretrained vision and language models, such as CLIP. To further improve generalization on the unseen novel classes, several approaches proposed to additionally train with pseudo region labeling on the external data sources that contain a substantial number of novel category labels beyond the existing training data. Albeit its simplicity, these pseudo-labeling methods still exhibit limited improvement with regard to the truly unseen novel classes that were not pseudo-labeled. In this paper, we present a novel, yet simple technique that helps generalization on the overall distribution of novel classes. Inspired by our observation that numerous novel classes reside within the convex hull constructed by the base (seen) classes in the CLIP embedding space, we propose to synthesize proxy-novel classes approximating novel classes via linear mixup between a pair of base classes. By training our detector with these synthetic proxy-novel classes, we effectively explore the embedding space of novel classes. The experimental results on various OVOD benchmarks such as LVIS and COCO demonstrate superior performance on novel classes compared to the other state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/ProxyDet.

Convolutions Die Hard: Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Single Frozen Convolutional CLIP

Open-vocabulary segmentation is a challenging task requiring segmenting and recognizing objects from an open set of categories. One way to address this challenge is to leverage multi-modal models, such as CLIP, to provide image and text features in a shared embedding space, which bridges the gap between closed-vocabulary and open-vocabulary recognition. Hence, existing methods often adopt a two-stage framework to tackle the problem, where the inputs first go through a mask generator and then through the CLIP model along with the predicted masks. This process involves extracting features from images multiple times, which can be ineffective and inefficient. By contrast, we propose to build everything into a single-stage framework using a shared Frozen Convolutional CLIP backbone, which not only significantly simplifies the current two-stage pipeline, but also remarkably yields a better accuracy-cost trade-off. The proposed FC-CLIP, benefits from the following observations: the frozen CLIP backbone maintains the ability of open-vocabulary classification and can also serve as a strong mask generator, and the convolutional CLIP generalizes well to a larger input resolution than the one used during contrastive image-text pretraining. When training on COCO panoptic data only and testing in a zero-shot manner, FC-CLIP achieve 26.8 PQ, 16.8 AP, and 34.1 mIoU on ADE20K, 18.2 PQ, 27.9 mIoU on Mapillary Vistas, 44.0 PQ, 26.8 AP, 56.2 mIoU on Cityscapes, outperforming the prior art by +4.2 PQ, +2.4 AP, +4.2 mIoU on ADE20K, +4.0 PQ on Mapillary Vistas and +20.1 PQ on Cityscapes, respectively. Additionally, the training and testing time of FC-CLIP is 7.5x and 6.6x significantly faster than the same prior art, while using 5.9x fewer parameters. FC-CLIP also sets a new state-of-the-art performance across various open-vocabulary semantic segmentation datasets. Code at https://github.com/bytedance/fc-clip

Open-Vocabulary Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation

Audio-visual semantic segmentation (AVSS) aims to segment and classify sounding objects in videos with acoustic cues. However, most approaches operate on the close-set assumption and only identify pre-defined categories from training data, lacking the generalization ability to detect novel categories in practical applications. In this paper, we introduce a new task: open-vocabulary audio-visual semantic segmentation, extending AVSS task to open-world scenarios beyond the annotated label space. This is a more challenging task that requires recognizing all categories, even those that have never been seen nor heard during training. Moreover, we propose the first open-vocabulary AVSS framework, OV-AVSS, which mainly consists of two parts: 1) a universal sound source localization module to perform audio-visual fusion and locate all potential sounding objects and 2) an open-vocabulary classification module to predict categories with the help of the prior knowledge from large-scale pre-trained vision-language models. To properly evaluate the open-vocabulary AVSS, we split zero-shot training and testing subsets based on the AVSBench-semantic benchmark, namely AVSBench-OV. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong segmentation and zero-shot generalization ability of our model on all categories. On the AVSBench-OV dataset, OV-AVSS achieves 55.43% mIoU on base categories and 29.14% mIoU on novel categories, exceeding the state-of-the-art zero-shot method by 41.88%/20.61% and open-vocabulary method by 10.2%/11.6%. The code is available at https://github.com/ruohaoguo/ovavss.

CoDA: Collaborative Novel Box Discovery and Cross-modal Alignment for Open-vocabulary 3D Object Detection

Open-vocabulary 3D Object Detection (OV-3DDet) aims to detect objects from an arbitrary list of categories within a 3D scene, which remains seldom explored in the literature. There are primarily two fundamental problems in OV-3DDet, i.e., localizing and classifying novel objects. This paper aims at addressing the two problems simultaneously via a unified framework, under the condition of limited base categories. To localize novel 3D objects, we propose an effective 3D Novel Object Discovery strategy, which utilizes both the 3D box geometry priors and 2D semantic open-vocabulary priors to generate pseudo box labels of the novel objects. To classify novel object boxes, we further develop a cross-modal alignment module based on discovered novel boxes, to align feature spaces between 3D point cloud and image/text modalities. Specifically, the alignment process contains a class-agnostic and a class-discriminative alignment, incorporating not only the base objects with annotations but also the increasingly discovered novel objects, resulting in an iteratively enhanced alignment. The novel box discovery and crossmodal alignment are jointly learned to collaboratively benefit each other. The novel object discovery can directly impact the cross-modal alignment, while a better feature alignment can, in turn, boost the localization capability, leading to a unified OV-3DDet framework, named CoDA, for simultaneous novel object localization and classification. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets (i.e., SUN-RGBD and ScanNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and also show a significant mAP improvement upon the best-performing alternative method by 80%. Codes and pre-trained models are released on the project page.

Boosting Open-Vocabulary Object Detection by Handling Background Samples

Open-vocabulary object detection is the task of accurately detecting objects from a candidate vocabulary list that includes both base and novel categories. Currently, numerous open-vocabulary detectors have achieved success by leveraging the impressive zero-shot capabilities of CLIP. However, we observe that CLIP models struggle to effectively handle background images (i.e. images without corresponding labels) due to their language-image learning methodology. This limitation results in suboptimal performance for open-vocabulary detectors that rely on CLIP when processing background samples. In this paper, we propose Background Information Representation for open-vocabulary Detector (BIRDet), a novel approach to address the limitations of CLIP in handling background samples. Specifically, we design Background Information Modeling (BIM) to replace the single, fixed background embedding in mainstream open-vocabulary detectors with dynamic scene information, and prompt it into image-related background representations. This method effectively enhances the ability to classify oversized regions as background. Besides, we introduce Partial Object Suppression (POS), an algorithm that utilizes the ratio of overlap area to address the issue of misclassifying partial regions as foreground. Experiments on OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of achieving performance enhancements across various open-vocabulary detectors.

OV-DINO: Unified Open-Vocabulary Detection with Language-Aware Selective Fusion

Open-vocabulary detection is a challenging task due to the requirement of detecting objects based on class names, including those not encountered during training. Existing methods have shown strong zero-shot detection capabilities through pre-training on diverse large-scale datasets. However, these approaches still face two primary challenges: (i) how to universally integrate diverse data sources for end-to-end training, and (ii) how to effectively leverage the language-aware capability for region-level cross-modality understanding. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unified open-vocabulary detection method called OV-DINO, which pre-trains on diverse large-scale datasets with language-aware selective fusion in a unified framework. Specifically, we introduce a Unified Data Integration (UniDI) pipeline to enable end-to-end training and eliminate noise from pseudo-label generation by unifying different data sources into detection-centric data. In addition, we propose a Language-Aware Selective Fusion (LASF) module to enable the language-aware ability of the model through a language-aware query selection and fusion process. We evaluate the performance of the proposed OV-DINO on popular open-vocabulary detection benchmark datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results with an AP of 50.6\% on the COCO dataset and 40.0\% on the LVIS dataset in a zero-shot manner, demonstrating its strong generalization ability. Furthermore, the fine-tuned OV-DINO on COCO achieves 58.4\% AP, outperforming many existing methods with the same backbone. The code for OV-DINO will be available at https://github.com/wanghao9610/OV-DINO{https://github.com/wanghao9610/OV-DINO}.

OvarNet: Towards Open-vocabulary Object Attribute Recognition

In this paper, we consider the problem of simultaneously detecting objects and inferring their visual attributes in an image, even for those with no manual annotations provided at the training stage, resembling an open-vocabulary scenario. To achieve this goal, we make the following contributions: (i) we start with a naive two-stage approach for open-vocabulary object detection and attribute classification, termed CLIP-Attr. The candidate objects are first proposed with an offline RPN and later classified for semantic category and attributes; (ii) we combine all available datasets and train with a federated strategy to finetune the CLIP model, aligning the visual representation with attributes, additionally, we investigate the efficacy of leveraging freely available online image-caption pairs under weakly supervised learning; (iii) in pursuit of efficiency, we train a Faster-RCNN type model end-to-end with knowledge distillation, that performs class-agnostic object proposals and classification on semantic categories and attributes with classifiers generated from a text encoder; Finally, (iv) we conduct extensive experiments on VAW, MS-COCO, LSA, and OVAD datasets, and show that recognition of semantic category and attributes is complementary for visual scene understanding, i.e., jointly training object detection and attributes prediction largely outperform existing approaches that treat the two tasks independently, demonstrating strong generalization ability to novel attributes and categories.

Open-NeRF: Towards Open Vocabulary NeRF Decomposition

In this paper, we address the challenge of decomposing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) into objects from an open vocabulary, a critical task for object manipulation in 3D reconstruction and view synthesis. Current techniques for NeRF decomposition involve a trade-off between the flexibility of processing open-vocabulary queries and the accuracy of 3D segmentation. We present, Open-vocabulary Embedded Neural Radiance Fields (Open-NeRF), that leverage large-scale, off-the-shelf, segmentation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and introduce an integrate-and-distill paradigm with hierarchical embeddings to achieve both the flexibility of open-vocabulary querying and 3D segmentation accuracy. Open-NeRF first utilizes large-scale foundation models to generate hierarchical 2D mask proposals from varying viewpoints. These proposals are then aligned via tracking approaches and integrated within the 3D space and subsequently distilled into the 3D field. This process ensures consistent recognition and granularity of objects from different viewpoints, even in challenging scenarios involving occlusion and indistinct features. Our experimental results show that the proposed Open-NeRF outperforms state-of-the-art methods such as LERF lerf and FFD ffd in open-vocabulary scenarios. Open-NeRF offers a promising solution to NeRF decomposition, guided by open-vocabulary queries, enabling novel applications in robotics and vision-language interaction in open-world 3D scenes.

Leveraging Open-Vocabulary Diffusion to Camouflaged Instance Segmentation

Text-to-image diffusion techniques have shown exceptional capability of producing high-quality images from text descriptions. This indicates that there exists a strong correlation between the visual and textual domains. In addition, text-image discriminative models such as CLIP excel in image labelling from text prompts, thanks to the rich and diverse information available from open concepts. In this paper, we leverage these technical advances to solve a challenging problem in computer vision: camouflaged instance segmentation. Specifically, we propose a method built upon a state-of-the-art diffusion model, empowered by open-vocabulary to learn multi-scale textual-visual features for camouflaged object representations. Such cross-domain representations are desirable in segmenting camouflaged objects where visual cues are subtle to distinguish the objects from the background, especially in segmenting novel objects which are not seen in training. We also develop technically supportive components to effectively fuse cross-domain features and engage relevant features towards respective foreground objects. We validate our method and compare it with existing ones on several benchmark datasets of camouflaged instance segmentation and generic open-vocabulary instance segmentation. Experimental results confirm the advances of our method over existing ones. We will publish our code and pre-trained models to support future research.

FrozenSeg: Harmonizing Frozen Foundation Models for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation

Open-vocabulary segmentation poses significant challenges, as it requires segmenting and recognizing objects across an open set of categories in unconstrained environments. Building on the success of powerful vision-language (ViL) foundation models, such as CLIP, recent efforts sought to harness their zero-short capabilities to recognize unseen categories. Despite notable performance improvements, these models still encounter the critical issue of generating precise mask proposals for unseen categories and scenarios, resulting in inferior segmentation performance eventually. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel approach, FrozenSeg, designed to integrate spatial knowledge from a localization foundation model (e.g., SAM) and semantic knowledge extracted from a ViL model (e.g., CLIP), in a synergistic framework. Taking the ViL model's visual encoder as the feature backbone, we inject the space-aware feature into the learnable queries and CLIP features within the transformer decoder. In addition, we devise a mask proposal ensemble strategy for further improving the recall rate and mask quality. To fully exploit pre-trained knowledge while minimizing training overhead, we freeze both foundation models, focusing optimization efforts solely on a lightweight transformer decoder for mask proposal generation-the performance bottleneck. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FrozenSeg advances state-of-the-art results across various segmentation benchmarks, trained exclusively on COCO panoptic data, and tested in a zero-shot manner. Code is available at https://github.com/chenxi52/FrozenSeg.

Open-vocabulary vs. Closed-set: Best Practice for Few-shot Object Detection Considering Text Describability

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), detecting specific classes of objects using only their linguistic descriptions (e.g., class names) without any image samples, has garnered significant attention. However, in real-world applications, the target class concepts is often hard to describe in text and the only way to specify target objects is to provide their image examples, yet it is often challenging to obtain a good number of samples. Thus, there is a high demand from practitioners for few-shot object detection (FSOD). A natural question arises: Can the benefits of OVD extend to FSOD for object classes that are difficult to describe in text? Compared to traditional methods that learn only predefined classes (referred to in this paper as closed-set object detection, COD), can the extra cost of OVD be justified? To answer these questions, we propose a method to quantify the ``text-describability'' of object detection datasets using the zero-shot image classification accuracy with CLIP. This allows us to categorize various OD datasets with different text-describability and emprically evaluate the FSOD performance of OVD and COD methods within each category. Our findings reveal that: i) there is little difference between OVD and COD for object classes with low text-describability under equal conditions in OD pretraining; and ii) although OVD can learn from more diverse data than OD-specific data, thereby increasing the volume of training data, it can be counterproductive for classes with low-text-describability. These findings provide practitioners with valuable guidance amidst the recent advancements of OVD methods.

Zero-Shot Dual-Path Integration Framework for Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation

Open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation transcends traditional closed-vocabulary methods by enabling the identification of both previously seen and unseen objects in real-world scenarios. It leverages a dual-modality approach, utilizing both 3D point clouds and 2D multi-view images to generate class-agnostic object mask proposals. Previous efforts predominantly focused on enhancing 3D mask proposal models; consequently, the information that could come from 2D association to 3D was not fully exploited. This bias towards 3D data, while effective for familiar indoor objects, limits the system's adaptability to new and varied object types, where 2D models offer greater utility. Addressing this gap, we introduce Zero-Shot Dual-Path Integration Framework that equally values the contributions of both 3D and 2D modalities. Our framework comprises three components: 3D pathway, 2D pathway, and Dual-Path Integration. 3D pathway generates spatially accurate class-agnostic mask proposals of common indoor objects from 3D point cloud data using a pre-trained 3D model, while 2D pathway utilizes pre-trained open-vocabulary instance segmentation model to identify a diverse array of object proposals from multi-view RGB-D images. In Dual-Path Integration, our Conditional Integration process, which operates in two stages, filters and merges the proposals from both pathways adaptively. This process harmonizes output proposals to enhance segmentation capabilities. Our framework, utilizing pre-trained models in a zero-shot manner, is model-agnostic and demonstrates superior performance on both seen and unseen data, as evidenced by comprehensive evaluations on the ScanNet200 and qualitative results on ARKitScenes datasets.

V3Det Challenge 2024 on Vast Vocabulary and Open Vocabulary Object Detection: Methods and Results

Detecting objects in real-world scenes is a complex task due to various challenges, including the vast range of object categories, and potential encounters with previously unknown or unseen objects. The challenges necessitate the development of public benchmarks and challenges to advance the field of object detection. Inspired by the success of previous COCO and LVIS Challenges, we organize the V3Det Challenge 2024 in conjunction with the 4th Open World Vision Workshop: Visual Perception via Learning in an Open World (VPLOW) at CVPR 2024, Seattle, US. This challenge aims to push the boundaries of object detection research and encourage innovation in this field. The V3Det Challenge 2024 consists of two tracks: 1) Vast Vocabulary Object Detection: This track focuses on detecting objects from a large set of 13204 categories, testing the detection algorithm's ability to recognize and locate diverse objects. 2) Open Vocabulary Object Detection: This track goes a step further, requiring algorithms to detect objects from an open set of categories, including unknown objects. In the following sections, we will provide a comprehensive summary and analysis of the solutions submitted by participants. By analyzing the methods and solutions presented, we aim to inspire future research directions in vast vocabulary and open-vocabulary object detection, driving progress in this field. Challenge homepage: https://v3det.openxlab.org.cn/challenge

Instance Brownian Bridge as Texts for Open-vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation

Temporally locating objects with arbitrary class texts is the primary pursuit of open-vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (VIS). Because of the insufficient vocabulary of video data, previous methods leverage image-text pretraining model for recognizing object instances by separately aligning each frame and class texts, ignoring the correlation between frames. As a result, the separation breaks the instance movement context of videos, causing inferior alignment between video and text. To tackle this issue, we propose to link frame-level instance representations as a Brownian Bridge to model instance dynamics and align bridge-level instance representation to class texts for more precisely open-vocabulary VIS (BriVIS). Specifically, we build our system upon a frozen video segmentor to generate frame-level instance queries, and design Temporal Instance Resampler (TIR) to generate queries with temporal context from frame queries. To mold instance queries to follow Brownian bridge and accomplish alignment with class texts, we design Bridge-Text Alignment (BTA) to learn discriminative bridge-level representations of instances via contrastive objectives. Setting MinVIS as the basic video segmentor, BriVIS surpasses the Open-vocabulary SOTA (OV2Seg) by a clear margin. For example, on the challenging large-vocabulary VIS dataset (BURST), BriVIS achieves 7.43 mAP and exhibits 49.49% improvement compared to OV2Seg (4.97 mAP).

Open-Vocabulary Camouflaged Object Segmentation

Recently, the emergence of the large-scale vision-language model (VLM), such as CLIP, has opened the way towards open-world object perception. Many works have explored the utilization of pre-trained VLM for the challenging open-vocabulary dense prediction task that requires perceiving diverse objects with novel classes at inference time. Existing methods construct experiments based on the public datasets of related tasks, which are not tailored for open vocabulary and rarely involve imperceptible objects camouflaged in complex scenes due to data collection bias and annotation costs. To fill in the gaps, we introduce a new task, open-vocabulary camouflaged object segmentation (OVCOS), and construct a large-scale complex scene dataset (OVCamo) containing 11,483 hand-selected images with fine annotations and corresponding object classes. Further, we build a strong single-stage open-vocabulary camouflaged object segmentation transformer baseline OVCoser attached to the parameter-fixed CLIP with iterative semantic guidance and structure enhancement. By integrating the guidance of class semantic knowledge and the supplement of visual structure cues from the edge and depth information, the proposed method can efficiently capture camouflaged objects. Moreover, this effective framework also surpasses previous state-of-the-arts of open-vocabulary semantic image segmentation by a large margin on our OVCamo dataset. With the proposed dataset and baseline, we hope that this new task with more practical value can further expand the research on open-vocabulary dense prediction tasks. Our code and data can be found in the https://github.com/lartpang/OVCamo{link}.

Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Open-vocabulary object detection aims to provide object detectors trained on a fixed set of object categories with the generalizability to detect objects described by arbitrary text queries. Previous methods adopt knowledge distillation to extract knowledge from Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models (PVLMs) and transfer it to detectors. However, due to the non-adaptive proposal cropping and single-level feature mimicking processes, they suffer from information destruction during knowledge extraction and inefficient knowledge transfer. To remedy these limitations, we propose an Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid (OADP) framework, including an Object-Aware Knowledge Extraction (OAKE) module and a Distillation Pyramid (DP) mechanism. When extracting object knowledge from PVLMs, the former adaptively transforms object proposals and adopts object-aware mask attention to obtain precise and complete knowledge of objects. The latter introduces global and block distillation for more comprehensive knowledge transfer to compensate for the missing relation information in object distillation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvement compared to current methods. Especially on the MS-COCO dataset, our OADP framework reaches 35.6 mAP^{N}_{50}, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by 3.3 mAP^{N}_{50}. Code is released at https://github.com/LutingWang/OADP.

Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation

We aim at advancing open-vocabulary object detection, which detects objects described by arbitrary text inputs. The fundamental challenge is the availability of training data. It is costly to further scale up the number of classes contained in existing object detection datasets. To overcome this challenge, we propose ViLD, a training method via Vision and Language knowledge Distillation. Our method distills the knowledge from a pretrained open-vocabulary image classification model (teacher) into a two-stage detector (student). Specifically, we use the teacher model to encode category texts and image regions of object proposals. Then we train a student detector, whose region embeddings of detected boxes are aligned with the text and image embeddings inferred by the teacher. We benchmark on LVIS by holding out all rare categories as novel categories that are not seen during training. ViLD obtains 16.1 mask AP_r with a ResNet-50 backbone, even outperforming the supervised counterpart by 3.8. When trained with a stronger teacher model ALIGN, ViLD achieves 26.3 AP_r. The model can directly transfer to other datasets without finetuning, achieving 72.2 AP_{50} on PASCAL VOC, 36.6 AP on COCO and 11.8 AP on Objects365. On COCO, ViLD outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by 4.8 on novel AP and 11.4 on overall AP. Code and demo are open-sourced at https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/detection/projects/vild.

HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation

HomeRobot (noun): An affordable compliant robot that navigates homes and manipulates a wide range of objects in order to complete everyday tasks. Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation (OVMM) is the problem of picking any object in any unseen environment, and placing it in a commanded location. This is a foundational challenge for robots to be useful assistants in human environments, because it involves tackling sub-problems from across robotics: perception, language understanding, navigation, and manipulation are all essential to OVMM. In addition, integration of the solutions to these sub-problems poses its own substantial challenges. To drive research in this area, we introduce the HomeRobot OVMM benchmark, where an agent navigates household environments to grasp novel objects and place them on target receptacles. HomeRobot has two components: a simulation component, which uses a large and diverse curated object set in new, high-quality multi-room home environments; and a real-world component, providing a software stack for the low-cost Hello Robot Stretch to encourage replication of real-world experiments across labs. We implement both reinforcement learning and heuristic (model-based) baselines and show evidence of sim-to-real transfer. Our baselines achieve a 20% success rate in the real world; our experiments identify ways future research work improve performance. See videos on our website: https://ovmm.github.io/.

Diffusion Models for Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Segmentation

The variety of objects in the real world is nearly unlimited and is thus impossible to capture using models trained on a fixed set of categories. As a result, in recent years, open-vocabulary methods have attracted the interest of the community. This paper proposes a new method for zero-shot open-vocabulary segmentation. Prior work largely relies on contrastive training using image-text pairs, leveraging grouping mechanisms to learn image features that are both aligned with language and well-localised. This however can introduce ambiguity as the visual appearance of images with similar captions often varies. Instead, we leverage the generative properties of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models to sample a set of support images for a given textual category. This provides a distribution of appearances for a given text circumventing the ambiguity problem. We further propose a mechanism that considers the contextual background of the sampled images to better localise objects and segment the background directly. We show that our method can be used to ground several existing pre-trained self-supervised feature extractors in natural language and provide explainable predictions by mapping back to regions in the support set. Our proposal is training-free, relying on pre-trained components only, yet, shows strong performance on a range of open-vocabulary segmentation benchmarks, obtaining a lead of more than 10% on the Pascal VOC benchmark.

Open-YOLO 3D: Towards Fast and Accurate Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation

Recent works on open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation show strong promise, but at the cost of slow inference speed and high computation requirements. This high computation cost is typically due to their heavy reliance on 3D clip features, which require computationally expensive 2D foundation models like Segment Anything (SAM) and CLIP for multi-view aggregation into 3D. As a consequence, this hampers their applicability in many real-world applications that require both fast and accurate predictions. To this end, we propose a fast yet accurate open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation approach, named Open-YOLO 3D, that effectively leverages only 2D object detection from multi-view RGB images for open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. We address this task by generating class-agnostic 3D masks for objects in the scene and associating them with text prompts. We observe that the projection of class-agnostic 3D point cloud instances already holds instance information; thus, using SAM might only result in redundancy that unnecessarily increases the inference time. We empirically find that a better performance of matching text prompts to 3D masks can be achieved in a faster fashion with a 2D object detector. We validate our Open-YOLO 3D on two benchmarks, ScanNet200 and Replica, under two scenarios: (i) with ground truth masks, where labels are required for given object proposals, and (ii) with class-agnostic 3D proposals generated from a 3D proposal network. Our Open-YOLO 3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets while obtaining up to sim16times speedup compared to the best existing method in literature. On ScanNet200 val. set, our Open-YOLO 3D achieves mean average precision (mAP) of 24.7\% while operating at 22 seconds per scene. Code and model are available at github.com/aminebdj/OpenYOLO3D.

OpenMask3D: Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation

We introduce the task of open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. Traditional approaches for 3D instance segmentation largely rely on existing 3D annotated datasets, which are restricted to a closed-set of object categories. This is an important limitation for real-life applications where one might need to perform tasks guided by novel, open-vocabulary queries related to objects from a wide variety. Recently, open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding methods have emerged to address this problem by learning queryable features per each point in the scene. While such a representation can be directly employed to perform semantic segmentation, existing methods have limitations in their ability to identify object instances. In this work, we address this limitation, and propose OpenMask3D, which is a zero-shot approach for open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. Guided by predicted class-agnostic 3D instance masks, our model aggregates per-mask features via multi-view fusion of CLIP-based image embeddings. We conduct experiments and ablation studies on the ScanNet200 dataset to evaluate the performance of OpenMask3D, and provide insights about the open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation task. We show that our approach outperforms other open-vocabulary counterparts, particularly on the long-tail distribution. Furthermore, OpenMask3D goes beyond the limitations of close-vocabulary approaches, and enables the segmentation of object instances based on free-form queries describing object properties such as semantics, geometry, affordances, and material properties.

Find n' Propagate: Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Detection in Urban Environments

In this work, we tackle the limitations of current LiDAR-based 3D object detection systems, which are hindered by a restricted class vocabulary and the high costs associated with annotating new object classes. Our exploration of open-vocabulary (OV) learning in urban environments aims to capture novel instances using pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) with multi-sensor data. We design and benchmark a set of four potential solutions as baselines, categorizing them into either top-down or bottom-up approaches based on their input data strategies. While effective, these methods exhibit certain limitations, such as missing novel objects in 3D box estimation or applying rigorous priors, leading to biases towards objects near the camera or of rectangular geometries. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a universal Find n' Propagate approach for 3D OV tasks, aimed at maximizing the recall of novel objects and propagating this detection capability to more distant areas thereby progressively capturing more. In particular, we utilize a greedy box seeker to search against 3D novel boxes of varying orientations and depth in each generated frustum and ensure the reliability of newly identified boxes by cross alignment and density ranker. Additionally, the inherent bias towards camera-proximal objects is alleviated by the proposed remote simulator, which randomly diversifies pseudo-labeled novel instances in the self-training process, combined with the fusion of base samples in the memory bank. Extensive experiments demonstrate a 53% improvement in novel recall across diverse OV settings, VLMs, and 3D detectors. Notably, we achieve up to a 3.97-fold increase in Average Precision (AP) for novel object classes. The source code is made available at https://github.com/djamahl99/findnpropagate.

Weakly Supervised 3D Open-vocabulary Segmentation

Open-vocabulary segmentation of 3D scenes is a fundamental function of human perception and thus a crucial objective in computer vision research. However, this task is heavily impeded by the lack of large-scale and diverse 3D open-vocabulary segmentation datasets for training robust and generalizable models. Distilling knowledge from pre-trained 2D open-vocabulary segmentation models helps but it compromises the open-vocabulary feature as the 2D models are mostly finetuned with close-vocabulary datasets. We tackle the challenges in 3D open-vocabulary segmentation by exploiting pre-trained foundation models CLIP and DINO in a weakly supervised manner. Specifically, given only the open-vocabulary text descriptions of the objects in a scene, we distill the open-vocabulary multimodal knowledge and object reasoning capability of CLIP and DINO into a neural radiance field (NeRF), which effectively lifts 2D features into view-consistent 3D segmentation. A notable aspect of our approach is that it does not require any manual segmentation annotations for either the foundation models or the distillation process. Extensive experiments show that our method even outperforms fully supervised models trained with segmentation annotations in certain scenes, suggesting that 3D open-vocabulary segmentation can be effectively learned from 2D images and text-image pairs. Code is available at https://github.com/Kunhao-Liu/3D-OVS.

OV-PARTS: Towards Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation

Segmenting and recognizing diverse object parts is a crucial ability in applications spanning various computer vision and robotic tasks. While significant progress has been made in object-level Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS), i.e., segmenting objects with arbitrary text, the corresponding part-level research poses additional challenges. Firstly, part segmentation inherently involves intricate boundaries, while limited annotated data compounds the challenge. Secondly, part segmentation introduces an open granularity challenge due to the diverse and often ambiguous definitions of parts in the open world. Furthermore, the large-scale vision and language models, which play a key role in the open vocabulary setting, struggle to recognize parts as effectively as objects. To comprehensively investigate and tackle these challenges, we propose an Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation (OV-PARTS) benchmark. OV-PARTS includes refined versions of two publicly available datasets: Pascal-Part-116 and ADE20K-Part-234. And it covers three specific tasks: Generalized Zero-Shot Part Segmentation, Cross-Dataset Part Segmentation, and Few-Shot Part Segmentation, providing insights into analogical reasoning, open granularity and few-shot adapting abilities of models. Moreover, we analyze and adapt two prevailing paradigms of existing object-level OVSS methods for OV-PARTS. Extensive experimental analysis is conducted to inspire future research in leveraging foundational models for OV-PARTS. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/OV_PARTS.

A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detection

We present OpenSeeD, a simple Open-vocabulary Segmentation and Detection framework that jointly learns from different segmentation and detection datasets. To bridge the gap of vocabulary and annotation granularity, we first introduce a pre-trained text encoder to encode all the visual concepts in two tasks and learn a common semantic space for them. This gives us reasonably good results compared with the counterparts trained on segmentation task only. To further reconcile them, we locate two discrepancies: i) task discrepancy -- segmentation requires extracting masks for both foreground objects and background stuff, while detection merely cares about the former; ii) data discrepancy -- box and mask annotations are with different spatial granularity, and thus not directly interchangeable. To address these issues, we propose a decoupled decoding to reduce the interference between foreground/background and a conditioned mask decoding to assist in generating masks for given boxes. To this end, we develop a simple encoder-decoder model encompassing all three techniques and train it jointly on COCO and Objects365. After pre-training, our model exhibits competitive or stronger zero-shot transferability for both segmentation and detection. Specifically, OpenSeeD beats the state-of-the-art method for open-vocabulary instance and panoptic segmentation across 5 datasets, and outperforms previous work for open-vocabulary detection on LVIS and ODinW under similar settings. When transferred to specific tasks, our model achieves new SoTA for panoptic segmentation on COCO and ADE20K, and instance segmentation on ADE20K and Cityscapes. Finally, we note that OpenSeeD is the first to explore the potential of joint training on segmentation and detection, and hope it can be received as a strong baseline for developing a single model for both tasks in open world.

OV-VG: A Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding

Open-vocabulary learning has emerged as a cutting-edge research area, particularly in light of the widespread adoption of vision-based foundational models. Its primary objective is to comprehend novel concepts that are not encompassed within a predefined vocabulary. One key facet of this endeavor is Visual Grounding, which entails locating a specific region within an image based on a corresponding language description. While current foundational models excel at various visual language tasks, there's a noticeable absence of models specifically tailored for open-vocabulary visual grounding. This research endeavor introduces novel and challenging OV tasks, namely Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding and Open-Vocabulary Phrase Localization. The overarching aim is to establish connections between language descriptions and the localization of novel objects. To facilitate this, we have curated a comprehensive annotated benchmark, encompassing 7,272 OV-VG images and 1,000 OV-PL images. In our pursuit of addressing these challenges, we delved into various baseline methodologies rooted in existing open-vocabulary object detection, VG, and phrase localization frameworks. Surprisingly, we discovered that state-of-the-art methods often falter in diverse scenarios. Consequently, we developed a novel framework that integrates two critical components: Text-Image Query Selection and Language-Guided Feature Attention. These modules are designed to bolster the recognition of novel categories and enhance the alignment between visual and linguistic information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework, which consistently attains SOTA performance across the OV-VG task. Additionally, ablation studies provide further evidence of the effectiveness of our innovative models. Codes and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/cv516Buaa/OV-VG.

Learning to Prompt for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision-Language Model

Recently, vision-language pre-training shows great potential in open-vocabulary object detection, where detectors trained on base classes are devised for detecting new classes. The class text embedding is firstly generated by feeding prompts to the text encoder of a pre-trained vision-language model. It is then used as the region classifier to supervise the training of a detector. The key element that leads to the success of this model is the proper prompt, which requires careful words tuning and ingenious design. To avoid laborious prompt engineering, there are some prompt representation learning methods being proposed for the image classification task, which however can only be sub-optimal solutions when applied to the detection task. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, detection prompt (DetPro), to learn continuous prompt representations for open-vocabulary object detection based on the pre-trained vision-language model. Different from the previous classification-oriented methods, DetPro has two highlights: 1) a background interpretation scheme to include the proposals in image background into the prompt training; 2) a context grading scheme to separate proposals in image foreground for tailored prompt training. We assemble DetPro with ViLD, a recent state-of-the-art open-world object detector, and conduct experiments on the LVIS as well as transfer learning on the Pascal VOC, COCO, Objects365 datasets. Experimental results show that our DetPro outperforms the baseline ViLD in all settings, e.g., +3.4 APbox and +3.0 APmask improvements on the novel classes of LVIS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dyabel/detpro.

Prompt-Guided Mask Proposal for Two-Stage Open-Vocabulary Segmentation

We tackle the challenge of open-vocabulary segmentation, where we need to identify objects from a wide range of categories in different environments, using text prompts as our input. To overcome this challenge, existing methods often use multi-modal models like CLIP, which combine image and text features in a shared embedding space to bridge the gap between limited and extensive vocabulary recognition, resulting in a two-stage approach: In the first stage, a mask generator takes an input image to generate mask proposals, and the in the second stage the target mask is picked based on the query. However, the expected target mask may not exist in the generated mask proposals, which leads to an unexpected output mask. In our work, we propose a novel approach named Prompt-guided Mask Proposal (PMP) where the mask generator takes the input text prompts and generates masks guided by these prompts. Compared with mask proposals generated without input prompts, masks generated by PMP are better aligned with the input prompts. To realize PMP, we designed a cross-attention mechanism between text tokens and query tokens which is capable of generating prompt-guided mask proposals after each decoding. We combined our PMP with several existing works employing a query-based segmentation backbone and the experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, showcasing significant improvements over the current two-stage models (1% ~ 3% absolute performance gain in terms of mIOU). The steady improvement in performance across these benchmarks indicates the effective generalization of our proposed lightweight prompt-aware method.

GaussianGrasper: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting for Open-vocabulary Robotic Grasping

Constructing a 3D scene capable of accommodating open-ended language queries, is a pivotal pursuit, particularly within the domain of robotics. Such technology facilitates robots in executing object manipulations based on human language directives. To tackle this challenge, some research efforts have been dedicated to the development of language-embedded implicit fields. However, implicit fields (e.g. NeRF) encounter limitations due to the necessity of processing a large number of input views for reconstruction, coupled with their inherent inefficiencies in inference. Thus, we present the GaussianGrasper, which utilizes 3D Gaussian Splatting to explicitly represent the scene as a collection of Gaussian primitives. Our approach takes a limited set of RGB-D views and employs a tile-based splatting technique to create a feature field. In particular, we propose an Efficient Feature Distillation (EFD) module that employs contrastive learning to efficiently and accurately distill language embeddings derived from foundational models. With the reconstructed geometry of the Gaussian field, our method enables the pre-trained grasping model to generate collision-free grasp pose candidates. Furthermore, we propose a normal-guided grasp module to select the best grasp pose. Through comprehensive real-world experiments, we demonstrate that GaussianGrasper enables robots to accurately query and grasp objects with language instructions, providing a new solution for language-guided manipulation tasks. Data and codes can be available at https://github.com/MrSecant/GaussianGrasper.

OpenIns3D: Snap and Lookup for 3D Open-vocabulary Instance Segmentation

Current 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding methods mostly utilize well-aligned 2D images as the bridge to learn 3D features with language. However, applying these approaches becomes challenging in scenarios where 2D images are absent. In this work, we introduce a completely new pipeline, namely, OpenIns3D, which requires no 2D image inputs, for 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding at the instance level. The OpenIns3D framework employs a "Mask-Snap-Lookup" scheme. The "Mask" module learns class-agnostic mask proposals in 3D point clouds. The "Snap" module generates synthetic scene-level images at multiple scales and leverages 2D vision language models to extract interesting objects. The "Lookup" module searches through the outcomes of "Snap" with the help of Mask2Pixel maps, which contain the precise correspondence between 3D masks and synthetic images, to assign category names to the proposed masks. This 2D input-free, easy-to-train, and flexible approach achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of indoor and outdoor datasets with a large margin. Furthermore, OpenIns3D allows for effortless switching of 2D detectors without re-training. When integrated with state-of-the-art 2D open-world models such as ODISE and GroundingDINO, superb results are observed on open-vocabulary instance segmentation. When integrated with LLM-powered 2D models like LISA, it demonstrates a remarkable capacity to process highly complex text queries, including those that require intricate reasoning and world knowledge. Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/OpenIns3D/

Betrayed by Captions: Joint Caption Grounding and Generation for Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentation

In this work, we focus on open vocabulary instance segmentation to expand a segmentation model to classify and segment instance-level novel categories. Previous approaches have relied on massive caption datasets and complex pipelines to establish one-to-one mappings between image regions and words in captions. However, such methods build noisy supervision by matching non-visible words to image regions, such as adjectives and verbs. Meanwhile, context words are also important for inferring the existence of novel objects as they show high inter-correlations with novel categories. To overcome these limitations, we devise a joint Caption Grounding and Generation (CGG) framework, which incorporates a novel grounding loss that only focuses on matching object nouns to improve learning efficiency. We also introduce a caption generation head that enables additional supervision and contextual modeling as a complementation to the grounding loss. Our analysis and results demonstrate that grounding and generation components complement each other, significantly enhancing the segmentation performance for novel classes. Experiments on the COCO dataset with two settings: Open Vocabulary Instance Segmentation (OVIS) and Open Set Panoptic Segmentation (OSPS) demonstrate the superiority of the CGG. Specifically, CGG achieves a substantial improvement of 6.8% mAP for novel classes without extra data on the OVIS task and 15% PQ improvements for novel classes on the OSPS benchmark.

GroundVLP: Harnessing Zero-shot Visual Grounding from Vision-Language Pre-training and Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Visual grounding, a crucial vision-language task involving the understanding of the visual context based on the query expression, necessitates the model to capture the interactions between objects, as well as various spatial and attribute information. However, the annotation data of visual grounding task is limited due to its time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation process, resulting in the trained models being constrained from generalizing its capability to a broader domain. To address this challenge, we propose GroundVLP, a simple yet effective zero-shot method that harnesses visual grounding ability from the existing models trained from image-text pairs and pure object detection data, both of which are more conveniently obtainable and offer a broader domain compared to visual grounding annotation data. GroundVLP proposes a fusion mechanism that combines the heatmap from GradCAM and the object proposals of open-vocabulary detectors. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms other zero-shot methods on RefCOCO/+/g datasets, surpassing prior zero-shot state-of-the-art by approximately 28\% on the test split of RefCOCO and RefCOCO+. Furthermore, GroundVLP performs comparably to or even better than some non-VLP-based supervised models on the Flickr30k entities dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/GroundVLP.

CLIM: Contrastive Language-Image Mosaic for Region Representation

Detecting objects accurately from a large or open vocabulary necessitates the vision-language alignment on region representations. However, learning such a region-text alignment by obtaining high-quality box annotations with text labels or descriptions is expensive and infeasible. In contrast, collecting image-text pairs is simpler but lacks precise object location information to associate regions with texts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Contrastive Language-Image Mosaic (CLIM), which leverages large-scale image-text pairs effectively for aligning region and text representations. CLIM combines multiple images into a mosaicked image and treats each image as a `pseudo region'. The feature of each pseudo region is extracted and trained to be similar to the corresponding text embedding while dissimilar from others by a contrastive loss, enabling the model to learn the region-text alignment without costly box annotations. As a generally applicable approach, CLIM consistently improves different open-vocabulary object detection methods that use caption supervision. Furthermore, CLIM can effectively enhance the region representation of vision-language models, thus providing stronger backbones for open-vocabulary object detectors. Our experimental results demonstrate that CLIM improves different baseline open-vocabulary object detectors by a large margin on both OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/wusize/CLIM.

Described Object Detection: Liberating Object Detection with Flexible Expressions

Detecting objects based on language information is a popular task that includes Open-Vocabulary object Detection (OVD) and Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). In this paper, we advance them to a more practical setting called Described Object Detection (DOD) by expanding category names to flexible language expressions for OVD and overcoming the limitation of REC only grounding the pre-existing object. We establish the research foundation for DOD by constructing a Description Detection Dataset (D^3). This dataset features flexible language expressions, whether short category names or long descriptions, and annotating all described objects on all images without omission. By evaluating previous SOTA methods on D^3, we find some troublemakers that fail current REC, OVD, and bi-functional methods. REC methods struggle with confidence scores, rejecting negative instances, and multi-target scenarios, while OVD methods face constraints with long and complex descriptions. Recent bi-functional methods also do not work well on DOD due to their separated training procedures and inference strategies for REC and OVD tasks. Building upon the aforementioned findings, we propose a baseline that largely improves REC methods by reconstructing the training data and introducing a binary classification sub-task, outperforming existing methods. Data and code are available at https://github.com/shikras/d-cube and related works are tracked in https://github.com/Charles-Xie/awesome-described-object-detection.

Embodied Task Planning with Large Language Models

Equipping embodied agents with commonsense is important for robots to successfully complete complex human instructions in general environments. Recent large language models (LLM) can embed rich semantic knowledge for agents in plan generation of complex tasks, while they lack the information about the realistic world and usually yield infeasible action sequences. In this paper, we propose a TAsk Planing Agent (TaPA) in embodied tasks for grounded planning with physical scene constraint, where the agent generates executable plans according to the existed objects in the scene by aligning LLMs with the visual perception models. Specifically, we first construct a multimodal dataset containing triplets of indoor scenes, instructions and action plans, where we provide the designed prompts and the list of existing objects in the scene for GPT-3.5 to generate a large number of instructions and corresponding planned actions. The generated data is leveraged for grounded plan tuning of pre-trained LLMs. During inference, we discover the objects in the scene by extending open-vocabulary object detectors to multi-view RGB images collected in different achievable locations. Experimental results show that the generated plan from our TaPA framework can achieve higher success rate than LLaVA and GPT-3.5 by a sizable margin, which indicates the practicality of embodied task planning in general and complex environments.

StableSemantics: A Synthetic Language-Vision Dataset of Semantic Representations in Naturalistic Images

Understanding the semantics of visual scenes is a fundamental challenge in Computer Vision. A key aspect of this challenge is that objects sharing similar semantic meanings or functions can exhibit striking visual differences, making accurate identification and categorization difficult. Recent advancements in text-to-image frameworks have led to models that implicitly capture natural scene statistics. These frameworks account for the visual variability of objects, as well as complex object co-occurrences and sources of noise such as diverse lighting conditions. By leveraging large-scale datasets and cross-attention conditioning, these models generate detailed and contextually rich scene representations. This capability opens new avenues for improving object recognition and scene understanding in varied and challenging environments. Our work presents StableSemantics, a dataset comprising 224 thousand human-curated prompts, processed natural language captions, over 2 million synthetic images, and 10 million attention maps corresponding to individual noun chunks. We explicitly leverage human-generated prompts that correspond to visually interesting stable diffusion generations, provide 10 generations per phrase, and extract cross-attention maps for each image. We explore the semantic distribution of generated images, examine the distribution of objects within images, and benchmark captioning and open vocabulary segmentation methods on our data. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to release a diffusion dataset with semantic attributions. We expect our proposed dataset to catalyze advances in visual semantic understanding and provide a foundation for developing more sophisticated and effective visual models. Website: https://stablesemantics.github.io/StableSemantics

Open-Universe Indoor Scene Generation using LLM Program Synthesis and Uncurated Object Databases

We present a system for generating indoor scenes in response to text prompts. The prompts are not limited to a fixed vocabulary of scene descriptions, and the objects in generated scenes are not restricted to a fixed set of object categories -- we call this setting indoor scene generation. Unlike most prior work on indoor scene generation, our system does not require a large training dataset of existing 3D scenes. Instead, it leverages the world knowledge encoded in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to synthesize programs in a domain-specific layout language that describe objects and spatial relations between them. Executing such a program produces a specification of a constraint satisfaction problem, which the system solves using a gradient-based optimization scheme to produce object positions and orientations. To produce object geometry, the system retrieves 3D meshes from a database. Unlike prior work which uses databases of category-annotated, mutually-aligned meshes, we develop a pipeline using vision-language models (VLMs) to retrieve meshes from massive databases of un-annotated, inconsistently-aligned meshes. Experimental evaluations show that our system outperforms generative models trained on 3D data for traditional, closed-universe scene generation tasks; it also outperforms a recent LLM-based layout generation method on open-universe scene generation.

MarvelOVD: Marrying Object Recognition and Vision-Language Models for Robust Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Learning from pseudo-labels that generated with VLMs~(Vision Language Models) has been shown as a promising solution to assist open vocabulary detection (OVD) in recent studies. However, due to the domain gap between VLM and vision-detection tasks, pseudo-labels produced by the VLMs are prone to be noisy, while the training design of the detector further amplifies the bias. In this work, we investigate the root cause of VLMs' biased prediction under the OVD context. Our observations lead to a simple yet effective paradigm, coded MarvelOVD, that generates significantly better training targets and optimizes the learning procedure in an online manner by marrying the capability of the detector with the vision-language model. Our key insight is that the detector itself can act as a strong auxiliary guidance to accommodate VLM's inability of understanding both the ``background'' and the context of a proposal within the image. Based on it, we greatly purify the noisy pseudo-labels via Online Mining and propose Adaptive Reweighting to effectively suppress the biased training boxes that are not well aligned with the target object. In addition, we also identify a neglected ``base-novel-conflict'' problem and introduce stratified label assignments to prevent it. Extensive experiments on COCO and LVIS datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the other state-of-the-arts by significant margins. Codes are available at https://github.com/wkfdb/MarvelOVD

Detection-Oriented Image-Text Pretraining for Open-Vocabulary Detection

We present a new open-vocabulary detection approach based on detection-oriented image-text pretraining to bridge the gap between image-level pretraining and open-vocabulary object detection. At the pretraining phase, we replace the commonly used classification architecture with the detector architecture, which better serves the region-level recognition needs of detection by enabling the detector heads to learn from noisy image-text pairs. Using only standard contrastive loss and no pseudo-labeling, our approach is a simple yet effective extension of the contrastive learning method to learn emergent object-semantic cues. In addition, we propose a shifted-window learning approach upon window attention to make the backbone representation more robust, translation-invariant, and less biased by the window pattern. On the popular LVIS open-vocabulary detection benchmark, our approach sets a new state of the art of 40.4 mask AP_r using the common ViT-L backbone, significantly outperforming the best existing approach by +6.5 mask AP_r at system level. On the COCO benchmark, we achieve very competitive 40.8 novel AP without pseudo labeling or weak supervision. In addition, we evaluate our approach on the transfer detection setup, where ours outperforms the baseline significantly. Visualization reveals emerging object locality from the pretraining recipes compared to the baseline. Code and models will be publicly released.

Expanding Scene Graph Boundaries: Fully Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation via Visual-Concept Alignment and Retention

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) offers a structured representation critical in many computer vision applications. Traditional SGG approaches, however, are limited by a closed-set assumption, restricting their ability to recognize only predefined object and relation categories. To overcome this, we categorize SGG scenarios into four distinct settings based on the node and edge: Closed-set SGG, Open Vocabulary (object) Detection-based SGG (OvD-SGG), Open Vocabulary Relation-based SGG (OvR-SGG), and Open Vocabulary Detection + Relation-based SGG (OvD+R-SGG). While object-centric open vocabulary SGG has been studied recently, the more challenging problem of relation-involved open-vocabulary SGG remains relatively unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose a unified framework named OvSGTR towards fully open vocabulary SGG from a holistic view. The proposed framework is an end-toend transformer architecture, which learns a visual-concept alignment for both nodes and edges, enabling the model to recognize unseen categories. For the more challenging settings of relation-involved open vocabulary SGG, the proposed approach integrates relation-aware pre-training utilizing image-caption data and retains visual-concept alignment through knowledge distillation. Comprehensive experimental results on the Visual Genome benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.

From Occlusion to Insight: Object Search in Semantic Shelves using Large Language Models

How can a robot efficiently extract a desired object from a shelf when it is fully occluded by other objects? Prior works propose geometric approaches for this problem but do not consider object semantics. Shelves in pharmacies, restaurant kitchens, and grocery stores are often organized such that semantically similar objects are placed close to one another. Can large language models (LLMs) serve as semantic knowledge sources to accelerate robotic mechanical search in semantically arranged environments? With Semantic Spatial Search on Shelves (S^4), we use LLMs to generate affinity matrices, where entries correspond to semantic likelihood of physical proximity between objects. We derive semantic spatial distributions by synthesizing semantics with learned geometric constraints. S^4 incorporates Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and semantic refinement with predictions from ViLD, an open-vocabulary object detection model. Simulation experiments suggest that semantic spatial search reduces the search time relative to pure spatial search by an average of 24% across three domains: pharmacy, kitchen, and office shelves. A manually collected dataset of 100 semantic scenes suggests that OCR and semantic refinement improve object detection accuracy by 35%. Lastly, physical experiments in a pharmacy shelf suggest 47.1% improvement over pure spatial search. Supplementary material can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/s4-rss/home.

The devil is in the object boundary: towards annotation-free instance segmentation using Foundation Models

Foundation models, pre-trained on a large amount of data have demonstrated impressive zero-shot capabilities in various downstream tasks. However, in object detection and instance segmentation, two fundamental computer vision tasks heavily reliant on extensive human annotations, foundation models such as SAM and DINO struggle to achieve satisfactory performance. In this study, we reveal that the devil is in the object boundary, i.e., these foundation models fail to discern boundaries between individual objects. For the first time, we probe that CLIP, which has never accessed any instance-level annotations, can provide a highly beneficial and strong instance-level boundary prior in the clustering results of its particular intermediate layer. Following this surprising observation, we propose Zip which Zips up CLip and SAM in a novel classification-first-then-discovery pipeline, enabling annotation-free, complex-scene-capable, open-vocabulary object detection and instance segmentation. Our Zip significantly boosts SAM's mask AP on COCO dataset by 12.5% and establishes state-of-the-art performance in various settings, including training-free, self-training, and label-efficient finetuning. Furthermore, annotation-free Zip even achieves comparable performance to the best-performing open-vocabulary object detecters using base annotations. Code is released at https://github.com/ChengShiest/Zip-Your-CLIP

ImagineNav: Prompting Vision-Language Models as Embodied Navigator through Scene Imagination

Visual navigation is an essential skill for home-assistance robots, providing the object-searching ability to accomplish long-horizon daily tasks. Many recent approaches use Large Language Models (LLMs) for commonsense inference to improve exploration efficiency. However, the planning process of LLMs is limited within texts and it is difficult to represent the spatial occupancy and geometry layout only by texts. Both are important for making rational navigation decisions. In this work, we seek to unleash the spatial perception and planning ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and explore whether the VLM, with only on-board camera captured RGB/RGB-D stream inputs, can efficiently finish the visual navigation tasks in a mapless manner. We achieve this by developing the imagination-powered navigation framework ImagineNav, which imagines the future observation images at valuable robot views and translates the complex navigation planning process into a rather simple best-view image selection problem for VLM. To generate appropriate candidate robot views for imagination, we introduce the Where2Imagine module, which is distilled to align with human navigation habits. Finally, to reach the VLM preferred views, an off-the-shelf point-goal navigation policy is utilized. Empirical experiments on the challenging open-vocabulary object navigation benchmarks demonstrates the superiority of our proposed system.

Visual-RFT: Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning

Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) in Large Reasoning Models like OpenAI o1 learns from feedback on its answers, which is especially useful in applications when fine-tuning data is scarce. Recent open-source work like DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that reinforcement learning with verifiable reward is one key direction in reproducing o1. While the R1-style model has demonstrated success in language models, its application in multi-modal domains remains under-explored. This work introduces Visual Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (Visual-RFT), which further extends the application areas of RFT on visual tasks. Specifically, Visual-RFT first uses Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to generate multiple responses containing reasoning tokens and final answers for each input, and then uses our proposed visual perception verifiable reward functions to update the model via the policy optimization algorithm such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). We design different verifiable reward functions for different perception tasks, such as the Intersection over Union (IoU) reward for object detection. Experimental results on fine-grained image classification, few-shot object detection, reasoning grounding, as well as open-vocabulary object detection benchmarks show the competitive performance and advanced generalization ability of Visual-RFT compared with Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT). For example, Visual-RFT improves accuracy by 24.3% over the baseline in one-shot fine-grained image classification with around 100 samples. In few-shot object detection, Visual-RFT also exceeds the baseline by 21.9 on COCO's two-shot setting and 15.4 on LVIS. Our Visual-RFT represents a paradigm shift in fine-tuning LVLMs, offering a data-efficient, reward-driven approach that enhances reasoning and adaptability for domain-specific tasks.

Visual Prompting with Iterative Refinement for Design Critique Generation

Feedback is crucial for every design process, such as user interface (UI) design, and automating design critiques can significantly improve the efficiency of the design workflow. Although existing multimodal large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks, they often struggle with generating high-quality design critiques -- a complex task that requires producing detailed design comments that are visually grounded in a given design's image. Building on recent advancements in iterative refinement of text output and visual prompting methods, we propose an iterative visual prompting approach for UI critique that takes an input UI screenshot and design guidelines and generates a list of design comments, along with corresponding bounding boxes that map each comment to a specific region in the screenshot. The entire process is driven completely by LLMs, which iteratively refine both the text output and bounding boxes using few-shot samples tailored for each step. We evaluated our approach using Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT-4o, and found that human experts generally preferred the design critiques generated by our pipeline over those by the baseline, with the pipeline reducing the gap from human performance by 50% for one rating metric. To assess the generalizability of our approach to other multimodal tasks, we applied our pipeline to open-vocabulary object and attribute detection, and experiments showed that our method also outperformed the baseline.

DetGPT: Detect What You Need via Reasoning

In recent years, the field of computer vision has seen significant advancements thanks to the development of large language models (LLMs). These models have enabled more effective and sophisticated interactions between humans and machines, paving the way for novel techniques that blur the lines between human and machine intelligence. In this paper, we introduce a new paradigm for object detection that we call reasoning-based object detection. Unlike conventional object detection methods that rely on specific object names, our approach enables users to interact with the system using natural language instructions, allowing for a higher level of interactivity. Our proposed method, called DetGPT, leverages state-of-the-art multi-modal models and open-vocabulary object detectors to perform reasoning within the context of the user's instructions and the visual scene. This enables DetGPT to automatically locate the object of interest based on the user's expressed desires, even if the object is not explicitly mentioned. For instance, if a user expresses a desire for a cold beverage, DetGPT can analyze the image, identify a fridge, and use its knowledge of typical fridge contents to locate the beverage. This flexibility makes our system applicable across a wide range of fields, from robotics and automation to autonomous driving. Overall, our proposed paradigm and DetGPT demonstrate the potential for more sophisticated and intuitive interactions between humans and machines. We hope that our proposed paradigm and approach will provide inspiration to the community and open the door to more interative and versatile object detection systems. Our project page is launched at detgpt.github.io.

LangSplat: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting

Human lives in a 3D world and commonly uses natural language to interact with a 3D scene. Modeling a 3D language field to support open-ended language queries in 3D has gained increasing attention recently. This paper introduces LangSplat, which constructs a 3D language field that enables precise and efficient open-vocabulary querying within 3D spaces. Unlike existing methods that ground CLIP language embeddings in a NeRF model, LangSplat advances the field by utilizing a collection of 3D Gaussians, each encoding language features distilled from CLIP, to represent the language field. By employing a tile-based splatting technique for rendering language features, we circumvent the costly rendering process inherent in NeRF. Instead of directly learning CLIP embeddings, LangSplat first trains a scene-wise language autoencoder and then learns language features on the scene-specific latent space, thereby alleviating substantial memory demands imposed by explicit modeling. Existing methods struggle with imprecise and vague 3D language fields, which fail to discern clear boundaries between objects. We delve into this issue and propose to learn hierarchical semantics using SAM, thereby eliminating the need for extensively querying the language field across various scales and the regularization of DINO features. Extensive experiments on open-vocabulary 3D object localization and semantic segmentation demonstrate that LangSplat significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method LERF by a large margin. Notably, LangSplat is extremely efficient, achieving a {\speed} times speedup compared to LERF at the resolution of 1440 times 1080. We strongly recommend readers to check out our video results at https://langsplat.github.io

FMGS: Foundation Model Embedded 3D Gaussian Splatting for Holistic 3D Scene Understanding

Precisely perceiving the geometric and semantic properties of real-world 3D objects is crucial for the continued evolution of augmented reality and robotic applications. To this end, we present (), which incorporates vision-language embeddings of foundation models into 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS). The key contribution of this work is an efficient method to reconstruct and represent 3D vision-language models. This is achieved by distilling feature maps generated from image-based foundation models into those rendered from our 3D model. To ensure high-quality rendering and fast training, we introduce a novel scene representation by integrating strengths from both GS and multi-resolution hash encodings (MHE). Our effective training procedure also introduces a pixel alignment loss that makes the rendered feature distance of same semantic entities close, following the pixel-level semantic boundaries. Our results demonstrate remarkable multi-view semantic consistency, facilitating diverse downstream tasks, beating state-of-the-art methods by 10.2 percent on open-vocabulary language-based object detection, despite that we are 851times faster for inference. This research explores the intersection of vision, language, and 3D scene representation, paving the way for enhanced scene understanding in uncontrolled real-world environments. We plan to release the code upon paper acceptance.

AttrSeg: Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation via Attribute Decomposition-Aggregation

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation is a challenging task that requires segmenting novel object categories at inference time. Recent studies have explored vision-language pre-training to handle this task, but suffer from unrealistic assumptions in practical scenarios, i.e., low-quality textual category names. For example, this paradigm assumes that new textual categories will be accurately and completely provided, and exist in lexicons during pre-training. However, exceptions often happen when encountering ambiguity for brief or incomplete names, new words that are not present in the pre-trained lexicons, and difficult-to-describe categories for users. To address these issues, this work proposes a novel attribute decomposition-aggregation framework, AttrSeg, inspired by human cognition in understanding new concepts. Specifically, in the decomposition stage, we decouple class names into diverse attribute descriptions to complement semantic contexts from multiple perspectives. Two attribute construction strategies are designed: using large language models for common categories, and involving manually labeling for human-invented categories. In the aggregation stage, we group diverse attributes into an integrated global description, to form a discriminative classifier that distinguishes the target object from others. One hierarchical aggregation architecture is further proposed to achieve multi-level aggregations, leveraging the meticulously designed clustering module. The final results are obtained by computing the similarity between aggregated attributes and images embeddings. To evaluate the effectiveness, we annotate three types of datasets with attribute descriptions, and conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies. The results show the superior performance of attribute decomposition-aggregation.

Global Knowledge Calibration for Fast Open-Vocabulary Segmentation

Recent advancements in pre-trained vision-language models, such as CLIP, have enabled the segmentation of arbitrary concepts solely from textual inputs, a process commonly referred to as open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVS). However, existing OVS techniques confront a fundamental challenge: the trained classifier tends to overfit on the base classes observed during training, resulting in suboptimal generalization performance to unseen classes. To mitigate this issue, recent studies have proposed the use of an additional frozen pre-trained CLIP for classification. Nonetheless, this approach incurs heavy computational overheads as the CLIP vision encoder must be repeatedly forward-passed for each mask, rendering it impractical for real-world applications. To address this challenge, our objective is to develop a fast OVS model that can perform comparably or better without the extra computational burden of the CLIP image encoder during inference. To this end, we propose a core idea of preserving the generalizable representation when fine-tuning on known classes. Specifically, we introduce a text diversification strategy that generates a set of synonyms for each training category, which prevents the learned representation from collapsing onto specific known category names. Additionally, we employ a text-guided knowledge distillation method to preserve the generalizable knowledge of CLIP. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves robust generalization performance across various datasets. Furthermore, we perform a preliminary exploration of open-vocabulary video segmentation and present a benchmark that can facilitate future open-vocabulary research in the video domain.

DINO-X: A Unified Vision Model for Open-World Object Detection and Understanding

In this paper, we introduce DINO-X, which is a unified object-centric vision model developed by IDEA Research with the best open-world object detection performance to date. DINO-X employs the same Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture as Grounding DINO 1.5 to pursue an object-level representation for open-world object understanding. To make long-tailed object detection easy, DINO-X extends its input options to support text prompt, visual prompt, and customized prompt. With such flexible prompt options, we develop a universal object prompt to support prompt-free open-world detection, making it possible to detect anything in an image without requiring users to provide any prompt. To enhance the model's core grounding capability, we have constructed a large-scale dataset with over 100 million high-quality grounding samples, referred to as Grounding-100M, for advancing the model's open-vocabulary detection performance. Pre-training on such a large-scale grounding dataset leads to a foundational object-level representation, which enables DINO-X to integrate multiple perception heads to simultaneously support multiple object perception and understanding tasks, including detection, segmentation, pose estimation, object captioning, object-based QA, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of DINO-X. Specifically, the DINO-X Pro model achieves 56.0 AP, 59.8 AP, and 52.4 AP on the COCO, LVIS-minival, and LVIS-val zero-shot object detection benchmarks, respectively. Notably, it scores 63.3 AP and 56.5 AP on the rare classes of LVIS-minival and LVIS-val benchmarks, both improving the previous SOTA performance by 5.8 AP. Such a result underscores its significantly improved capacity for recognizing long-tailed objects.

How to Evaluate the Generalization of Detection? A Benchmark for Comprehensive Open-Vocabulary Detection

Object detection (OD) in computer vision has made significant progress in recent years, transitioning from closed-set labels to open-vocabulary detection (OVD) based on large-scale vision-language pre-training (VLP). However, current evaluation methods and datasets are limited to testing generalization over object types and referral expressions, which do not provide a systematic, fine-grained, and accurate benchmark of OVD models' abilities. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark named OVDEval, which includes 9 sub-tasks and introduces evaluations on commonsense knowledge, attribute understanding, position understanding, object relation comprehension, and more. The dataset is meticulously created to provide hard negatives that challenge models' true understanding of visual and linguistic input. Additionally, we identify a problem with the popular Average Precision (AP) metric when benchmarking models on these fine-grained label datasets and propose a new metric called Non-Maximum Suppression Average Precision (NMS-AP) to address this issue. Extensive experimental results show that existing top OVD models all fail on the new tasks except for simple object types, demonstrating the value of the proposed dataset in pinpointing the weakness of current OVD models and guiding future research. Furthermore, the proposed NMS-AP metric is verified by experiments to provide a much more truthful evaluation of OVD models, whereas traditional AP metrics yield deceptive results. Data is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/OVDEval

FROSTER: Frozen CLIP Is A Strong Teacher for Open-Vocabulary Action Recognition

In this paper, we introduce FROSTER, an effective framework for open-vocabulary action recognition. The CLIP model has achieved remarkable success in a range of image-based tasks, benefiting from its strong generalization capability stemming from pretaining on massive image-text pairs. However, applying CLIP directly to the open-vocabulary action recognition task is challenging due to the absence of temporal information in CLIP's pretraining. Further, fine-tuning CLIP on action recognition datasets may lead to overfitting and hinder its generalizability, resulting in unsatisfactory results when dealing with unseen actions. To address these issues, FROSTER employs a residual feature distillation approach to ensure that CLIP retains its generalization capability while effectively adapting to the action recognition task. Specifically, the residual feature distillation treats the frozen CLIP model as a teacher to maintain the generalizability exhibited by the original CLIP and supervises the feature learning for the extraction of video-specific features to bridge the gap between images and videos. Meanwhile, it uses a residual sub-network for feature distillation to reach a balance between the two distinct objectives of learning generalizable and video-specific features. We extensively evaluate FROSTER on open-vocabulary action recognition benchmarks under both base-to-novel and cross-dataset settings. FROSTER consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on all datasets across the board. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/froster.

MOCHa: Multi-Objective Reinforcement Mitigating Caption Hallucinations

While recent years have seen rapid progress in image-conditioned text generation, image captioning still suffers from the fundamental issue of hallucinations, the generation of spurious details that cannot be inferred from the given image. Dedicated methods for reducing hallucinations in image captioning largely focus on closed-vocabulary object tokens, ignoring most types of hallucinations that occur in practice. In this work, we propose MOCHa, an approach that harnesses advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) to address the sequence-level nature of hallucinations in an open-world setup. To optimize for caption fidelity to the input image, we leverage ground-truth reference captions as proxies to measure the logical consistency of generated captions. However, optimizing for caption fidelity alone fails to preserve the semantic adequacy of generations; therefore, we propose a multi-objective reward function that jointly targets these qualities, without requiring any strong supervision. We demonstrate that these goals can be simultaneously optimized with our framework, enhancing performance for various captioning models of different scales. Our qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate MOCHa's superior performance across various established metrics. We also demonstrate the benefit of our method in the open-vocabulary setting. To this end, we contribute OpenCHAIR, a new benchmark for quantifying open-vocabulary hallucinations in image captioning models, constructed using generative foundation models. We will release our code, benchmark, and trained models.

CoWs on Pasture: Baselines and Benchmarks for Language-Driven Zero-Shot Object Navigation

For robots to be generally useful, they must be able to find arbitrary objects described by people (i.e., be language-driven) even without expensive navigation training on in-domain data (i.e., perform zero-shot inference). We explore these capabilities in a unified setting: language-driven zero-shot object navigation (L-ZSON). Inspired by the recent success of open-vocabulary models for image classification, we investigate a straightforward framework, CLIP on Wheels (CoW), to adapt open-vocabulary models to this task without fine-tuning. To better evaluate L-ZSON, we introduce the Pasture benchmark, which considers finding uncommon objects, objects described by spatial and appearance attributes, and hidden objects described relative to visible objects. We conduct an in-depth empirical study by directly deploying 21 CoW baselines across Habitat, RoboTHOR, and Pasture. In total, we evaluate over 90k navigation episodes and find that (1) CoW baselines often struggle to leverage language descriptions, but are proficient at finding uncommon objects. (2) A simple CoW, with CLIP-based object localization and classical exploration -- and no additional training -- matches the navigation efficiency of a state-of-the-art ZSON method trained for 500M steps on Habitat MP3D data. This same CoW provides a 15.6 percentage point improvement in success over a state-of-the-art RoboTHOR ZSON model.

Segment Any 3D Object with Language

In this paper, we investigate Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation (OV-3DIS) with free-form language instructions. Earlier works that rely on only annotated base categories for training suffer from limited generalization to unseen novel categories. Recent works mitigate poor generalizability to novel categories by generating class-agnostic masks or projecting generalized masks from 2D to 3D, but disregard semantic or geometry information, leading to sub-optimal performance. Instead, generating generalizable but semantic-related masks directly from 3D point clouds would result in superior outcomes. In this paper, we introduce Segment any 3D Object with LanguagE (SOLE), which is a semantic and geometric-aware visual-language learning framework with strong generalizability by generating semantic-related masks directly from 3D point clouds. Specifically, we propose a multimodal fusion network to incorporate multimodal semantics in both backbone and decoder. In addition, to align the 3D segmentation model with various language instructions and enhance the mask quality, we introduce three types of multimodal associations as supervision. Our SOLE outperforms previous methods by a large margin on ScanNetv2, ScanNet200, and Replica benchmarks, and the results are even close to the fully-supervised counterpart despite the absence of class annotations in the training. Furthermore, extensive qualitative results demonstrate the versatility of our SOLE to language instructions.

ImageNet3D: Towards General-Purpose Object-Level 3D Understanding

A vision model with general-purpose object-level 3D understanding should be capable of inferring both 2D (e.g., class name and bounding box) and 3D information (e.g., 3D location and 3D viewpoint) for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images. This is a challenging task, as it involves inferring 3D information from 2D signals and most importantly, generalizing to rigid objects from unseen categories. However, existing datasets with object-level 3D annotations are often limited by the number of categories or the quality of annotations. Models developed on these datasets become specialists for certain categories or domains, and fail to generalize. In this work, we present ImageNet3D, a large dataset for general-purpose object-level 3D understanding. ImageNet3D augments 200 categories from the ImageNet dataset with 2D bounding box, 3D pose, 3D location annotations, and image captions interleaved with 3D information. With the new annotations available in ImageNet3D, we could (i) analyze the object-level 3D awareness of visual foundation models, and (ii) study and develop general-purpose models that infer both 2D and 3D information for arbitrary rigid objects in natural images, and (iii) integrate unified 3D models with large language models for 3D-related reasoning.. We consider two new tasks, probing of object-level 3D awareness and open vocabulary pose estimation, besides standard classification and pose estimation. Experimental results on ImageNet3D demonstrate the potential of our dataset in building vision models with stronger general-purpose object-level 3D understanding.

OmniManip: Towards General Robotic Manipulation via Object-Centric Interaction Primitives as Spatial Constraints

The development of general robotic systems capable of manipulating in unstructured environments is a significant challenge. While Vision-Language Models(VLM) excel in high-level commonsense reasoning, they lack the fine-grained 3D spatial understanding required for precise manipulation tasks. Fine-tuning VLM on robotic datasets to create Vision-Language-Action Models(VLA) is a potential solution, but it is hindered by high data collection costs and generalization issues. To address these challenges, we propose a novel object-centric representation that bridges the gap between VLM's high-level reasoning and the low-level precision required for manipulation. Our key insight is that an object's canonical space, defined by its functional affordances, provides a structured and semantically meaningful way to describe interaction primitives, such as points and directions. These primitives act as a bridge, translating VLM's commonsense reasoning into actionable 3D spatial constraints. In this context, we introduce a dual closed-loop, open-vocabulary robotic manipulation system: one loop for high-level planning through primitive resampling, interaction rendering and VLM checking, and another for low-level execution via 6D pose tracking. This design ensures robust, real-time control without requiring VLM fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong zero-shot generalization across diverse robotic manipulation tasks, highlighting the potential of this approach for automating large-scale simulation data generation.

Bongard-OpenWorld: Few-Shot Reasoning for Free-form Visual Concepts in the Real World

We introduce Bongard-OpenWorld, a new benchmark for evaluating real-world few-shot reasoning for machine vision. It originates from the classical Bongard Problems (BPs): Given two sets of images (positive and negative), the model needs to identify the set that query images belong to by inducing the visual concepts, which is exclusively depicted by images from the positive set. Our benchmark inherits the few-shot concept induction of the original BPs while adding the two novel layers of challenge: 1) open-world free-form concepts, as the visual concepts in Bongard-OpenWorld are unique compositions of terms from an open vocabulary, ranging from object categories to abstract visual attributes and commonsense factual knowledge; 2) real-world images, as opposed to the synthetic diagrams used by many counterparts. In our exploration, Bongard-OpenWorld already imposes a significant challenge to current few-shot reasoning algorithms. We further investigate to which extent the recently introduced Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can solve our task, by directly probing VLMs, and combining VLMs and LLMs in an interactive reasoning scheme. We even designed a neuro-symbolic reasoning approach that reconciles LLMs & VLMs with logical reasoning to emulate the human problem-solving process for Bongard Problems. However, none of these approaches manage to close the human-machine gap, as the best learner achieves 64% accuracy while human participants easily reach 91%. We hope Bongard-OpenWorld can help us better understand the limitations of current visual intelligence and facilitate future research on visual agents with stronger few-shot visual reasoning capabilities.

4D LangSplat: 4D Language Gaussian Splatting via Multimodal Large Language Models

Learning 4D language fields to enable time-sensitive, open-ended language queries in dynamic scenes is essential for many real-world applications. While LangSplat successfully grounds CLIP features into 3D Gaussian representations, achieving precision and efficiency in 3D static scenes, it lacks the ability to handle dynamic 4D fields as CLIP, designed for static image-text tasks, cannot capture temporal dynamics in videos. Real-world environments are inherently dynamic, with object semantics evolving over time. Building a precise 4D language field necessitates obtaining pixel-aligned, object-wise video features, which current vision models struggle to achieve. To address these challenges, we propose 4D LangSplat, which learns 4D language fields to handle time-agnostic or time-sensitive open-vocabulary queries in dynamic scenes efficiently. 4D LangSplat bypasses learning the language field from vision features and instead learns directly from text generated from object-wise video captions via Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Specifically, we propose a multimodal object-wise video prompting method, consisting of visual and text prompts that guide MLLMs to generate detailed, temporally consistent, high-quality captions for objects throughout a video. These captions are encoded using a Large Language Model into high-quality sentence embeddings, which then serve as pixel-aligned, object-specific feature supervision, facilitating open-vocabulary text queries through shared embedding spaces. Recognizing that objects in 4D scenes exhibit smooth transitions across states, we further propose a status deformable network to model these continuous changes over time effectively. Our results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that 4D LangSplat attains precise and efficient results for both time-sensitive and time-agnostic open-vocabulary queries.

SEGIC: Unleashing the Emergent Correspondence for In-Context Segmentation

In-context segmentation aims at segmenting novel images using a few labeled example images, termed as "in-context examples", exploring content similarities between examples and the target. The resulting models can be generalized seamlessly to novel segmentation tasks, significantly reducing the labeling and training costs compared with conventional pipelines. However, in-context segmentation is more challenging than classic ones due to its meta-learning nature, requiring the model to learn segmentation rules conditioned on a few samples, not just the segmentation. Unlike previous work with ad-hoc or non-end-to-end designs, we propose SEGIC, an end-to-end segment-in-context framework built upon a single vision foundation model (VFM). In particular, SEGIC leverages the emergent correspondence within VFM to capture dense relationships between target images and in-context samples. As such, information from in-context samples is then extracted into three types of instructions, i.e. geometric, visual, and meta instructions, serving as explicit conditions for the final mask prediction. SEGIC is a straightforward yet effective approach that yields state-of-the-art performance on one-shot segmentation benchmarks. Notably, SEGIC can be easily generalized to diverse tasks, including video object segmentation and open-vocabulary segmentation. Code will be available at https://github.com/MengLcool/SEGIC.

Grounding Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Controlled High-Quality Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) generative diffusion models have demonstrated outstanding performance in synthesizing diverse, high-quality visuals from text captions. Several layout-to-image models have been developed to control the generation process by utilizing a wide range of layouts, such as segmentation maps, edges, and human keypoints. In this work, we propose ObjectDiffusion, a model that conditions T2I diffusion models on semantic and spatial grounding information, enabling the precise rendering and placement of desired objects in specific locations defined by bounding boxes. To achieve this, we make substantial modifications to the network architecture introduced in ControlNet to integrate it with the grounding method proposed in GLIGEN. We fine-tune ObjectDiffusion on the COCO2017 training dataset and evaluate it on the COCO2017 validation dataset. Our model improves the precision and quality of controllable image generation, achieving an AP_{50} of 46.6, an AR of 44.5, and an FID of 19.8, outperforming the current SOTA model trained on open-source datasets across all three metrics. ObjectDiffusion demonstrates a distinctive capability in synthesizing diverse, high-quality, high-fidelity images that seamlessly conform to the semantic and spatial control layout. Evaluated in qualitative and quantitative tests, ObjectDiffusion exhibits remarkable grounding capabilities in closed-set and open-set vocabulary settings across a wide variety of contexts. The qualitative assessment verifies the ability of ObjectDiffusion to generate multiple detailed objects in varying sizes, forms, and locations.

What does a platypus look like? Generating customized prompts for zero-shot image classification

Open-vocabulary models are a promising new paradigm for image classification. Unlike traditional classification models, open-vocabulary models classify among any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language during inference. This natural language, called "prompts", typically consists of a set of hand-written templates (e.g., "a photo of a {}") which are completed with each of the category names. This work introduces a simple method to generate higher accuracy prompts, without relying on any explicit knowledge of the task domain and with far fewer hand-constructed sentences. To achieve this, we combine open-vocabulary models with large language models (LLMs) to create Customized Prompts via Language models (CuPL, pronounced "couple"). In particular, we leverage the knowledge contained in LLMs in order to generate many descriptive sentences that contain important discriminating characteristics of the image categories. This allows the model to place a greater importance on these regions in the image when making predictions. We find that this straightforward and general approach improves accuracy on a range of zero-shot image classification benchmarks, including over one percentage point gain on ImageNet. Finally, this simple baseline requires no additional training and remains completely zero-shot. Code available at https://github.com/sarahpratt/CuPL.

Towards Open-Ended Visual Recognition with Large Language Model

Localizing and recognizing objects in the open-ended physical world poses a long-standing challenge within the domain of machine perception. Recent methods have endeavored to address the issue by employing a class-agnostic mask (or box) proposal model, complemented by an open-vocabulary classifier (e.g., CLIP) using pre-extracted text embeddings. However, it is worth noting that these open-vocabulary recognition models still exhibit limitations in practical applications. On one hand, they rely on the provision of class names during testing, where the recognition performance heavily depends on this predefined set of semantic classes by users. On the other hand, when training with multiple datasets, human intervention is required to alleviate the label definition conflict between them. In this paper, we introduce the OmniScient Model (OSM), a novel Large Language Model (LLM) based mask classifier, as a straightforward and effective solution to the aforementioned challenges. Specifically, OSM predicts class labels in a generative manner, thus removing the supply of class names during both training and testing. It also enables cross-dataset training without any human interference, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities due to the world knowledge acquired from the LLM. By combining OSM with an off-the-shelf mask proposal model, we present promising results on various benchmarks, and demonstrate its effectiveness in handling novel concepts. Code/model are available at https://github.com/bytedance/OmniScient-Model.

Open-World Object Manipulation using Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

For robots to follow instructions from people, they must be able to connect the rich semantic information in human vocabulary, e.g. "can you get me the pink stuffed whale?" to their sensory observations and actions. This brings up a notably difficult challenge for robots: while robot learning approaches allow robots to learn many different behaviors from first-hand experience, it is impractical for robots to have first-hand experiences that span all of this semantic information. We would like a robot's policy to be able to perceive and pick up the pink stuffed whale, even if it has never seen any data interacting with a stuffed whale before. Fortunately, static data on the internet has vast semantic information, and this information is captured in pre-trained vision-language models. In this paper, we study whether we can interface robot policies with these pre-trained models, with the aim of allowing robots to complete instructions involving object categories that the robot has never seen first-hand. We develop a simple approach, which we call Manipulation of Open-World Objects (MOO), which leverages a pre-trained vision-language model to extract object-identifying information from the language command and image, and conditions the robot policy on the current image, the instruction, and the extracted object information. In a variety of experiments on a real mobile manipulator, we find that MOO generalizes zero-shot to a wide range of novel object categories and environments. In addition, we show how MOO generalizes to other, non-language-based input modalities to specify the object of interest such as finger pointing, and how it can be further extended to enable open-world navigation and manipulation. The project's website and evaluation videos can be found at https://robot-moo.github.io/

OpenSD: Unified Open-Vocabulary Segmentation and Detection

Recently, a few open-vocabulary methods have been proposed by employing a unified architecture to tackle generic segmentation and detection tasks. However, their performance still lags behind the task-specific models due to the conflict between different tasks, and their open-vocabulary capability is limited due to the inadequate use of CLIP. To address these challenges, we present a universal transformer-based framework, abbreviated as OpenSD, which utilizes the same architecture and network parameters to handle open-vocabulary segmentation and detection tasks. First, we introduce a decoder decoupled learning strategy to alleviate the semantic conflict between thing and staff categories so that each individual task can be learned more effectively under the same framework. Second, to better leverage CLIP for end-to-end segmentation and detection, we propose dual classifiers to handle the in-vocabulary domain and out-of-vocabulary domain, respectively. The text encoder is further trained to be region-aware for both thing and stuff categories through decoupled prompt learning, enabling them to filter out duplicated and low-quality predictions, which is important to end-to-end segmentation and detection. Extensive experiments are conducted on multiple datasets under various circumstances. The results demonstrate that OpenSD outperforms state-of-the-art open-vocabulary segmentation and detection methods in both closed- and open-vocabulary settings. Code is available at https://github.com/strongwolf/OpenSD

Grounding Descriptions in Images informs Zero-Shot Visual Recognition

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have been cherished for their ability to perform zero-shot visual recognition on open-vocabulary concepts. This is achieved by selecting the object category whose textual representation bears the highest similarity with the query image. While successful in some domains, this method struggles with identifying fine-grained entities as well as generalizing to unseen concepts that are not captured by the training distribution. Recent works attempt to mitigate these challenges by integrating category descriptions at test time, albeit yielding modest improvements. We attribute these limited gains to a fundamental misalignment between image and description representations, which is rooted in the pretraining structure of CLIP. In this paper, we propose GRAIN, a new pretraining strategy aimed at aligning representations at both fine and coarse levels simultaneously. Our approach learns to jointly ground textual descriptions in image regions along with aligning overarching captions with global image representations. To drive this pre-training, we leverage frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to derive large-scale synthetic annotations. We demonstrate the enhanced zero-shot performance of our model compared to current state-of-the art methods across 11 diverse image classification datasets. Additionally, we introduce Products-2023, a newly curated, manually labeled dataset featuring novel concepts, and showcase our model's ability to recognize these concepts by benchmarking on it. Significant improvements achieved by our model on other downstream tasks like retrieval further highlight the superior quality of representations learned by our approach. Code available at https://github.com/shaunak27/grain-clip .

Chat-3D v2: Bridging 3D Scene and Large Language Models with Object Identifiers

Recent research has evidenced the significant potentials of Large Language Models (LLMs) in handling challenging tasks within 3D scenes. However, current models are constrained to addressing object-centric tasks, where each question-answer pair focuses solely on an individual object. In real-world applications, users may pose queries involving multiple objects or expect for answers that precisely reference various objects. We introduce the use of object identifiers to freely reference objects during a conversation. While this solution appears straightforward, it presents two main challenges: 1) How to establish a reliable one-to-one correspondence between each object and its identifier? 2) How to incorporate complex spatial relationships among dozens of objects into the embedding space of the LLM? To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage alignment method, which involves learning an attribute-aware token and a relation-aware token for each object. These tokens capture the object's attributes and spatial relationships with surrounding objects in the 3D scene. Once the alignment is established, we can fine-tune our model on various downstream tasks using instruction tuning. Experiments conducted on traditional datasets like ScanQA, ScanRefer, and Nr3D/Sr3D showcase the effectiveness of our proposed method. Additionally, we create a 3D scene captioning dataset annotated with rich object identifiers, with the assistant of GPT-4. This dataset aims to further explore the capability of object identifiers in effective object referencing and precise scene understanding.

Salamandra Technical Report

This work introduces Salamandra, a suite of open-source decoder-only large language models available in three different sizes: 2, 7, and 40 billion parameters. The models were trained from scratch on highly multilingual data that comprises text in 35 European languages and code. Our carefully curated corpus is made exclusively from open-access data compiled from a wide variety of sources. Along with the base models, supplementary checkpoints that were fine-tuned on public-domain instruction data are also released for chat applications. Additionally, we also share our preliminary experiments on multimodality, which serve as proof-of-concept to showcase potential applications for the Salamandra family. Our extensive evaluations on multilingual benchmarks reveal that Salamandra has strong capabilities, achieving competitive performance when compared to similarly sized open-source models. We provide comprehensive evaluation results both on standard downstream tasks as well as key aspects related to bias and safety.With this technical report, we intend to promote open science by sharing all the details behind our design choices, data curation strategy and evaluation methodology. In addition to that, we deviate from the usual practice by making our training and evaluation scripts publicly accessible. We release all models under a permissive Apache 2.0 license in order to foster future research and facilitate commercial use, thereby contributing to the open-source ecosystem of large language models.

Detecting Any Human-Object Interaction Relationship: Universal HOI Detector with Spatial Prompt Learning on Foundation Models

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to comprehend the intricate relationships between humans and objects, predicting <human, action, object> triplets, and serving as the foundation for numerous computer vision tasks. The complexity and diversity of human-object interactions in the real world, however, pose significant challenges for both annotation and recognition, particularly in recognizing interactions within an open world context. This study explores the universal interaction recognition in an open-world setting through the use of Vision-Language (VL) foundation models and large language models (LLMs). The proposed method is dubbed as \textbf{UniHOI}. We conduct a deep analysis of the three hierarchical features inherent in visual HOI detectors and propose a method for high-level relation extraction aimed at VL foundation models, which we call HO prompt-based learning. Our design includes an HO Prompt-guided Decoder (HOPD), facilitates the association of high-level relation representations in the foundation model with various HO pairs within the image. Furthermore, we utilize a LLM (i.e. GPT) for interaction interpretation, generating a richer linguistic understanding for complex HOIs. For open-category interaction recognition, our method supports either of two input types: interaction phrase or interpretive sentence. Our efficient architecture design and learning methods effectively unleash the potential of the VL foundation models and LLMs, allowing UniHOI to surpass all existing methods with a substantial margin, under both supervised and zero-shot settings. The code and pre-trained weights are available at: https://github.com/Caoyichao/UniHOI.

Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research

Language models have become a critical technology to tackling a wide range of natural language processing tasks, yet many details about how the best-performing language models were developed are not reported. In particular, information about their pretraining corpora is seldom discussed: commercial language models rarely provide any information about their data; even open models rarely release datasets they are trained on, or an exact recipe to reproduce them. As a result, it is challenging to conduct certain threads of language modeling research, such as understanding how training data impacts model capabilities and shapes their limitations. To facilitate open research on language model pretraining, we release Dolma, a three trillion tokens English corpus, built from a diverse mixture of web content, scientific papers, code, public-domain books, social media, and encyclopedic materials. In addition, we open source our data curation toolkit to enable further experimentation and reproduction of our work. In this report, we document Dolma, including its design principles, details about its construction, and a summary of its contents. We interleave this report with analyses and experimental results from training language models on intermediate states of Dolma to share what we have learned about important data curation practices, including the role of content or quality filters, deduplication, and multi-source mixing. Dolma has been used to train OLMo, a state-of-the-art, open language model and framework designed to build and study the science of language modeling.

Toxicity of the Commons: Curating Open-Source Pre-Training Data

Open-source large language models are becoming increasingly available and popular among researchers and practitioners. While significant progress has been made on open-weight models, open training data is a practice yet to be adopted by the leading open-weight models creators. At the same time, there researchers are working to make language models safer. We propose a data curation pipeline to reduce harmful outputs by models trained on public domain data. There are unique challenges to working with public domain data, as these sources differ from web text in both form and content. Many sources are historical documents and are the result of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Consequently, current state-of-the-art approaches to toxicity filtering are often infeasible or inappropriate for open data models. In this paper, we introduce a new fully open-source pipeline for open-data toxicity filtering. Our contributions are threefold. We create a custom training dataset, ToxicCommons, which is composed of texts which have been classified across five different dimensions (racial/origin-based, gender/sex-based, religious, ability-based discrimination, and violence). We use this dataset to train a custom classifier, Celadon, that can be used to detect toxic content in open data more efficiently at a larger scale. Finally, we describe the balanced approach to content filtration that optimizes safety filtering with respect to the filtered data available for training.

Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation with Mask-adapted CLIP

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation aims to segment an image into semantic regions according to text descriptions, which may not have been seen during training. Recent two-stage methods first generate class-agnostic mask proposals and then leverage pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, to classify masked regions. We identify the performance bottleneck of this paradigm to be the pre-trained CLIP model, since it does not perform well on masked images. To address this, we propose to finetune CLIP on a collection of masked image regions and their corresponding text descriptions. We collect training data by mining an existing image-caption dataset (e.g., COCO Captions), using CLIP to match masked image regions to nouns in the image captions. Compared with the more precise and manually annotated segmentation labels with fixed classes (e.g., COCO-Stuff), we find our noisy but diverse dataset can better retain CLIP's generalization ability. Along with finetuning the entire model, we utilize the "blank" areas in masked images using a method we dub mask prompt tuning. Experiments demonstrate mask prompt tuning brings significant improvement without modifying any weights of CLIP, and it can further improve a fully finetuned model. In particular, when trained on COCO and evaluated on ADE20K-150, our best model achieves 29.6% mIoU, which is +8.5% higher than the previous state-of-the-art. For the first time, open-vocabulary generalist models match the performance of supervised specialist models in 2017 without dataset-specific adaptations.

Vocabulary-free Image Classification

Recent advances in large vision-language models have revolutionized the image classification paradigm. Despite showing impressive zero-shot capabilities, a pre-defined set of categories, a.k.a. the vocabulary, is assumed at test time for composing the textual prompts. However, such assumption can be impractical when the semantic context is unknown and evolving. We thus formalize a novel task, termed as Vocabulary-free Image Classification (VIC), where we aim to assign to an input image a class that resides in an unconstrained language-induced semantic space, without the prerequisite of a known vocabulary. VIC is a challenging task as the semantic space is extremely large, containing millions of concepts, with hard-to-discriminate fine-grained categories. In this work, we first empirically verify that representing this semantic space by means of an external vision-language database is the most effective way to obtain semantically relevant content for classifying the image. We then propose Category Search from External Databases (CaSED), a method that exploits a pre-trained vision-language model and an external vision-language database to address VIC in a training-free manner. CaSED first extracts a set of candidate categories from captions retrieved from the database based on their semantic similarity to the image, and then assigns to the image the best matching candidate category according to the same vision-language model. Experiments on benchmark datasets validate that CaSED outperforms other complex vision-language frameworks, while being efficient with much fewer parameters, paving the way for future research in this direction.