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SubscribeLoCoOp: Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection via Prompt Learning
We present a novel vision-language prompt learning approach for few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. Few-shot OOD detection aims to detect OOD images from classes that are unseen during training using only a few labeled in-distribution (ID) images. While prompt learning methods such as CoOp have shown effectiveness and efficiency in few-shot ID classification, they still face limitations in OOD detection due to the potential presence of ID-irrelevant information in text embeddings. To address this issue, we introduce a new approach called Local regularized Context Optimization (LoCoOp), which performs OOD regularization that utilizes the portions of CLIP local features as OOD features during training. CLIP's local features have a lot of ID-irrelevant nuisances (e.g., backgrounds), and by learning to push them away from the ID class text embeddings, we can remove the nuisances in the ID class text embeddings and enhance the separation between ID and OOD. Experiments on the large-scale ImageNet OOD detection benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our LoCoOp over zero-shot, fully supervised detection methods and prompt learning methods. Notably, even in a one-shot setting -- just one label per class, LoCoOp outperforms existing zero-shot and fully supervised detection methods. The code will be available via https://github.com/AtsuMiyai/LoCoOp.
PointOBB: Learning Oriented Object Detection via Single Point Supervision
Single point-supervised object detection is gaining attention due to its cost-effectiveness. However, existing approaches focus on generating horizontal bounding boxes (HBBs) while ignoring oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) commonly used for objects in aerial images. This paper proposes PointOBB, the first single Point-based OBB generation method, for oriented object detection. PointOBB operates through the collaborative utilization of three distinctive views: an original view, a resized view, and a rotated/flipped (rot/flp) view. Upon the original view, we leverage the resized and rot/flp views to build a scale augmentation module and an angle acquisition module, respectively. In the former module, a Scale-Sensitive Consistency (SSC) loss is designed to enhance the deep network's ability to perceive the object scale. For accurate object angle predictions, the latter module incorporates self-supervised learning to predict angles, which is associated with a scale-guided Dense-to-Sparse (DS) matching strategy for aggregating dense angles corresponding to sparse objects. The resized and rot/flp views are switched using a progressive multi-view switching strategy during training to achieve coupled optimization of scale and angle. Experimental results on the DIOR-R and DOTA-v1.0 datasets demonstrate that PointOBB achieves promising performance, and significantly outperforms potential point-supervised baselines.
Can OOD Object Detectors Learn from Foundation Models?
Out-of-distribution (OOD) object detection is a challenging task due to the absence of open-set OOD data. Inspired by recent advancements in text-to-image generative models, such as Stable Diffusion, we study the potential of generative models trained on large-scale open-set data to synthesize OOD samples, thereby enhancing OOD object detection. We introduce SyncOOD, a simple data curation method that capitalizes on the capabilities of large foundation models to automatically extract meaningful OOD data from text-to-image generative models. This offers the model access to open-world knowledge encapsulated within off-the-shelf foundation models. The synthetic OOD samples are then employed to augment the training of a lightweight, plug-and-play OOD detector, thus effectively optimizing the in-distribution (ID)/OOD decision boundaries. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SyncOOD significantly outperforms existing methods, establishing new state-of-the-art performance with minimal synthetic data usage.
HYPO: Hyperspherical Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization is critical for machine learning models deployed in the real world. However, achieving this can be fundamentally challenging, as it requires the ability to learn invariant features across different domains or environments. In this paper, we propose a novel framework HYPO (HYPerspherical OOD generalization) that provably learns domain-invariant representations in a hyperspherical space. In particular, our hyperspherical learning algorithm is guided by intra-class variation and inter-class separation principles -- ensuring that features from the same class (across different training domains) are closely aligned with their class prototypes, while different class prototypes are maximally separated. We further provide theoretical justifications on how our prototypical learning objective improves the OOD generalization bound. Through extensive experiments on challenging OOD benchmarks, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms competitive baselines and achieves superior performance. Code is available at https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/hypo.
Image Background Serves as Good Proxy for Out-of-distribution Data
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection empowers the model trained on the closed image set to identify unknown data in the open world. Though many prior techniques have yielded considerable improvements in this research direction, two crucial obstacles still remain. Firstly, a unified perspective has yet to be presented to view the developed arts with individual designs, which is vital for providing insights into future work. Secondly, we expect sufficient natural OOD supervision to promote the generation of compact boundaries between the in-distribution (ID) and OOD data without collecting explicit OOD samples. To tackle these issues, we propose a general probabilistic framework to interpret many existing methods and an OOD-data-free model, namely Self-supervised Sampling for OOD Detection (SSOD). SSOD efficiently exploits natural OOD signals from the ID data based on the local property of convolution. With these supervisions, it jointly optimizes the OOD detection and conventional ID classification in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments reveal that SSOD establishes competitive state-of-the-art performance on many large-scale benchmarks, outperforming the best previous method by a large margin, \eg, reporting -6.28\% FPR95 and +0.77\% AUROC on ImageNet, -19.01\% FPR95 and +3.04\% AUROC on CIFAR-10, and top-ranked performance on hard OOD datasets, \ie, ImageNet-O and OpenImage-O.
Open-set object detection: towards unified problem formulation and benchmarking
In real-world applications where confidence is key, like autonomous driving, the accurate detection and appropriate handling of classes differing from those used during training are crucial. Despite the proposal of various unknown object detection approaches, we have observed widespread inconsistencies among them regarding the datasets, metrics, and scenarios used, alongside a notable absence of a clear definition for unknown objects, which hampers meaningful evaluation. To counter these issues, we introduce two benchmarks: a unified VOC-COCO evaluation, and the new OpenImagesRoad benchmark which provides clear hierarchical object definition besides new evaluation metrics. Complementing the benchmark, we exploit recent self-supervised Vision Transformers performance, to improve pseudo-labeling-based OpenSet Object Detection (OSOD), through OW-DETR++. State-of-the-art methods are extensively evaluated on the proposed benchmarks. This study provides a clear problem definition, ensures consistent evaluations, and draws new conclusions about effectiveness of OSOD strategies.
NECO: NEural Collapse Based Out-of-distribution detection
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a critical challenge in machine learning due to model overconfidence, often without awareness of their epistemological limits. We hypothesize that ``neural collapse'', a phenomenon affecting in-distribution data for models trained beyond loss convergence, also influences OOD data. To benefit from this interplay, we introduce NECO, a novel post-hoc method for OOD detection, which leverages the geometric properties of ``neural collapse'' and of principal component spaces to identify OOD data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that NECO achieves state-of-the-art results on both small and large-scale OOD detection tasks while exhibiting strong generalization capabilities across different network architectures. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical explanation for the effectiveness of our method in OOD detection. Code is available at https://gitlab.com/drti/neco
Learning with Mixture of Prototypes for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to detect testing samples far away from the in-distribution (ID) training data, which is crucial for the safe deployment of machine learning models in the real world. Distance-based OOD detection methods have emerged with enhanced deep representation learning. They identify unseen OOD samples by measuring their distances from ID class centroids or prototypes. However, existing approaches learn the representation relying on oversimplified data assumptions, e.g, modeling ID data of each class with one centroid class prototype or using loss functions not designed for OOD detection, which overlook the natural diversities within the data. Naively enforcing data samples of each class to be compact around only one prototype leads to inadequate modeling of realistic data and limited performance. To tackle these issues, we propose PrototypicAl Learning with a Mixture of prototypes (PALM) which models each class with multiple prototypes to capture the sample diversities, and learns more faithful and compact samples embeddings to enhance OOD detection. Our method automatically identifies and dynamically updates prototypes, assigning each sample to a subset of prototypes via reciprocal neighbor soft assignment weights. PALM optimizes a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) loss to encourage the sample embeddings to be compact around the associated prototypes, as well as a contrastive loss on all prototypes to enhance intra-class compactness and inter-class discrimination at the prototype level. Moreover, the automatic estimation of prototypes enables our approach to be extended to the challenging OOD detection task with unlabelled ID data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of PALM, achieving state-of-the-art average AUROC performance of 93.82 on the challenging CIFAR-100 benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/jeff024/PALM.
Can Pre-trained Networks Detect Familiar Out-of-Distribution Data?
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical for safety-sensitive machine learning applications and has been extensively studied, yielding a plethora of methods developed in the literature. However, most studies for OOD detection did not use pre-trained models and trained a backbone from scratch. In recent years, transferring knowledge from large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by lightweight tuning has become mainstream for training in-distribution (ID) classifiers. To bridge the gap between the practice of OOD detection and current classifiers, the unique and crucial problem is that the samples whose information networks know often come as OOD input. We consider that such data may significantly affect the performance of large pre-trained networks because the discriminability of these OOD data depends on the pre-training algorithm. Here, we define such OOD data as PT-OOD (Pre-Trained OOD) data. In this paper, we aim to reveal the effect of PT-OOD on the OOD detection performance of pre-trained networks from the perspective of pre-training algorithms. To achieve this, we explore the PT-OOD detection performance of supervised and self-supervised pre-training algorithms with linear-probing tuning, the most common efficient tuning method. Through our experiments and analysis, we find that the low linear separability of PT-OOD in the feature space heavily degrades the PT-OOD detection performance, and self-supervised models are more vulnerable to PT-OOD than supervised pre-trained models, even with state-of-the-art detection methods. To solve this vulnerability, we further propose a unique solution to large-scale pre-trained models: Leveraging powerful instance-by-instance discriminative representations of pre-trained models and detecting OOD in the feature space independent of the ID decision boundaries. The code will be available via https://github.com/AtsuMiyai/PT-OOD.
Rich Feature Construction for the Optimization-Generalization Dilemma
There often is a dilemma between ease of optimization and robust out-of-distribution (OoD) generalization. For instance, many OoD methods rely on penalty terms whose optimization is challenging. They are either too strong to optimize reliably or too weak to achieve their goals. We propose to initialize the networks with a rich representation containing a palette of potentially useful features, ready to be used by even simple models. On the one hand, a rich representation provides a good initialization for the optimizer. On the other hand, it also provides an inductive bias that helps OoD generalization. Such a representation is constructed with the Rich Feature Construction (RFC) algorithm, also called the Bonsai algorithm, which consists of a succession of training episodes. During discovery episodes, we craft a multi-objective optimization criterion and its associated datasets in a manner that prevents the network from using the features constructed in the previous iterations. During synthesis episodes, we use knowledge distillation to force the network to simultaneously represent all the previously discovered features. Initializing the networks with Bonsai representations consistently helps six OoD methods achieve top performance on ColoredMNIST benchmark. The same technique substantially outperforms comparable results on the Wilds Camelyon17 task, eliminates the high result variance that plagues other methods, and makes hyperparameter tuning and model selection more reliable.
ViM: Out-Of-Distribution with Virtual-logit Matching
Most of the existing Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection algorithms depend on single input source: the feature, the logit, or the softmax probability. However, the immense diversity of the OOD examples makes such methods fragile. There are OOD samples that are easy to identify in the feature space while hard to distinguish in the logit space and vice versa. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel OOD scoring method named Virtual-logit Matching (ViM), which combines the class-agnostic score from feature space and the In-Distribution (ID) class-dependent logits. Specifically, an additional logit representing the virtual OOD class is generated from the residual of the feature against the principal space, and then matched with the original logits by a constant scaling. The probability of this virtual logit after softmax is the indicator of OOD-ness. To facilitate the evaluation of large-scale OOD detection in academia, we create a new OOD dataset for ImageNet-1K, which is human-annotated and is 8.8x the size of existing datasets. We conducted extensive experiments, including CNNs and vision transformers, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ViM score. In particular, using the BiT-S model, our method gets an average AUROC 90.91% on four difficult OOD benchmarks, which is 4% ahead of the best baseline. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/haoqiwang/vim.
PROB: Probabilistic Objectness for Open World Object Detection
Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a new and challenging computer vision task that bridges the gap between classic object detection (OD) benchmarks and object detection in the real world. In addition to detecting and classifying seen/labeled objects, OWOD algorithms are expected to detect novel/unknown objects - which can be classified and incrementally learned. In standard OD, object proposals not overlapping with a labeled object are automatically classified as background. Therefore, simply applying OD methods to OWOD fails as unknown objects would be predicted as background. The challenge of detecting unknown objects stems from the lack of supervision in distinguishing unknown objects and background object proposals. Previous OWOD methods have attempted to overcome this issue by generating supervision using pseudo-labeling - however, unknown object detection has remained low. Probabilistic/generative models may provide a solution for this challenge. Herein, we introduce a novel probabilistic framework for objectness estimation, where we alternate between probability distribution estimation and objectness likelihood maximization of known objects in the embedded feature space - ultimately allowing us to estimate the objectness probability of different proposals. The resulting Probabilistic Objectness transformer-based open-world detector, PROB, integrates our framework into traditional object detection models, adapting them for the open-world setting. Comprehensive experiments on OWOD benchmarks show that PROB outperforms all existing OWOD methods in both unknown object detection (sim 2times unknown recall) and known object detection (sim 10% mAP). Our code will be made available upon publication at https://github.com/orrzohar/PROB.
Overcoming the Pitfalls of Vision-Language Model Finetuning for OOD Generalization
Existing vision-language models exhibit strong generalization on a variety of visual domains and tasks. However, such models mainly perform zero-shot recognition in a closed-set manner, and thus struggle to handle open-domain visual concepts by design. There are recent finetuning methods, such as prompt learning, that not only study the discrimination between in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, but also show some improvements in both ID and OOD accuracies. In this paper, we first demonstrate that vision-language models, after long enough finetuning but without proper regularization, tend to overfit the known classes in the given dataset, with degraded performance on unknown classes. Then we propose a novel approach OGEN to address this pitfall, with the main focus on improving the OOD GENeralization of finetuned models. Specifically, a class-conditional feature generator is introduced to synthesize OOD features using just the class name of any unknown class. Such synthesized features will provide useful knowledge about unknowns and help regularize the decision boundary between ID and OOD data when optimized jointly. Equally important is our adaptive self-distillation mechanism to regularize our feature generation model during joint optimization, i.e., adaptively transferring knowledge between model states to further prevent overfitting. Experiments validate that our method yields convincing gains in OOD generalization performance in different settings.
An accurate detection is not all you need to combat label noise in web-noisy datasets
Training a classifier on web-crawled data demands learning algorithms that are robust to annotation errors and irrelevant examples. This paper builds upon the recent empirical observation that applying unsupervised contrastive learning to noisy, web-crawled datasets yields a feature representation under which the in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples are linearly separable. We show that direct estimation of the separating hyperplane can indeed offer an accurate detection of OOD samples, and yet, surprisingly, this detection does not translate into gains in classification accuracy. Digging deeper into this phenomenon, we discover that the near-perfect detection misses a type of clean examples that are valuable for supervised learning. These examples often represent visually simple images, which are relatively easy to identify as clean examples using standard loss- or distance-based methods despite being poorly separated from the OOD distribution using unsupervised learning. Because we further observe a low correlation with SOTA metrics, this urges us to propose a hybrid solution that alternates between noise detection using linear separation and a state-of-the-art (SOTA) small-loss approach. When combined with the SOTA algorithm PLS, we substantially improve SOTA results for real-world image classification in the presence of web noise github.com/PaulAlbert31/LSA
Concept-based Explanations for Out-Of-Distribution Detectors
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection plays a crucial role in ensuring the safe deployment of deep neural network (DNN) classifiers. While a myriad of methods have focused on improving the performance of OOD detectors, a critical gap remains in interpreting their decisions. We help bridge this gap by providing explanations for OOD detectors based on learned high-level concepts. We first propose two new metrics for assessing the effectiveness of a particular set of concepts for explaining OOD detectors: 1) detection completeness, which quantifies the sufficiency of concepts for explaining an OOD-detector's decisions, and 2) concept separability, which captures the distributional separation between in-distribution and OOD data in the concept space. Based on these metrics, we propose an unsupervised framework for learning a set of concepts that satisfy the desired properties of high detection completeness and concept separability, and demonstrate its effectiveness in providing concept-based explanations for diverse off-the-shelf OOD detectors. We also show how to identify prominent concepts contributing to the detection results, and provide further reasoning about their decisions.
Shepherding Slots to Objects: Towards Stable and Robust Object-Centric Learning
Object-centric learning (OCL) aspires general and compositional understanding of scenes by representing a scene as a collection of object-centric representations. OCL has also been extended to multi-view image and video datasets to apply various data-driven inductive biases by utilizing geometric or temporal information in the multi-image data. Single-view images carry less information about how to disentangle a given scene than videos or multi-view images do. Hence, owing to the difficulty of applying inductive biases, OCL for single-view images remains challenging, resulting in inconsistent learning of object-centric representation. To this end, we introduce a novel OCL framework for single-view images, SLot Attention via SHepherding (SLASH), which consists of two simple-yet-effective modules on top of Slot Attention. The new modules, Attention Refining Kernel (ARK) and Intermediate Point Predictor and Encoder (IPPE), respectively, prevent slots from being distracted by the background noise and indicate locations for slots to focus on to facilitate learning of object-centric representation. We also propose a weak semi-supervision approach for OCL, whilst our proposed framework can be used without any assistant annotation during the inference. Experiments show that our proposed method enables consistent learning of object-centric representation and achieves strong performance across four datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/object-understanding/SLASH.
OpenOOD v1.5: Enhanced Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is critical for the reliable operation of open-world intelligent systems. Despite the emergence of an increasing number of OOD detection methods, the evaluation inconsistencies present challenges for tracking the progress in this field. OpenOOD v1 initiated the unification of the OOD detection evaluation but faced limitations in scalability and usability. In response, this paper presents OpenOOD v1.5, a significant improvement from its predecessor that ensures accurate, standardized, and user-friendly evaluation of OOD detection methodologies. Notably, OpenOOD v1.5 extends its evaluation capabilities to large-scale datasets such as ImageNet, investigates full-spectrum OOD detection which is important yet underexplored, and introduces new features including an online leaderboard and an easy-to-use evaluator. This work also contributes in-depth analysis and insights derived from comprehensive experimental results, thereby enriching the knowledge pool of OOD detection methodologies. With these enhancements, OpenOOD v1.5 aims to drive advancements and offer a more robust and comprehensive evaluation benchmark for OOD detection research.
Hierarchical VAEs Know What They Don't Know
Deep generative models have been demonstrated as state-of-the-art density estimators. Yet, recent work has found that they often assign a higher likelihood to data from outside the training distribution. This seemingly paradoxical behavior has caused concerns over the quality of the attained density estimates. In the context of hierarchical variational autoencoders, we provide evidence to explain this behavior by out-of-distribution data having in-distribution low-level features. We argue that this is both expected and desirable behavior. With this insight in hand, we develop a fast, scalable and fully unsupervised likelihood-ratio score for OOD detection that requires data to be in-distribution across all feature-levels. We benchmark the method on a vast set of data and model combinations and achieve state-of-the-art results on out-of-distribution detection.
GODS: Generalized One-class Discriminative Subspaces for Anomaly Detection
One-class learning is the classic problem of fitting a model to data for which annotations are available only for a single class. In this paper, we propose a novel objective for one-class learning. Our key idea is to use a pair of orthonormal frames -- as subspaces -- to "sandwich" the labeled data via optimizing for two objectives jointly: i) minimize the distance between the origins of the two subspaces, and ii) to maximize the margin between the hyperplanes and the data, either subspace demanding the data to be in its positive and negative orthant respectively. Our proposed objective however leads to a non-convex optimization problem, to which we resort to Riemannian optimization schemes and derive an efficient conjugate gradient scheme on the Stiefel manifold. To study the effectiveness of our scheme, we propose a new dataset~Dash-Cam-Pose, consisting of clips with skeleton poses of humans seated in a car, the task being to classify the clips as normal or abnormal; the latter is when any human pose is out-of-position with regard to say an airbag deployment. Our experiments on the proposed Dash-Cam-Pose dataset, as well as several other standard anomaly/novelty detection benchmarks demonstrate the benefits of our scheme, achieving state-of-the-art one-class accuracy.
MultiOOD: Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Multiple Modalities
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is important for deploying machine learning models in safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and robot-assisted surgery. Existing research has mainly focused on unimodal scenarios on image data. However, real-world applications are inherently multimodal, which makes it essential to leverage information from multiple modalities to enhance the efficacy of OOD detection. To establish a foundation for more realistic Multimodal OOD Detection, we introduce the first-of-its-kind benchmark, MultiOOD, characterized by diverse dataset sizes and varying modality combinations. We first evaluate existing unimodal OOD detection algorithms on MultiOOD, observing that the mere inclusion of additional modalities yields substantial improvements. This underscores the importance of utilizing multiple modalities for OOD detection. Based on the observation of Modality Prediction Discrepancy between in-distribution (ID) and OOD data, and its strong correlation with OOD performance, we propose the Agree-to-Disagree (A2D) algorithm to encourage such discrepancy during training. Moreover, we introduce a novel outlier synthesis method, NP-Mix, which explores broader feature spaces by leveraging the information from nearest neighbor classes and complements A2D to strengthen OOD detection performance. Extensive experiments on MultiOOD demonstrate that training with A2D and NP-Mix improves existing OOD detection algorithms by a large margin. Our source code and MultiOOD benchmark are available at https://github.com/donghao51/MultiOOD.
Meta OOD Learning for Continuously Adaptive OOD Detection
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial to modern deep learning applications by identifying and alerting about the OOD samples that should not be tested or used for making predictions. Current OOD detection methods have made significant progress when in-distribution (ID) and OOD samples are drawn from static distributions. However, this can be unrealistic when applied to real-world systems which often undergo continuous variations and shifts in ID and OOD distributions over time. Therefore, for an effective application in real-world systems, the development of OOD detection methods that can adapt to these dynamic and evolving distributions is essential. In this paper, we propose a novel and more realistic setting called continuously adaptive out-of-distribution (CAOOD) detection which targets on developing an OOD detection model that enables dynamic and quick adaptation to a new arriving distribution, with insufficient ID samples during deployment time. To address CAOOD, we develop meta OOD learning (MOL) by designing a learning-to-adapt diagram such that a good initialized OOD detection model is learned during the training process. In the testing process, MOL ensures OOD detection performance over shifting distributions by quickly adapting to new distributions with a few adaptations. Extensive experiments on several OOD benchmarks endorse the effectiveness of our method in preserving both ID classification accuracy and OOD detection performance on continuously shifting distributions.
Feed Two Birds with One Scone: Exploiting Wild Data for Both Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Detection
Modern machine learning models deployed in the wild can encounter both covariate and semantic shifts, giving rise to the problems of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization and OOD detection respectively. While both problems have received significant research attention lately, they have been pursued independently. This may not be surprising, since the two tasks have seemingly conflicting goals. This paper provides a new unified approach that is capable of simultaneously generalizing to covariate shifts while robustly detecting semantic shifts. We propose a margin-based learning framework that exploits freely available unlabeled data in the wild that captures the environmental test-time OOD distributions under both covariate and semantic shifts. We show both empirically and theoretically that the proposed margin constraint is the key to achieving both OOD generalization and detection. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our framework, outperforming competitive baselines that specialize in either OOD generalization or OOD detection. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/scone.
MOS: Towards Scaling Out-of-distribution Detection for Large Semantic Space
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is a central challenge for safely deploying machine learning models in the real world. Existing solutions are mainly driven by small datasets, with low resolution and very few class labels (e.g., CIFAR). As a result, OOD detection for large-scale image classification tasks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we bridge this critical gap by proposing a group-based OOD detection framework, along with a novel OOD scoring function termed MOS. Our key idea is to decompose the large semantic space into smaller groups with similar concepts, which allows simplifying the decision boundaries between in- vs. out-of-distribution data for effective OOD detection. Our method scales substantially better for high-dimensional class space than previous approaches. We evaluate models trained on ImageNet against four carefully curated OOD datasets, spanning diverse semantics. MOS establishes state-of-the-art performance, reducing the average FPR95 by 14.33% while achieving 6x speedup in inference compared to the previous best method.
SC3K: Self-supervised and Coherent 3D Keypoints Estimation from Rotated, Noisy, and Decimated Point Cloud Data
This paper proposes a new method to infer keypoints from arbitrary object categories in practical scenarios where point cloud data (PCD) are noisy, down-sampled and arbitrarily rotated. Our proposed model adheres to the following principles: i) keypoints inference is fully unsupervised (no annotation given), ii) keypoints position error should be low and resilient to PCD perturbations (robustness), iii) keypoints should not change their indexes for the intra-class objects (semantic coherence), iv) keypoints should be close to or proximal to PCD surface (compactness). We achieve these desiderata by proposing a new self-supervised training strategy for keypoints estimation that does not assume any a priori knowledge of the object class, and a model architecture with coupled auxiliary losses that promotes the desired keypoints properties. We compare the keypoints estimated by the proposed approach with those of the state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches. The experiments show that our approach outperforms by estimating keypoints with improved coverage (+9.41%) while being semantically consistent (+4.66%) that best characterizes the object's 3D shape for downstream tasks. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/IITPAVIS/SC3K
SMILe: Leveraging Submodular Mutual Information For Robust Few-Shot Object Detection
Confusion and forgetting of object classes have been challenges of prime interest in Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD). To overcome these pitfalls in metric learning based FSOD techniques, we introduce a novel Submodular Mutual Information Learning (SMILe) framework which adopts combinatorial mutual information functions to enforce the creation of tighter and discriminative feature clusters in FSOD. Our proposed approach generalizes to several existing approaches in FSOD, agnostic of the backbone architecture demonstrating elevated performance gains. A paradigm shift from instance based objective functions to combinatorial objectives in SMILe naturally preserves the diversity within an object class resulting in reduced forgetting when subjected to few training examples. Furthermore, the application of mutual information between the already learnt (base) and newly added (novel) objects ensures sufficient separation between base and novel classes, minimizing the effect of class confusion. Experiments on popular FSOD benchmarks, PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO show that our approach generalizes to State-of-the-Art (SoTA) approaches improving their novel class performance by up to 5.7% (3.3 mAP points) and 5.4% (2.6 mAP points) on the 10-shot setting of VOC (split 3) and 30-shot setting of COCO datasets respectively. Our experiments also demonstrate better retention of base class performance and up to 2x faster convergence over existing approaches agnostic of the underlying architecture.
Learning Non-Linear Invariants for Unsupervised Out-of-Distribution Detection
The inability of deep learning models to handle data drawn from unseen distributions has sparked much interest in unsupervised out-of-distribution (U-OOD) detection, as it is crucial for reliable deep learning models. Despite considerable attention, theoretically-motivated approaches are few and far between, with most methods building on top of some form of heuristic. Recently, U-OOD was formalized in the context of data invariants, allowing a clearer understanding of how to characterize U-OOD, and methods leveraging affine invariants have attained state-of-the-art results on large-scale benchmarks. Nevertheless, the restriction to affine invariants hinders the expressiveness of the approach. In this work, we broaden the affine invariants formulation to a more general case and propose a framework consisting of a normalizing flow-like architecture capable of learning non-linear invariants. Our novel approach achieves state-of-the-art results on an extensive U-OOD benchmark, and we demonstrate its further applicability to tabular data. Finally, we show our method has the same desirable properties as those based on affine invariants.
CLIPood: Generalizing CLIP to Out-of-Distributions
Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, where the model needs to handle distribution shifts from training, is a major challenge of machine learning. Recently, contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models have shown impressive zero-shot ability, revealing a promising path toward OOD generalization. However, to boost upon zero-shot performance, further adaptation of CLIP on downstream tasks is indispensable but undesirably degrades OOD generalization ability. In this paper, we aim at generalizing CLIP to out-of-distribution test data on downstream tasks. Beyond the two canonical OOD situations, domain shift and open class, we tackle a more general but difficult in-the-wild setting where both OOD situations may occur on the unseen test data. We propose CLIPood, a simple fine-tuning method that can adapt CLIP models to all OOD situations. To exploit semantic relations between classes from the text modality, CLIPood introduces a new training objective, margin metric softmax (MMS), with class adaptive margins for fine-tuning. Moreover, to incorporate both the pre-trained zero-shot model and the fine-tuned task-adaptive model, CLIPood proposes a new Beta moving average (BMA) to maintain a temporal ensemble according to Beta distribution. Experiments on diverse datasets with different OOD scenarios show that CLIPood consistently outperforms existing generalization techniques.
Point2Point : A Framework for Efficient Deep Learning on Hilbert sorted Point Clouds with applications in Spatio-Temporal Occupancy Prediction
The irregularity and permutation invariance of point cloud data pose challenges for effective learning. Conventional methods for addressing this issue involve converting raw point clouds to intermediate representations such as 3D voxel grids or range images. While such intermediate representations solve the problem of permutation invariance, they can result in significant loss of information. Approaches that do learn on raw point clouds either have trouble in resolving neighborhood relationships between points or are too complicated in their formulation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to representing point clouds as a locality preserving 1D ordering induced by the Hilbert space-filling curve. We also introduce Point2Point, a neural architecture that can effectively learn on Hilbert-sorted point clouds. We show that Point2Point shows competitive performance on point cloud segmentation and generation tasks. Finally, we show the performance of Point2Point on Spatio-temporal Occupancy prediction from Point clouds.
Subjective Learning for Open-Ended Data
Conventional supervised learning typically assumes that the learning task can be solved by learning a single function since the data is sampled from a fixed distribution. However, this assumption is invalid in open-ended environments where no task-level data partitioning is available. In this paper, we present a novel supervised learning framework of learning from open-ended data, which is modeled as data implicitly sampled from multiple domains with the data in each domain obeying a domain-specific target function. Since different domains may possess distinct target functions, open-ended data inherently requires multiple functions to capture all its input-output relations, rendering training a single global model problematic. To address this issue, we devise an Open-ended Supervised Learning (OSL) framework, of which the key component is a subjective function that allocates the data among multiple candidate models to resolve the "conflict" between the data from different domains, exhibiting a natural hierarchy. We theoretically analyze the learnability and the generalization error of OSL, and empirically validate its efficacy in both open-ended regression and classification tasks.
A General Gaussian Heatmap Label Assignment for Arbitrary-Oriented Object Detection
Recently, many arbitrary-oriented object detection (AOOD) methods have been proposed and attracted widespread attention in many fields. However, most of them are based on anchor-boxes or standard Gaussian heatmaps. Such label assignment strategy may not only fail to reflect the shape and direction characteristics of arbitrary-oriented objects, but also have high parameter-tuning efforts. In this paper, a novel AOOD method called General Gaussian Heatmap Label Assignment (GGHL) is proposed. Specifically, an anchor-free object-adaptation label assignment (OLA) strategy is presented to define the positive candidates based on two-dimensional (2-D) oriented Gaussian heatmaps, which reflect the shape and direction features of arbitrary-oriented objects. Based on OLA, an oriented-bounding-box (OBB) representation component (ORC) is developed to indicate OBBs and adjust the Gaussian center prior weights to fit the characteristics of different objects adaptively through neural network learning. Moreover, a joint-optimization loss (JOL) with area normalization and dynamic confidence weighting is designed to refine the misalign optimal results of different subtasks. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed GGHL improves the AOOD performance with low parameter-tuning and time costs. Furthermore, it is generally applicable to most AOOD methods to improve their performance including lightweight models on embedded platforms.
CLIPN for Zero-Shot OOD Detection: Teaching CLIP to Say No
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection refers to training the model on an in-distribution (ID) dataset to classify whether the input images come from unknown classes. Considerable effort has been invested in designing various OOD detection methods based on either convolutional neural networks or transformers. However, zero-shot OOD detection methods driven by CLIP, which only require class names for ID, have received less attention. This paper presents a novel method, namely CLIP saying no (CLIPN), which empowers the logic of saying no within CLIP. Our key motivation is to equip CLIP with the capability of distinguishing OOD and ID samples using positive-semantic prompts and negation-semantic prompts. Specifically, we design a novel learnable no prompt and a no text encoder to capture negation semantics within images. Subsequently, we introduce two loss functions: the image-text binary-opposite loss and the text semantic-opposite loss, which we use to teach CLIPN to associate images with no prompts, thereby enabling it to identify unknown samples. Furthermore, we propose two threshold-free inference algorithms to perform OOD detection by utilizing negation semantics from no prompts and the text encoder. Experimental results on 9 benchmark datasets (3 ID datasets and 6 OOD datasets) for the OOD detection task demonstrate that CLIPN, based on ViT-B-16, outperforms 7 well-used algorithms by at least 2.34% and 11.64% in terms of AUROC and FPR95 for zero-shot OOD detection on ImageNet-1K. Our CLIPN can serve as a solid foundation for effectively leveraging CLIP in downstream OOD tasks. The code is available on https://github.com/xmed-lab/CLIPN.
Duoduo CLIP: Efficient 3D Understanding with Multi-View Images
We introduce Duoduo CLIP, a model for 3D representation learning that learns shape encodings from multi-view images instead of point-clouds. The choice of multi-view images allows us to leverage 2D priors from off-the-shelf CLIP models to facilitate fine-tuning with 3D data. Our approach not only shows better generalization compared to existing point cloud methods, but also reduces GPU requirements and training time. In addition, we modify the model with cross-view attention to leverage information across multiple frames of the object which further boosts performance. Compared to the current SOTA point cloud method that requires 480 A100 hours to train 1 billion model parameters we only require 57 A5000 hours and 87 million parameters. Multi-view images also provide more flexibility in use cases compared to point clouds. This includes being able to encode objects with a variable number of images, with better performance when more views are used. This is in contrast to point cloud based methods, where an entire scan or model of an object is required. We showcase this flexibility with object retrieval from images of real-world objects. Our model also achieves better performance in more fine-grained text to shape retrieval, demonstrating better text-and-shape alignment than point cloud based models.
Transductive Few-Shot Learning: Clustering is All You Need?
We investigate a general formulation for clustering and transductive few-shot learning, which integrates prototype-based objectives, Laplacian regularization and supervision constraints from a few labeled data points. We propose a concave-convex relaxation of the problem, and derive a computationally efficient block-coordinate bound optimizer, with convergence guarantee. At each iteration,our optimizer computes independent (parallel) updates for each point-to-cluster assignment. Therefore, it could be trivially distributed for large-scale clustering and few-shot tasks. Furthermore, we provides a thorough convergence analysis based on point-to-set maps. Were port comprehensive clustering and few-shot learning experiments over various data sets, showing that our method yields competitive performances, in term of accuracy and optimization quality, while scaling up to large problems. Using standard training on the base classes, without resorting to complex meta-learning and episodic-training strategies, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot methods by significant margins, across various models, settings and data sets. Surprisingly, we found that even standard clustering procedures (e.g., K-means), which correspond to particular, non-regularized cases of our general model, already achieve competitive performances in comparison to the state-of-the-art in few-shot learning. These surprising results point to the limitations of the current few-shot benchmarks, and question the viability of a large body of convoluted few-shot learning techniques in the recent literature.
Unified Out-Of-Distribution Detection: A Model-Specific Perspective
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify test examples that do not belong to the training distribution and are thus unlikely to be predicted reliably. Despite a plethora of existing works, most of them focused only on the scenario where OOD examples come from semantic shift (e.g., unseen categories), ignoring other possible causes (e.g., covariate shift). In this paper, we present a novel, unifying framework to study OOD detection in a broader scope. Instead of detecting OOD examples from a particular cause, we propose to detect examples that a deployed machine learning model (e.g., an image classifier) is unable to predict correctly. That is, whether a test example should be detected and rejected or not is ``model-specific''. We show that this framework unifies the detection of OOD examples caused by semantic shift and covariate shift, and closely addresses the concern of applying a machine learning model to uncontrolled environments. We provide an extensive analysis that involves a variety of models (e.g., different architectures and training strategies), sources of OOD examples, and OOD detection approaches, and reveal several insights into improving and understanding OOD detection in uncontrolled environments.
The Value of Out-of-Distribution Data
We expect the generalization error to improve with more samples from a similar task, and to deteriorate with more samples from an out-of-distribution (OOD) task. In this work, we show a counter-intuitive phenomenon: the generalization error of a task can be a non-monotonic function of the number of OOD samples. As the number of OOD samples increases, the generalization error on the target task improves before deteriorating beyond a threshold. In other words, there is value in training on small amounts of OOD data. We use Fisher's Linear Discriminant on synthetic datasets and deep networks on computer vision benchmarks such as MNIST, CIFAR-10, CINIC-10, PACS and DomainNet to demonstrate and analyze this phenomenon. In the idealistic setting where we know which samples are OOD, we show that these non-monotonic trends can be exploited using an appropriately weighted objective of the target and OOD empirical risk. While its practical utility is limited, this does suggest that if we can detect OOD samples, then there may be ways to benefit from them. When we do not know which samples are OOD, we show how a number of go-to strategies such as data-augmentation, hyper-parameter optimization, and pre-training are not enough to ensure that the target generalization error does not deteriorate with the number of OOD samples in the dataset.
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.
MixCycle: Mixup Assisted Semi-Supervised 3D Single Object Tracking with Cycle Consistency
3D single object tracking (SOT) is an indispensable part of automated driving. Existing approaches rely heavily on large, densely labeled datasets. However, annotating point clouds is both costly and time-consuming. Inspired by the great success of cycle tracking in unsupervised 2D SOT, we introduce the first semi-supervised approach to 3D SOT. Specifically, we introduce two cycle-consistency strategies for supervision: 1) Self tracking cycles, which leverage labels to help the model converge better in the early stages of training; 2) forward-backward cycles, which strengthen the tracker's robustness to motion variations and the template noise caused by the template update strategy. Furthermore, we propose a data augmentation strategy named SOTMixup to improve the tracker's robustness to point cloud diversity. SOTMixup generates training samples by sampling points in two point clouds with a mixing rate and assigns a reasonable loss weight for training according to the mixing rate. The resulting MixCycle approach generalizes to appearance matching-based trackers. On the KITTI benchmark, based on the P2B tracker, MixCycle trained with 10% labels outperforms P2B trained with 100% labels, and achieves a 28.4% precision improvement when using 1% labels. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Mumuqiao/MixCycle.
WDiscOOD: Out-of-Distribution Detection via Whitened Linear Discriminant Analysis
Deep neural networks are susceptible to generating overconfident yet erroneous predictions when presented with data beyond known concepts. This challenge underscores the importance of detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples in the open world. In this work, we propose a novel feature-space OOD detection score based on class-specific and class-agnostic information. Specifically, the approach utilizes Whitened Linear Discriminant Analysis to project features into two subspaces - the discriminative and residual subspaces - for which the in-distribution (ID) classes are maximally separated and closely clustered, respectively. The OOD score is then determined by combining the deviation from the input data to the ID pattern in both subspaces. The efficacy of our method, named WDiscOOD, is verified on the large-scale ImageNet-1k benchmark, with six OOD datasets that cover a variety of distribution shifts. WDiscOOD demonstrates superior performance on deep classifiers with diverse backbone architectures, including CNN and vision transformer. Furthermore, we also show that WDiscOOD more effectively detects novel concepts in representation spaces trained with contrastive objectives, including supervised contrastive loss and multi-modality contrastive loss.
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.
PointLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Understand Point Clouds
The unprecedented advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have created a profound impact on natural language processing but are yet to fully embrace the realm of 3D understanding. This paper introduces PointLLM, a preliminary effort to fill this gap, thereby enabling LLMs to understand point clouds and offering a new avenue beyond 2D visual data. PointLLM processes colored object point clouds with human instructions and generates contextually appropriate responses, illustrating its grasp of point clouds and common sense. Specifically, it leverages a point cloud encoder with a powerful LLM to effectively fuse geometric, appearance, and linguistic information. We collect a novel dataset comprising 660K simple and 70K complex point-text instruction pairs to enable a two-stage training strategy: initially aligning latent spaces and subsequently instruction-tuning the unified model. To rigorously evaluate our model's perceptual abilities and its generalization capabilities, we establish two benchmarks: Generative 3D Object Classification and 3D Object Captioning, assessed through three different methods, including human evaluation, GPT-4/ChatGPT evaluation, and traditional metrics. Experiment results show that PointLLM demonstrates superior performance over existing 2D baselines. Remarkably, in human-evaluated object captioning tasks, PointLLM outperforms human annotators in over 50% of the samples. Codes, datasets, and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/PointLLM .
Enhancing Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection with Low-confidence Pseudo Label Distillation
Source-Free domain adaptive Object Detection (SFOD) is a promising strategy for deploying trained detectors to new, unlabeled domains without accessing source data, addressing significant concerns around data privacy and efficiency. Most SFOD methods leverage a Mean-Teacher (MT) self-training paradigm relying heavily on High-confidence Pseudo Labels (HPL). However, these HPL often overlook small instances that undergo significant appearance changes with domain shifts. Additionally, HPL ignore instances with low confidence due to the scarcity of training samples, resulting in biased adaptation toward familiar instances from the source domain. To address this limitation, we introduce the Low-confidence Pseudo Label Distillation (LPLD) loss within the Mean-Teacher based SFOD framework. This novel approach is designed to leverage the proposals from Region Proposal Network (RPN), which potentially encompasses hard-to-detect objects in unfamiliar domains. Initially, we extract HPL using a standard pseudo-labeling technique and mine a set of Low-confidence Pseudo Labels (LPL) from proposals generated by RPN, leaving those that do not overlap significantly with HPL. These LPL are further refined by leveraging class-relation information and reducing the effect of inherent noise for the LPLD loss calculation. Furthermore, we use feature distance to adaptively weight the LPLD loss to focus on LPL containing a larger foreground area. Our method outperforms previous SFOD methods on four cross-domain object detection benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LPLD loss leads to effective adaptation by reducing false negatives and facilitating the use of domain-invariant knowledge from the source model. Code is available at https://github.com/junia3/LPLD.
POINTS1.5: Building a Vision-Language Model towards Real World Applications
Vision-language models have made significant strides recently, demonstrating superior performance across a range of tasks, e.g. optical character recognition and complex diagram analysis. Building on this trend, we introduce a new vision-language model, POINTS1.5, designed to excel in various real-world applications. POINTS1.5 is an enhancement of POINTS1.0 and incorporates several key innovations: i) We replace the original CLIP vision encoder, which had a fixed image resolution, with a NaViT-style vision encoder that supports native dynamic high resolution. This allows POINTS1.5 to process images of any resolution without needing to split them into tiles. ii) We add bilingual support to POINTS1.5, significantly enhancing its capability in Chinese. Due to the scarcity of open-source Chinese datasets for vision-language models, we collect numerous images from the Internet and annotate them using a combination of manual and automatic methods. iii) We propose a set of rigorous filtering methods for visual instruction tuning datasets. We comprehensively evaluate all these filtering methods, and choose the most effective ones to obtain the final visual instruction tuning set. Thanks to these innovations, POINTS1.5 significantly outperforms POINTS1.0 and demonstrates strong performance across a range of real-world applications. Notably, POINTS1.5-7B is trained on fewer than 4 billion tokens and ranks first on the OpenCompass leaderboard among models with fewer than 10 billion parameters
A Light-Weight Framework for Open-Set Object Detection with Decoupled Feature Alignment in Joint Space
Open-set object detection (OSOD) is highly desirable for robotic manipulation in unstructured environments. However, existing OSOD methods often fail to meet the requirements of robotic applications due to their high computational burden and complex deployment. To address this issue, this paper proposes a light-weight framework called Decoupled OSOD (DOSOD), which is a practical and highly efficient solution to support real-time OSOD tasks in robotic systems. Specifically, DOSOD builds upon the YOLO-World pipeline by integrating a vision-language model (VLM) with a detector. A Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) adaptor is developed to transform text embeddings extracted by the VLM into a joint space, within which the detector learns the region representations of class-agnostic proposals. Cross-modality features are directly aligned in the joint space, avoiding the complex feature interactions and thereby improving computational efficiency. DOSOD operates like a traditional closed-set detector during the testing phase, effectively bridging the gap between closed-set and open-set detection. Compared to the baseline YOLO-World, the proposed DOSOD significantly enhances real-time performance while maintaining comparable accuracy. The slight DOSOD-S model achieves a Fixed AP of 26.7%, compared to 26.2% for YOLO-World-v1-S and 22.7% for YOLO-World-v2-S, using similar backbones on the LVIS minival dataset. Meanwhile, the FPS of DOSOD-S is 57.1% higher than YOLO-World-v1-S and 29.6% higher than YOLO-World-v2-S. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the DOSOD model facilitates the deployment of edge devices. The codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/D-Robotics-AI-Lab/DOSOD.
Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation using Out-of-Distribution Data
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods are often built on pixel-level localization maps obtained from a classifier. However, training on class labels only, classifiers suffer from the spurious correlation between foreground and background cues (e.g. train and rail), fundamentally bounding the performance of WSSS. There have been previous endeavors to address this issue with additional supervision. We propose a novel source of information to distinguish foreground from the background: Out-of-Distribution (OoD) data, or images devoid of foreground object classes. In particular, we utilize the hard OoDs that the classifier is likely to make false-positive predictions. These samples typically carry key visual features on the background (e.g. rail) that the classifiers often confuse as foreground (e.g. train), so these cues let classifiers correctly suppress spurious background cues. Acquiring such hard OoDs does not require an extensive amount of annotation efforts; it only incurs a few additional image-level labeling costs on top of the original efforts to collect class labels. We propose a method, W-OoD, for utilizing the hard OoDs. W-OoD achieves state-of-the-art performance on Pascal VOC 2012.
Hyp-OW: Exploiting Hierarchical Structure Learning with Hyperbolic Distance Enhances Open World Object Detection
Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a challenging and realistic task that extends beyond the scope of standard Object Detection task. It involves detecting both known and unknown objects while integrating learned knowledge for future tasks. However, the level of "unknownness" varies significantly depending on the context. For example, a tree is typically considered part of the background in a self-driving scene, but it may be significant in a household context. We argue that this contextual information should already be embedded within the known classes. In other words, there should be a semantic or latent structure relationship between the known and unknown items to be discovered. Motivated by this observation, we propose Hyp-OW, a method that learns and models hierarchical representation of known items through a SuperClass Regularizer. Leveraging this representation allows us to effectively detect unknown objects using a similarity distance-based relabeling module. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Hyp-OW, achieving improvement in both known and unknown detection (up to 6 percent). These findings are particularly pronounced in our newly designed benchmark, where a strong hierarchical structure exists between known and unknown objects. Our code can be found at https://github.com/tldoan/-HYP-OW-AAAI-2024-
ConjNorm: Tractable Density Estimation for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Post-hoc out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has garnered intensive attention in reliable machine learning. Many efforts have been dedicated to deriving score functions based on logits, distances, or rigorous data distribution assumptions to identify low-scoring OOD samples. Nevertheless, these estimate scores may fail to accurately reflect the true data density or impose impractical constraints. To provide a unified perspective on density-based score design, we propose a novel theoretical framework grounded in Bregman divergence, which extends distribution considerations to encompass an exponential family of distributions. Leveraging the conjugation constraint revealed in our theorem, we introduce a ConjNorm method, reframing density function design as a search for the optimal norm coefficient p against the given dataset. In light of the computational challenges of normalization, we devise an unbiased and analytically tractable estimator of the partition function using the Monte Carlo-based importance sampling technique. Extensive experiments across OOD detection benchmarks empirically demonstrate that our proposed ConjNorm has established a new state-of-the-art in a variety of OOD detection setups, outperforming the current best method by up to 13.25% and 28.19% (FPR95) on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1K, respectively.
FlowCon: Out-of-Distribution Detection using Flow-Based Contrastive Learning
Identifying Out-of-distribution (OOD) data is becoming increasingly critical as the real-world applications of deep learning methods expand. Post-hoc methods modify softmax scores fine-tuned on outlier data or leverage intermediate feature layers to identify distinctive patterns between In-Distribution (ID) and OOD samples. Other methods focus on employing diverse OOD samples to learn discrepancies between ID and OOD. These techniques, however, are typically dependent on the quality of the outlier samples assumed. Density-based methods explicitly model class-conditioned distributions but this requires long training time or retraining the classifier. To tackle these issues, we introduce FlowCon, a new density-based OOD detection technique. Our main innovation lies in efficiently combining the properties of normalizing flow with supervised contrastive learning, ensuring robust representation learning with tractable density estimation. Empirical evaluation shows the enhanced performance of our method across common vision datasets such as CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 pretrained on ResNet18 and WideResNet classifiers. We also perform quantitative analysis using likelihood plots and qualitative visualization using UMAP embeddings and demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method under various OOD contexts. Code will be open-sourced post decision.
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.
Test-Time Optimization for Domain Adaptive Open Vocabulary Segmentation
We present Seg-TTO, a novel framework for zero-shot, open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS), designed to excel in specialized domain tasks. While current open vocabulary approaches show impressive performance on standard segmentation benchmarks under zero-shot settings, they fall short of supervised counterparts on highly domain-specific datasets. We focus on segmentation-specific test-time optimization to address this gap. Segmentation requires an understanding of multiple concepts within a single image while retaining the locality and spatial structure of representations. We propose a novel self-supervised objective adhering to these requirements and use it to align the model parameters with input images at test time. In the textual modality, we learn multiple embeddings for each category to capture diverse concepts within an image, while in the visual modality, we calculate pixel-level losses followed by embedding aggregation operations specific to preserving spatial structure. Our resulting framework termed Seg-TTO is a plug-in-play module. We integrate Seg-TTO with three state-of-the-art OVSS approaches and evaluate across 22 challenging OVSS tasks covering a range of specialized domains. Our Seg-TTO demonstrates clear performance improvements across these establishing new state-of-the-art. Code: https://github.com/UlinduP/SegTTO.
MixSup: Mixed-grained Supervision for Label-efficient LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection
Label-efficient LiDAR-based 3D object detection is currently dominated by weakly/semi-supervised methods. Instead of exclusively following one of them, we propose MixSup, a more practical paradigm simultaneously utilizing massive cheap coarse labels and a limited number of accurate labels for Mixed-grained Supervision. We start by observing that point clouds are usually textureless, making it hard to learn semantics. However, point clouds are geometrically rich and scale-invariant to the distances from sensors, making it relatively easy to learn the geometry of objects, such as poses and shapes. Thus, MixSup leverages massive coarse cluster-level labels to learn semantics and a few expensive box-level labels to learn accurate poses and shapes. We redesign the label assignment in mainstream detectors, which allows them seamlessly integrated into MixSup, enabling practicality and universality. We validate its effectiveness in nuScenes, Waymo Open Dataset, and KITTI, employing various detectors. MixSup achieves up to 97.31% of fully supervised performance, using cheap cluster annotations and only 10% box annotations. Furthermore, we propose PointSAM based on the Segment Anything Model for automated coarse labeling, further reducing the annotation burden. The code is available at https://github.com/BraveGroup/PointSAM-for-MixSup.
Practical Unlearning for Large Language Models
While LLMs have demonstrated impressive performance across various domains and tasks, their security issues have become increasingly severe. Machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a promising solution to address these issues by removing the influence of undesired data on the target model without compromising its utility in other aspects. MU typically assumes full access to the original training data to preserve utility, which is difficult to achieve in LLM unlearning. Existing LLM unlearning methods often assume access to data most affected by undesired data unlearning. However, this assumption underestimates the entanglement among various LLM capabilities and ignores data access limitations due to various issues. Moreover, these LLM unlearning methods do not sufficiently consider that unlearning requests in real-world scenarios are continuously emerging. To overcome these challenges and achieve practical LLM unlearning, we propose the O3 framework. The O3 framework includes an Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detector to measure the similarity between input and unlearning data, and an Orthogonal low-rank adapter (LoRA) for continuously unlearning requested data. The OOD detector is trained with a novel contrastive entropy loss and utilizes a local-global layer-aggregated scoring mechanism. The orthogonal LoRA achieves parameter disentanglement among continual unlearning requests. During inference, our O3 framework can smartly decide whether and to what extent to load the unlearning LoRA based on the OOD detector's predictions. Notably, O3's effectiveness does not rely on any retained data. We conducted extensive experiments on O3 and state-of-the-art LLM unlearning methods across three tasks and seven datasets. The results indicate that O3 consistently achieves the best trade-off between unlearning effectiveness and utility preservation, especially when facing continuous unlearning requests.
ShapeCodes: Self-Supervised Feature Learning by Lifting Views to Viewgrids
We introduce an unsupervised feature learning approach that embeds 3D shape information into a single-view image representation. The main idea is a self-supervised training objective that, given only a single 2D image, requires all unseen views of the object to be predictable from learned features. We implement this idea as an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network. The network maps an input image of an unknown category and unknown viewpoint to a latent space, from which a deconvolutional decoder can best "lift" the image to its complete viewgrid showing the object from all viewing angles. Our class-agnostic training procedure encourages the representation to capture fundamental shape primitives and semantic regularities in a data-driven manner---without manual semantic labels. Our results on two widely-used shape datasets show 1) our approach successfully learns to perform "mental rotation" even for objects unseen during training, and 2) the learned latent space is a powerful representation for object recognition, outperforming several existing unsupervised feature learning methods.
SQN: Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation of Large-Scale 3D Point Clouds
Labelling point clouds fully is highly time-consuming and costly. As larger point cloud datasets with billions of points become more common, we ask whether the full annotation is even necessary, demonstrating that existing baselines designed under a fully annotated assumption only degrade slightly even when faced with 1% random point annotations. However, beyond this point, e.g., at 0.1% annotations, segmentation accuracy is unacceptably low. We observe that, as point clouds are samples of the 3D world, the distribution of points in a local neighborhood is relatively homogeneous, exhibiting strong semantic similarity. Motivated by this, we propose a new weak supervision method to implicitly augment highly sparse supervision signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed Semantic Query Network (SQN) achieves promising performance on seven large-scale open datasets under weak supervision schemes, while requiring only 0.1% randomly annotated points for training, greatly reducing annotation cost and effort. The code is available at https://github.com/QingyongHu/SQN.
Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection and Beyond in Vision Language Model Era: A Survey
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is crucial for ensuring the safety of machine learning systems and has shaped the field of OOD detection. Meanwhile, several other problems are closely related to OOD detection, including anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD). To unify these problems, a generalized OOD detection framework was proposed, taxonomically categorizing these five problems. However, Vision Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP have significantly changed the paradigm and blurred the boundaries between these fields, again confusing researchers. In this survey, we first present a generalized OOD detection v2, encapsulating the evolution of AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD in the VLM era. Our framework reveals that, with some field inactivity and integration, the demanding challenges have become OOD detection and AD. In addition, we also highlight the significant shift in the definition, problem settings, and benchmarks; we thus feature a comprehensive review of the methodology for OOD detection, including the discussion over other related tasks to clarify their relationship to OOD detection. Finally, we explore the advancements in the emerging Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) era, such as GPT-4V. We conclude this survey with open challenges and future directions.
Self-Ordering Point Clouds
In this paper we address the task of finding representative subsets of points in a 3D point cloud by means of a point-wise ordering. Only a few works have tried to address this challenging vision problem, all with the help of hard to obtain point and cloud labels. Different from these works, we introduce the task of point-wise ordering in 3D point clouds through self-supervision, which we call self-ordering. We further contribute the first end-to-end trainable network that learns a point-wise ordering in a self-supervised fashion. It utilizes a novel differentiable point scoring-sorting strategy and it constructs an hierarchical contrastive scheme to obtain self-supervision signals. We extensively ablate the method and show its scalability and superior performance even compared to supervised ordering methods on multiple datasets and tasks including zero-shot ordering of point clouds from unseen categories.
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
MOHO: Learning Single-view Hand-held Object Reconstruction with Multi-view Occlusion-Aware Supervision
Previous works concerning single-view hand-held object reconstruction typically rely on supervision from 3D ground-truth models, which are hard to collect in real world. In contrast, readily accessible hand-object videos offer a promising training data source, but they only give heavily occluded object observations. In this paper, we present a novel synthetic-to-real framework to exploit Multi-view Occlusion-aware supervision from hand-object videos for Hand-held Object reconstruction (MOHO) from a single image, tackling two predominant challenges in such setting: hand-induced occlusion and object's self-occlusion. First, in the synthetic pre-training stage, we render a large-scaled synthetic dataset SOMVideo with hand-object images and multi-view occlusion-free supervisions, adopted to address hand-induced occlusion in both 2D and 3D spaces. Second, in the real-world finetuning stage, MOHO leverages the amodal-mask-weighted geometric supervision to mitigate the unfaithful guidance caused by the hand-occluded supervising views in real world. Moreover, domain-consistent occlusion-aware features are amalgamated in MOHO to resist object's self-occlusion for inferring the complete object shape. Extensive experiments on HO3D and DexYCB datasets demonstrate 2D-supervised MOHO gains superior results against 3D-supervised methods by a large margin.
4D Unsupervised Object Discovery
Object discovery is a core task in computer vision. While fast progresses have been made in supervised object detection, its unsupervised counterpart remains largely unexplored. With the growth of data volume, the expensive cost of annotations is the major limitation hindering further study. Therefore, discovering objects without annotations has great significance. However, this task seems impractical on still-image or point cloud alone due to the lack of discriminative information. Previous studies underlook the crucial temporal information and constraints naturally behind multi-modal inputs. In this paper, we propose 4D unsupervised object discovery, jointly discovering objects from 4D data -- 3D point clouds and 2D RGB images with temporal information. We present the first practical approach for this task by proposing a ClusterNet on 3D point clouds, which is jointly iteratively optimized with a 2D localization network. Extensive experiments on the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset suggest that the localization network and ClusterNet achieve competitive performance on both class-agnostic 2D object detection and 3D instance segmentation, bridging the gap between unsupervised methods and full supervised ones. Codes and models will be made available at https://github.com/Robertwyq/LSMOL.
On the Robustness of Open-World Test-Time Training: Self-Training with Dynamic Prototype Expansion
Generalizing deep learning models to unknown target domain distribution with low latency has motivated research into test-time training/adaptation (TTT/TTA). Existing approaches often focus on improving test-time training performance under well-curated target domain data. As figured out in this work, many state-of-the-art methods fail to maintain the performance when the target domain is contaminated with strong out-of-distribution (OOD) data, a.k.a. open-world test-time training (OWTTT). The failure is mainly due to the inability to distinguish strong OOD samples from regular weak OOD samples. To improve the robustness of OWTTT we first develop an adaptive strong OOD pruning which improves the efficacy of the self-training TTT method. We further propose a way to dynamically expand the prototypes to represent strong OOD samples for an improved weak/strong OOD data separation. Finally, we regularize self-training with distribution alignment and the combination yields the state-of-the-art performance on 5 OWTTT benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Yushu-Li/OWTTT.
ObjectMate: A Recurrence Prior for Object Insertion and Subject-Driven Generation
This paper introduces a tuning-free method for both object insertion and subject-driven generation. The task involves composing an object, given multiple views, into a scene specified by either an image or text. Existing methods struggle to fully meet the task's challenging objectives: (i) seamlessly composing the object into the scene with photorealistic pose and lighting, and (ii) preserving the object's identity. We hypothesize that achieving these goals requires large scale supervision, but manually collecting sufficient data is simply too expensive. The key observation in this paper is that many mass-produced objects recur across multiple images of large unlabeled datasets, in different scenes, poses, and lighting conditions. We use this observation to create massive supervision by retrieving sets of diverse views of the same object. This powerful paired dataset enables us to train a straightforward text-to-image diffusion architecture to map the object and scene descriptions to the composited image. We compare our method, ObjectMate, with state-of-the-art methods for object insertion and subject-driven generation, using a single or multiple references. Empirically, ObjectMate achieves superior identity preservation and more photorealistic composition. Differently from many other multi-reference methods, ObjectMate does not require slow test-time tuning.
OVOR: OnePrompt with Virtual Outlier Regularization for Rehearsal-Free Class-Incremental Learning
Recent works have shown that by using large pre-trained models along with learnable prompts, rehearsal-free methods for class-incremental learning (CIL) settings can achieve superior performance to prominent rehearsal-based ones. Rehearsal-free CIL methods struggle with distinguishing classes from different tasks, as those are not trained together. In this work we propose a regularization method based on virtual outliers to tighten decision boundaries of the classifier, such that confusion of classes among different tasks is mitigated. Recent prompt-based methods often require a pool of task-specific prompts, in order to prevent overwriting knowledge of previous tasks with that of the new task, leading to extra computation in querying and composing an appropriate prompt from the pool. This additional cost can be eliminated, without sacrificing accuracy, as we reveal in the paper. We illustrate that a simplified prompt-based method can achieve results comparable to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods equipped with a prompt pool, using much less learnable parameters and lower inference cost. Our regularization method has demonstrated its compatibility with different prompt-based methods, boosting those previous SOTA rehearsal-free CIL methods' accuracy on the ImageNet-R and CIFAR-100 benchmarks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/jpmorganchase/ovor.
Collaborative Propagation on Multiple Instance Graphs for 3D Instance Segmentation with Single-point Supervision
Instance segmentation on 3D point clouds has been attracting increasing attention due to its wide applications, especially in scene understanding areas. However, most existing methods operate on fully annotated data while manually preparing ground-truth labels at point-level is very cumbersome and labor-intensive. To address this issue, we propose a novel weakly supervised method RWSeg that only requires labeling one object with one point. With these sparse weak labels, we introduce a unified framework with two branches to propagate semantic and instance information respectively to unknown regions using self-attention and a cross-graph random walk method. Specifically, we propose a Cross-graph Competing Random Walks (CRW) algorithm that encourages competition among different instance graphs to resolve ambiguities in closely placed objects, improving instance assignment accuracy. RWSeg generates high-quality instance-level pseudo labels. Experimental results on ScanNet-v2 and S3DIS datasets show that our approach achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised methods and outperforms previous weakly-supervised methods by a substantial margin.
Templates for 3D Object Pose Estimation Revisited: Generalization to New Objects and Robustness to Occlusions
We present a method that can recognize new objects and estimate their 3D pose in RGB images even under partial occlusions. Our method requires neither a training phase on these objects nor real images depicting them, only their CAD models. It relies on a small set of training objects to learn local object representations, which allow us to locally match the input image to a set of "templates", rendered images of the CAD models for the new objects. In contrast with the state-of-the-art methods, the new objects on which our method is applied can be very different from the training objects. As a result, we are the first to show generalization without retraining on the LINEMOD and Occlusion-LINEMOD datasets. Our analysis of the failure modes of previous template-based approaches further confirms the benefits of local features for template matching. We outperform the state-of-the-art template matching methods on the LINEMOD, Occlusion-LINEMOD and T-LESS datasets. Our source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/nv-nguyen/template-pose
Rethinking Out-of-distribution (OOD) Detection: Masked Image Modeling is All You Need
The core of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is to learn the in-distribution (ID) representation, which is distinguishable from OOD samples. Previous work applied recognition-based methods to learn the ID features, which tend to learn shortcuts instead of comprehensive representations. In this work, we find surprisingly that simply using reconstruction-based methods could boost the performance of OOD detection significantly. We deeply explore the main contributors of OOD detection and find that reconstruction-based pretext tasks have the potential to provide a generally applicable and efficacious prior, which benefits the model in learning intrinsic data distributions of the ID dataset. Specifically, we take Masked Image Modeling as a pretext task for our OOD detection framework (MOOD). Without bells and whistles, MOOD outperforms previous SOTA of one-class OOD detection by 5.7%, multi-class OOD detection by 3.0%, and near-distribution OOD detection by 2.1%. It even defeats the 10-shot-per-class outlier exposure OOD detection, although we do not include any OOD samples for our detection
Label Propagation for Zero-shot Classification with Vision-Language Models
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on zero-shot classification, i.e. classification when provided merely with a list of class names. In this paper, we tackle the case of zero-shot classification in the presence of unlabeled data. We leverage the graph structure of the unlabeled data and introduce ZLaP, a method based on label propagation (LP) that utilizes geodesic distances for classification. We tailor LP to graphs containing both text and image features and further propose an efficient method for performing inductive inference based on a dual solution and a sparsification step. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method on 14 common datasets and show that ZLaP outperforms the latest related works. Code: https://github.com/vladan-stojnic/ZLaP
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.
Open World Object Detection in the Era of Foundation Models
Object detection is integral to a bevy of real-world applications, from robotics to medical image analysis. To be used reliably in such applications, models must be capable of handling unexpected - or novel - objects. The open world object detection (OWD) paradigm addresses this challenge by enabling models to detect unknown objects and learn discovered ones incrementally. However, OWD method development is hindered due to the stringent benchmark and task definitions. These definitions effectively prohibit foundation models. Here, we aim to relax these definitions and investigate the utilization of pre-trained foundation models in OWD. First, we show that existing benchmarks are insufficient in evaluating methods that utilize foundation models, as even naive integration methods nearly saturate these benchmarks. This result motivated us to curate a new and challenging benchmark for these models. Therefore, we introduce a new benchmark that includes five real-world application-driven datasets, including challenging domains such as aerial and surgical images, and establish baselines. We exploit the inherent connection between classes in application-driven datasets and introduce a novel method, Foundation Object detection Model for the Open world, or FOMO, which identifies unknown objects based on their shared attributes with the base known objects. FOMO has ~3x unknown object mAP compared to baselines on our benchmark. However, our results indicate a significant place for improvement - suggesting a great research opportunity in further scaling object detection methods to real-world domains. Our code and benchmark are available at https://orrzohar.github.io/projects/fomo/.
What is Essential for Unseen Goal Generalization of Offline Goal-conditioned RL?
Offline goal-conditioned RL (GCRL) offers a way to train general-purpose agents from fully offline datasets. In addition to being conservative within the dataset, the generalization ability to achieve unseen goals is another fundamental challenge for offline GCRL. However, to the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been well studied yet. In this paper, we study out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of offline GCRL both theoretically and empirically to identify factors that are important. In a number of experiments, we observe that weighted imitation learning enjoys better generalization than pessimism-based offline RL method. Based on this insight, we derive a theory for OOD generalization, which characterizes several important design choices. We then propose a new offline GCRL method, Generalizable Offline goAl-condiTioned RL (GOAT), by combining the findings from our theoretical and empirical studies. On a new benchmark containing 9 independent identically distributed (IID) tasks and 17 OOD tasks, GOAT outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
A noisy elephant in the room: Is your out-of-distribution detector robust to label noise?
The ability to detect unfamiliar or unexpected images is essential for safe deployment of computer vision systems. In the context of classification, the task of detecting images outside of a model's training domain is known as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While there has been a growing research interest in developing post-hoc OOD detection methods, there has been comparably little discussion around how these methods perform when the underlying classifier is not trained on a clean, carefully curated dataset. In this work, we take a closer look at 20 state-of-the-art OOD detection methods in the (more realistic) scenario where the labels used to train the underlying classifier are unreliable (e.g. crowd-sourced or web-scraped labels). Extensive experiments across different datasets, noise types & levels, architectures and checkpointing strategies provide insights into the effect of class label noise on OOD detection, and show that poor separation between incorrectly classified ID samples vs. OOD samples is an overlooked yet important limitation of existing methods. Code: https://github.com/glhr/ood-labelnoise
ASIC: Aligning Sparse in-the-wild Image Collections
We present a method for joint alignment of sparse in-the-wild image collections of an object category. Most prior works assume either ground-truth keypoint annotations or a large dataset of images of a single object category. However, neither of the above assumptions hold true for the long-tail of the objects present in the world. We present a self-supervised technique that directly optimizes on a sparse collection of images of a particular object/object category to obtain consistent dense correspondences across the collection. We use pairwise nearest neighbors obtained from deep features of a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT) model as noisy and sparse keypoint matches and make them dense and accurate matches by optimizing a neural network that jointly maps the image collection into a learned canonical grid. Experiments on CUB and SPair-71k benchmarks demonstrate that our method can produce globally consistent and higher quality correspondences across the image collection when compared to existing self-supervised methods. Code and other material will be made available at https://kampta.github.io/asic.
Residual Pattern Learning for Pixel-wise Out-of-Distribution Detection in Semantic Segmentation
Semantic segmentation models classify pixels into a set of known (``in-distribution'') visual classes. When deployed in an open world, the reliability of these models depends on their ability not only to classify in-distribution pixels but also to detect out-of-distribution (OoD) pixels. Historically, the poor OoD detection performance of these models has motivated the design of methods based on model re-training using synthetic training images that include OoD visual objects. Although successful, these re-trained methods have two issues: 1) their in-distribution segmentation accuracy may drop during re-training, and 2) their OoD detection accuracy does not generalise well to new contexts (e.g., country surroundings) outside the training set (e.g., city surroundings). In this paper, we mitigate these issues with: (i) a new residual pattern learning (RPL) module that assists the segmentation model to detect OoD pixels without affecting the inlier segmentation performance; and (ii) a novel context-robust contrastive learning (CoroCL) that enforces RPL to robustly detect OoD pixels among various contexts. Our approach improves by around 10\% FPR and 7\% AuPRC the previous state-of-the-art in Fishyscapes, Segment-Me-If-You-Can, and RoadAnomaly datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yyliu01/RPL.
Out-of-Distribution Detection for Monocular Depth Estimation
In monocular depth estimation, uncertainty estimation approaches mainly target the data uncertainty introduced by image noise. In contrast to prior work, we address the uncertainty due to lack of knowledge, which is relevant for the detection of data not represented by the training distribution, the so-called out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Motivated by anomaly detection, we propose to detect OOD images from an encoder-decoder depth estimation model based on the reconstruction error. Given the features extracted with the fixed depth encoder, we train an image decoder for image reconstruction using only in-distribution data. Consequently, OOD images result in a high reconstruction error, which we use to distinguish between in- and out-of-distribution samples. We built our experiments on the standard NYU Depth V2 and KITTI benchmarks as in-distribution data. Our post hoc method performs astonishingly well on different models and outperforms existing uncertainty estimation approaches without modifying the trained encoder-decoder depth estimation model.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Human Alignment with *PO
With the growing utilization of large language models (LLMs) across domains, alignment towards human preferences has become one of the most critical aspects of training models. At the forefront of state-of-the-art human alignment methods are preference optimization methods (*PO). However, prior research has often concentrated on identifying the best-performing method, typically involving a grid search over hyperparameters, which can be impractical for general practitioners. In this paper, we aim to identify the algorithm that, while being performant, is simultaneously more robust to varying hyperparameters, thereby increasing the likelihood of achieving better results. We focus on a realistic out-of-distribution (OOD) scenario that mirrors real-world applications of human alignment, offering practical insights into the strengths and weaknesses of these methods. Furthermore, to better understand the shortcomings of generations from the different methods, we analyze the model generations through the lens of KL divergence of the SFT model and the response length statistics. Our analysis reveals that the widely adopted DPO method consistently produces lengthy responses of inferior quality that are very close to the SFT responses. Motivated by these findings, we propose an embarrassingly simple extension to the DPO algorithm, LN-DPO, resulting in more concise responses without sacrificing quality compared to the policy obtained by vanilla DPO.
Point-Query Quadtree for Crowd Counting, Localization, and More
We show that crowd counting can be viewed as a decomposable point querying process. This formulation enables arbitrary points as input and jointly reasons whether the points are crowd and where they locate. The querying processing, however, raises an underlying problem on the number of necessary querying points. Too few imply underestimation; too many increase computational overhead. To address this dilemma, we introduce a decomposable structure, i.e., the point-query quadtree, and propose a new counting model, termed Point quEry Transformer (PET). PET implements decomposable point querying via data-dependent quadtree splitting, where each querying point could split into four new points when necessary, thus enabling dynamic processing of sparse and dense regions. Such a querying process yields an intuitive, universal modeling of crowd as both the input and output are interpretable and steerable. We demonstrate the applications of PET on a number of crowd-related tasks, including fully-supervised crowd counting and localization, partial annotation learning, and point annotation refinement, and also report state-of-the-art performance. For the first time, we show that a single counting model can address multiple crowd-related tasks across different learning paradigms. Code is available at https://github.com/cxliu0/PET.
Scaling Open-Vocabulary Object Detection
Open-vocabulary object detection has benefited greatly from pretrained vision-language models, but is still limited by the amount of available detection training data. While detection training data can be expanded by using Web image-text pairs as weak supervision, this has not been done at scales comparable to image-level pretraining. Here, we scale up detection data with self-training, which uses an existing detector to generate pseudo-box annotations on image-text pairs. Major challenges in scaling self-training are the choice of label space, pseudo-annotation filtering, and training efficiency. We present the OWLv2 model and OWL-ST self-training recipe, which address these challenges. OWLv2 surpasses the performance of previous state-of-the-art open-vocabulary detectors already at comparable training scales (~10M examples). However, with OWL-ST, we can scale to over 1B examples, yielding further large improvement: With an L/14 architecture, OWL-ST improves AP on LVIS rare classes, for which the model has seen no human box annotations, from 31.2% to 44.6% (43% relative improvement). OWL-ST unlocks Web-scale training for open-world localization, similar to what has been seen for image classification and language modelling.
SeFlow: A Self-Supervised Scene Flow Method in Autonomous Driving
Scene flow estimation predicts the 3D motion at each point in successive LiDAR scans. This detailed, point-level, information can help autonomous vehicles to accurately predict and understand dynamic changes in their surroundings. Current state-of-the-art methods require annotated data to train scene flow networks and the expense of labeling inherently limits their scalability. Self-supervised approaches can overcome the above limitations, yet face two principal challenges that hinder optimal performance: point distribution imbalance and disregard for object-level motion constraints. In this paper, we propose SeFlow, a self-supervised method that integrates efficient dynamic classification into a learning-based scene flow pipeline. We demonstrate that classifying static and dynamic points helps design targeted objective functions for different motion patterns. We also emphasize the importance of internal cluster consistency and correct object point association to refine the scene flow estimation, in particular on object details. Our real-time capable method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the self-supervised scene flow task on Argoverse 2 and Waymo datasets. The code is open-sourced at https://github.com/KTH-RPL/SeFlow along with trained model weights.
SOHES: Self-supervised Open-world Hierarchical Entity Segmentation
Open-world entity segmentation, as an emerging computer vision task, aims at segmenting entities in images without being restricted by pre-defined classes, offering impressive generalization capabilities on unseen images and concepts. Despite its promise, existing entity segmentation methods like Segment Anything Model (SAM) rely heavily on costly expert annotators. This work presents Self-supervised Open-world Hierarchical Entity Segmentation (SOHES), a novel approach that eliminates the need for human annotations. SOHES operates in three phases: self-exploration, self-instruction, and self-correction. Given a pre-trained self-supervised representation, we produce abundant high-quality pseudo-labels through visual feature clustering. Then, we train a segmentation model on the pseudo-labels, and rectify the noises in pseudo-labels via a teacher-student mutual-learning procedure. Beyond segmenting entities, SOHES also captures their constituent parts, providing a hierarchical understanding of visual entities. Using raw images as the sole training data, our method achieves unprecedented performance in self-supervised open-world segmentation, marking a significant milestone towards high-quality open-world entity segmentation in the absence of human-annotated masks. Project page: https://SOHES.github.io.
Object Detectors in the Open Environment: Challenges, Solutions, and Outlook
With the emergence of foundation models, deep learning-based object detectors have shown practical usability in closed set scenarios. However, for real-world tasks, object detectors often operate in open environments, where crucial factors (e.g., data distribution, objective) that influence model learning are often changing. The dynamic and intricate nature of the open environment poses novel and formidable challenges to object detectors. Unfortunately, current research on object detectors in open environments lacks a comprehensive analysis of their distinctive characteristics, challenges, and corresponding solutions, which hinders their secure deployment in critical real-world scenarios. This paper aims to bridge this gap by conducting a comprehensive review and analysis of object detectors in open environments. We initially identified limitations of key structural components within the existing detection pipeline and propose the open environment object detector challenge framework that includes four quadrants (i.e., out-of-domain, out-of-category, robust learning, and incremental learning) based on the dimensions of the data / target changes. For each quadrant of challenges in the proposed framework, we present a detailed description and systematic analysis of the overarching goals and core difficulties, systematically review the corresponding solutions, and benchmark their performance over multiple widely adopted datasets. In addition, we engage in a discussion of open problems and potential avenues for future research. This paper aims to provide a fresh, comprehensive, and systematic understanding of the challenges and solutions associated with open-environment object detectors, thus catalyzing the development of more solid applications in real-world scenarios. A project related to this survey can be found at https://github.com/LiangSiyuan21/OEOD_Survey.
All4One: Symbiotic Neighbour Contrastive Learning via Self-Attention and Redundancy Reduction
Nearest neighbour based methods have proved to be one of the most successful self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches due to their high generalization capabilities. However, their computational efficiency decreases when more than one neighbour is used. In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive SSL approach, which we call All4One, that reduces the distance between neighbour representations using ''centroids'' created through a self-attention mechanism. We use a Centroid Contrasting objective along with single Neighbour Contrasting and Feature Contrasting objectives. Centroids help in learning contextual information from multiple neighbours whereas the neighbour contrast enables learning representations directly from the neighbours and the feature contrast allows learning representations unique to the features. This combination enables All4One to outperform popular instance discrimination approaches by more than 1% on linear classification evaluation for popular benchmark datasets and obtains state-of-the-art (SoTA) results. Finally, we show that All4One is robust towards embedding dimensionalities and augmentations, surpassing NNCLR and Barlow Twins by more than 5% on low dimensionality and weak augmentation settings. The source code would be made available soon.
Reflexive Guidance: Improving OoDD in Vision-Language Models via Self-Guided Image-Adaptive Concept Generation
With the recent emergence of foundation models trained on internet-scale data and demonstrating remarkable generalization capabilities, such foundation models have become more widely adopted, leading to an expanding range of application domains. Despite this rapid proliferation, the trustworthiness of foundation models remains underexplored. Specifically, the out-of-distribution detection (OoDD) capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs), such as GPT-4o, which are trained on massive multi-modal data, have not been sufficiently addressed. The disparity between their demonstrated potential and practical reliability raises concerns regarding the safe and trustworthy deployment of foundation models. To address this gap, we evaluate and analyze the OoDD capabilities of various proprietary and open-source LVLMs. Our investigation contributes to a better understanding of how these foundation models represent confidence scores through their generated natural language responses. Based on our observations, we propose a self-guided prompting approach, termed Reflexive Guidance (ReGuide), aimed at enhancing the OoDD capability of LVLMs by leveraging self-generated image-adaptive concept suggestions. Experimental results demonstrate that our ReGuide enhances the performance of current LVLMs in both image classification and OoDD tasks.
P2C: Self-Supervised Point Cloud Completion from Single Partial Clouds
Point cloud completion aims to recover the complete shape based on a partial observation. Existing methods require either complete point clouds or multiple partial observations of the same object for learning. In contrast to previous approaches, we present Partial2Complete (P2C), the first self-supervised framework that completes point cloud objects using training samples consisting of only a single incomplete point cloud per object. Specifically, our framework groups incomplete point clouds into local patches as input and predicts masked patches by learning prior information from different partial objects. We also propose Region-Aware Chamfer Distance to regularize shape mismatch without limiting completion capability, and devise the Normal Consistency Constraint to incorporate a local planarity assumption, encouraging the recovered shape surface to be continuous and complete. In this way, P2C no longer needs multiple observations or complete point clouds as ground truth. Instead, structural cues are learned from a category-specific dataset to complete partial point clouds of objects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both synthetic ShapeNet data and real-world ScanNet data, showing that P2C produces comparable results to methods trained with complete shapes, and outperforms methods learned with multiple partial observations. Code is available at https://github.com/CuiRuikai/Partial2Complete.
OneRec: Unifying Retrieve and Rank with Generative Recommender and Iterative Preference Alignment
Recently, generative retrieval-based recommendation systems have emerged as a promising paradigm. However, most modern recommender systems adopt a retrieve-and-rank strategy, where the generative model functions only as a selector during the retrieval stage. In this paper, we propose OneRec, which replaces the cascaded learning framework with a unified generative model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end generative model that significantly surpasses current complex and well-designed recommender systems in real-world scenarios. Specifically, OneRec includes: 1) an encoder-decoder structure, which encodes the user's historical behavior sequences and gradually decodes the videos that the user may be interested in. We adopt sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to scale model capacity without proportionally increasing computational FLOPs. 2) a session-wise generation approach. In contrast to traditional next-item prediction, we propose a session-wise generation, which is more elegant and contextually coherent than point-by-point generation that relies on hand-crafted rules to properly combine the generated results. 3) an Iterative Preference Alignment module combined with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to enhance the quality of the generated results. Unlike DPO in NLP, a recommendation system typically has only one opportunity to display results for each user's browsing request, making it impossible to obtain positive and negative samples simultaneously. To address this limitation, We design a reward model to simulate user generation and customize the sampling strategy. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that a limited number of DPO samples can align user interest preferences and significantly improve the quality of generated results. We deployed OneRec in the main scene of Kuaishou, achieving a 1.6\% increase in watch-time, which is a substantial improvement.
Instance-aware Dynamic Prompt Tuning for Pre-trained Point Cloud Models
Pre-trained point cloud models have found extensive applications in 3D understanding tasks like object classification and part segmentation. However, the prevailing strategy of full fine-tuning in downstream tasks leads to large per-task storage overhead for model parameters, which limits the efficiency when applying large-scale pre-trained models. Inspired by the recent success of visual prompt tuning (VPT), this paper attempts to explore prompt tuning on pre-trained point cloud models, to pursue an elegant balance between performance and parameter efficiency. We find while instance-agnostic static prompting, e.g. VPT, shows some efficacy in downstream transfer, it is vulnerable to the distribution diversity caused by various types of noises in real-world point cloud data. To conquer this limitation, we propose a novel Instance-aware Dynamic Prompt Tuning (IDPT) strategy for pre-trained point cloud models. The essence of IDPT is to develop a dynamic prompt generation module to perceive semantic prior features of each point cloud instance and generate adaptive prompt tokens to enhance the model's robustness. Notably, extensive experiments demonstrate that IDPT outperforms full fine-tuning in most tasks with a mere 7% of the trainable parameters, providing a promising solution to parameter-efficient learning for pre-trained point cloud models. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh16143998882/ICCV23-IDPT.
Zero-Shot In-Distribution Detection in Multi-Object Settings Using Vision-Language Foundation Models
Extracting in-distribution (ID) images from noisy images scraped from the Internet is an important preprocessing for constructing datasets, which has traditionally been done manually. Automating this preprocessing with deep learning techniques presents two key challenges. First, images should be collected using only the name of the ID class without training on the ID data. Second, as we can see why COCO was created, it is crucial to identify images containing not only ID objects but also both ID and out-of-distribution (OOD) objects as ID images to create robust recognizers. In this paper, we propose a novel problem setting called zero-shot in-distribution (ID) detection, where we identify images containing ID objects as ID images (even if they contain OOD objects), and images lacking ID objects as OOD images without any training. To solve this problem, we leverage the powerful zero-shot capability of CLIP and present a simple and effective approach, Global-Local Maximum Concept Matching (GL-MCM), based on both global and local visual-text alignments of CLIP features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GL-MCM outperforms comparison methods on both multi-object datasets and single-object ImageNet benchmarks. The code will be available via https://github.com/AtsuMiyai/GL-MCM.
Direct Language Model Alignment from Online AI Feedback
Direct alignment from preferences (DAP) methods, such as DPO, have recently emerged as efficient alternatives to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), that do not require a separate reward model. However, the preference datasets used in DAP methods are usually collected ahead of training and never updated, thus the feedback is purely offline. Moreover, responses in these datasets are often sampled from a language model distinct from the one being aligned, and since the model evolves over training, the alignment phase is inevitably off-policy. In this study, we posit that online feedback is key and improves DAP methods. Our method, online AI feedback (OAIF), uses an LLM as annotator: on each training iteration, we sample two responses from the current model and prompt the LLM annotator to choose which one is preferred, thus providing online feedback. Despite its simplicity, we demonstrate via human evaluation in several tasks that OAIF outperforms both offline DAP and RLHF methods. We further show that the feedback leveraged in OAIF is easily controllable, via instruction prompts to the LLM annotator.
Self-Supervised Prompt Optimization
Well-designed prompts are crucial for enhancing Large language models' (LLMs) reasoning capabilities while aligning their outputs with task requirements across diverse domains. However, manually designed prompts require expertise and iterative experimentation. While existing prompt optimization methods aim to automate this process, they rely heavily on external references such as ground truth or by humans, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where such data is unavailable or costly to obtain. To address this, we propose Self-Supervised Prompt Optimization (SPO), a cost-efficient framework that discovers effective prompts for both closed and open-ended tasks without requiring external reference. Motivated by the observations that prompt quality manifests directly in LLM outputs and LLMs can effectively assess adherence to task requirements, we derive evaluation and optimization signals purely from output comparisons. Specifically, SPO selects superior prompts through pairwise output comparisons evaluated by an LLM evaluator, followed by an LLM optimizer that aligns outputs with task requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPO outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods, achieving comparable or superior results with significantly lower costs (e.g., 1.1% to 5.6% of existing methods) and fewer samples (e.g., three samples). The code is available at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT.
Multi-Modal Classifiers for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection
The goal of this paper is open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) x2013 building a model that can detect objects beyond the set of categories seen at training, thus enabling the user to specify categories of interest at inference without the need for model retraining. We adopt a standard two-stage object detector architecture, and explore three ways for specifying novel categories: via language descriptions, via image exemplars, or via a combination of the two. We make three contributions: first, we prompt a large language model (LLM) to generate informative language descriptions for object classes, and construct powerful text-based classifiers; second, we employ a visual aggregator on image exemplars that can ingest any number of images as input, forming vision-based classifiers; and third, we provide a simple method to fuse information from language descriptions and image exemplars, yielding a multi-modal classifier. When evaluating on the challenging LVIS open-vocabulary benchmark we demonstrate that: (i) our text-based classifiers outperform all previous OVOD works; (ii) our vision-based classifiers perform as well as text-based classifiers in prior work; (iii) using multi-modal classifiers perform better than either modality alone; and finally, (iv) our text-based and multi-modal classifiers yield better performance than a fully-supervised detector.
Progressive Open Space Expansion for Open-Set Model Attribution
Despite the remarkable progress in generative technology, the Janus-faced issues of intellectual property protection and malicious content supervision have arisen. Efforts have been paid to manage synthetic images by attributing them to a set of potential source models. However, the closed-set classification setting limits the application in real-world scenarios for handling contents generated by arbitrary models. In this study, we focus on a challenging task, namely Open-Set Model Attribution (OSMA), to simultaneously attribute images to known models and identify those from unknown ones. Compared to existing open-set recognition (OSR) tasks focusing on semantic novelty, OSMA is more challenging as the distinction between images from known and unknown models may only lie in visually imperceptible traces. To this end, we propose a Progressive Open Space Expansion (POSE) solution, which simulates open-set samples that maintain the same semantics as closed-set samples but embedded with different imperceptible traces. Guided by a diversity constraint, the open space is simulated progressively by a set of lightweight augmentation models. We consider three real-world scenarios and construct an OSMA benchmark dataset, including unknown models trained with different random seeds, architectures, and datasets from known ones. Extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate POSE is superior to both existing model attribution methods and off-the-shelf OSR methods.
Matching Networks for One Shot Learning
Learning from a few examples remains a key challenge in machine learning. Despite recent advances in important domains such as vision and language, the standard supervised deep learning paradigm does not offer a satisfactory solution for learning new concepts rapidly from little data. In this work, we employ ideas from metric learning based on deep neural features and from recent advances that augment neural networks with external memories. Our framework learns a network that maps a small labelled support set and an unlabelled example to its label, obviating the need for fine-tuning to adapt to new class types. We then define one-shot learning problems on vision (using Omniglot, ImageNet) and language tasks. Our algorithm improves one-shot accuracy on ImageNet from 87.6% to 93.2% and from 88.0% to 93.8% on Omniglot compared to competing approaches. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the same model on language modeling by introducing a one-shot task on the Penn Treebank.
Towards Category Unification of 3D Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds
Category-specific models are provenly valuable methods in 3D single object tracking (SOT) regardless of Siamese or motion-centric paradigms. However, such over-specialized model designs incur redundant parameters, thus limiting the broader applicability of 3D SOT task. This paper first introduces unified models that can simultaneously track objects across all categories using a single network with shared model parameters. Specifically, we propose to explicitly encode distinct attributes associated to different object categories, enabling the model to adapt to cross-category data. We find that the attribute variances of point cloud objects primarily occur from the varying size and shape (e.g., large and square vehicles v.s. small and slender humans). Based on this observation, we design a novel point set representation learning network inheriting transformer architecture, termed AdaFormer, which adaptively encodes the dynamically varying shape and size information from cross-category data in a unified manner. We further incorporate the size and shape prior derived from the known template targets into the model's inputs and learning objective, facilitating the learning of unified representation. Equipped with such designs, we construct two category-unified models SiamCUT and MoCUT.Extensive experiments demonstrate that SiamCUT and MoCUT exhibit strong generalization and training stability. Furthermore, our category-unified models outperform the category-specific counterparts by a significant margin (e.g., on KITTI dataset, 12% and 3% performance gains on the Siamese and motion paradigms). Our code will be available.
Out-of-Distribution Detection with Attention Head Masking for Multimodal Document Classification
Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data is crucial in machine learning applications to mitigate the risk of model overconfidence, thereby enhancing the reliability and safety of deployed systems. The majority of existing OOD detection methods predominantly address uni-modal inputs, such as images or texts. In the context of multi-modal documents, there is a notable lack of extensive research on the performance of these methods, which have primarily been developed with a focus on computer vision tasks. We propose a novel methodology termed as attention head masking (AHM) for multi-modal OOD tasks in document classification systems. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed AHM method outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches and significantly decreases the false positive rate (FPR) compared to existing solutions up to 7.5\%. This methodology generalizes well to multi-modal data, such as documents, where visual and textual information are modeled under the same Transformer architecture. To address the scarcity of high-quality publicly available document datasets and encourage further research on OOD detection for documents, we introduce FinanceDocs, a new document AI dataset. Our code and dataset are publicly available.
A Boundary Based Out-of-Distribution Classifier for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning
Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) is a challenging topic that has promising prospects in many realistic scenarios. Using a gating mechanism that discriminates the unseen samples from the seen samples can decompose the GZSL problem to a conventional Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) problem and a supervised classification problem. However, training the gate is usually challenging due to the lack of data in the unseen domain. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a boundary based Out-of-Distribution (OOD) classifier which classifies the unseen and seen domains by only using seen samples for training. First, we learn a shared latent space on a unit hyper-sphere where the latent distributions of visual features and semantic attributes are aligned class-wisely. Then we find the boundary and the center of the manifold for each class. By leveraging the class centers and boundaries, the unseen samples can be separated from the seen samples. After that, we use two experts to classify the seen and unseen samples separately. We extensively validate our approach on five popular benchmark datasets including AWA1, AWA2, CUB, FLO and SUN. The experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.
A Bayesian Approach to OOD Robustness in Image Classification
An important and unsolved problem in computer vision is to ensure that the algorithms are robust to changes in image domains. We address this problem in the scenario where we have access to images from the target domains but no annotations. Motivated by the challenges of the OOD-CV benchmark where we encounter real world Out-of-Domain (OOD) nuisances and occlusion, we introduce a novel Bayesian approach to OOD robustness for object classification. Our work extends Compositional Neural Networks (CompNets), which have been shown to be robust to occlusion but degrade badly when tested on OOD data. We exploit the fact that CompNets contain a generative head defined over feature vectors represented by von Mises-Fisher (vMF) kernels, which correspond roughly to object parts, and can be learned without supervision. We obverse that some vMF kernels are similar between different domains, while others are not. This enables us to learn a transitional dictionary of vMF kernels that are intermediate between the source and target domains and train the generative model on this dictionary using the annotations on the source domain, followed by iterative refinement. This approach, termed Unsupervised Generative Transition (UGT), performs very well in OOD scenarios even when occlusion is present. UGT is evaluated on different OOD benchmarks including the OOD-CV dataset, several popular datasets (e.g., ImageNet-C [9]), artificial image corruptions (including adding occluders), and synthetic-to-real domain transfer, and does well in all scenarios outperforming SOTA alternatives (e.g. up to 10% top-1 accuracy on Occluded OOD-CV dataset).
H2RBox: Horizontal Box Annotation is All You Need for Oriented Object Detection
Oriented object detection emerges in many applications from aerial images to autonomous driving, while many existing detection benchmarks are annotated with horizontal bounding box only which is also less costive than fine-grained rotated box, leading to a gap between the readily available training corpus and the rising demand for oriented object detection. This paper proposes a simple yet effective oriented object detection approach called H2RBox merely using horizontal box annotation for weakly-supervised training, which closes the above gap and shows competitive performance even against those trained with rotated boxes. The cores of our method are weakly- and self-supervised learning, which predicts the angle of the object by learning the consistency of two different views. To our best knowledge, H2RBox is the first horizontal box annotation-based oriented object detector. Compared to an alternative i.e. horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation with our post adaption to oriented object detection, our approach is not susceptible to the prediction quality of mask and can perform more robustly in complex scenes containing a large number of dense objects and outliers. Experimental results show that H2RBox has significant performance and speed advantages over horizontal box-supervised instance segmentation methods, as well as lower memory requirements. While compared to rotated box-supervised oriented object detectors, our method shows very close performance and speed. The source code is available at PyTorch-based https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-mmrotate{MMRotate} and Jittor-based https://github.com/yangxue0827/h2rbox-jittor{JDet}.
MFOS: Model-Free & One-Shot Object Pose Estimation
Existing learning-based methods for object pose estimation in RGB images are mostly model-specific or category based. They lack the capability to generalize to new object categories at test time, hence severely hindering their practicability and scalability. Notably, recent attempts have been made to solve this issue, but they still require accurate 3D data of the object surface at both train and test time. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that can estimate in a single forward pass the pose of objects never seen during training, given minimum input. In contrast to existing state-of-the-art approaches, which rely on task-specific modules, our proposed model is entirely based on a transformer architecture, which can benefit from recently proposed 3D-geometry general pretraining. We conduct extensive experiments and report state-of-the-art one-shot performance on the challenging LINEMOD benchmark. Finally, extensive ablations allow us to determine good practices with this relatively new type of architecture in the field.
Offline Regularised Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models Alignment
The dominant framework for alignment of large language models (LLM), whether through reinforcement learning from human feedback or direct preference optimisation, is to learn from preference data. This involves building datasets where each element is a quadruplet composed of a prompt, two independent responses (completions of the prompt) and a human preference between the two independent responses, yielding a preferred and a dis-preferred response. Such data is typically scarce and expensive to collect. On the other hand, single-trajectory datasets where each element is a triplet composed of a prompt, a response and a human feedback is naturally more abundant. The canonical element of such datasets is for instance an LLM's response to a user's prompt followed by a user's feedback such as a thumbs-up/down. Consequently, in this work, we propose DRO, or Direct Reward Optimisation, as a framework and associated algorithms that do not require pairwise preferences. DRO uses a simple mean-squared objective that can be implemented in various ways. We validate our findings empirically, using T5 encoder-decoder language models, and show DRO's performance over selected baselines such as Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO). Thus, we confirm that DRO is a simple and empirically compelling method for single-trajectory policy optimisation.
Point-Bind & Point-LLM: Aligning Point Cloud with Multi-modality for 3D Understanding, Generation, and Instruction Following
We introduce Point-Bind, a 3D multi-modality model aligning point clouds with 2D image, language, audio, and video. Guided by ImageBind, we construct a joint embedding space between 3D and multi-modalities, enabling many promising applications, e.g., any-to-3D generation, 3D embedding arithmetic, and 3D open-world understanding. On top of this, we further present Point-LLM, the first 3D large language model (LLM) following 3D multi-modal instructions. By parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques, Point-LLM injects the semantics of Point-Bind into pre-trained LLMs, e.g., LLaMA, which requires no 3D instruction data, but exhibits superior 3D and multi-modal question-answering capacity. We hope our work may cast a light on the community for extending 3D point clouds to multi-modality applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Point-Bind_Point-LLM.
Unsupervised Object Localization with Representer Point Selection
We propose a novel unsupervised object localization method that allows us to explain the predictions of the model by utilizing self-supervised pre-trained models without additional finetuning. Existing unsupervised and self-supervised object localization methods often utilize class-agnostic activation maps or self-similarity maps of a pre-trained model. Although these maps can offer valuable information for localization, their limited ability to explain how the model makes predictions remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective unsupervised object localization method based on representer point selection, where the predictions of the model can be represented as a linear combination of representer values of training points. By selecting representer points, which are the most important examples for the model predictions, our model can provide insights into how the model predicts the foreground object by providing relevant examples as well as their importance. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised and self-supervised object localization methods on various datasets with significant margins and even outperforms recent weakly supervised and few-shot methods.
D2PO: Discriminator-Guided DPO with Response Evaluation Models
Varied approaches for aligning language models have been proposed, including supervised fine-tuning, RLHF, and direct optimization methods such as DPO. Although DPO has rapidly gained popularity due to its straightforward training process and competitive results, there is an open question of whether there remain practical advantages of using a discriminator, like a reward model, to evaluate responses. We propose D2PO, discriminator-guided DPO, an approach for the online setting where preferences are being collected throughout learning. As we collect gold preferences, we use these not only to train our policy, but to train a discriminative response evaluation model to silver-label even more synthetic data for policy training. We explore this approach across a set of diverse tasks, including a realistic chat setting, we find that our approach leads to higher-quality outputs compared to DPO with the same data budget, and greater efficiency in terms of preference data requirements. Furthermore, we show conditions under which silver labeling is most helpful: it is most effective when training the policy with DPO, outperforming traditional PPO, and benefits from maintaining a separate discriminator from the policy model.
Object-Centric Multiple Object Tracking
Unsupervised object-centric learning methods allow the partitioning of scenes into entities without additional localization information and are excellent candidates for reducing the annotation burden of multiple-object tracking (MOT) pipelines. Unfortunately, they lack two key properties: objects are often split into parts and are not consistently tracked over time. In fact, state-of-the-art models achieve pixel-level accuracy and temporal consistency by relying on supervised object detection with additional ID labels for the association through time. This paper proposes a video object-centric model for MOT. It consists of an index-merge module that adapts the object-centric slots into detection outputs and an object memory module that builds complete object prototypes to handle occlusions. Benefited from object-centric learning, we only require sparse detection labels (0%-6.25%) for object localization and feature binding. Relying on our self-supervised Expectation-Maximization-inspired loss for object association, our approach requires no ID labels. Our experiments significantly narrow the gap between the existing object-centric model and the fully supervised state-of-the-art and outperform several unsupervised trackers.
ULMA: Unified Language Model Alignment with Demonstration and Point-wise Human Preference
Language model alignment is a cutting-edge technique in large language model training to align the model output to user's intent, e.g., being helpful and harmless. Recent alignment framework consists of two steps: supervised fine-tuning with demonstration data and preference learning with human preference data. Previous preference learning methods, such as RLHF and DPO, mainly focus on pair-wise preference data. However, in many real-world scenarios where human feedbacks are intrinsically point-wise, these methods will suffer from information loss or even fail. To fill this gap, in this paper, we first develop a preference learning method called point-wise DPO to tackle point-wise preference data. Further revelation on the connection between supervised fine-tuning and point-wise preference learning enables us to develop a unified framework for both human demonstration and point-wise preference data, which sheds new light on the construction of preference dataset. Extensive experiments on point-wise datasets with binary or continuous labels demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our proposed methods. A new dataset with high-quality demonstration samples on harmlessness is constructed and made publicly available.
Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection
Determining whether inputs are out-of-distribution (OOD) is an essential building block for safely deploying machine learning models in the open world. However, previous methods relying on the softmax confidence score suffer from overconfident posterior distributions for OOD data. We propose a unified framework for OOD detection that uses an energy score. We show that energy scores better distinguish in- and out-of-distribution samples than the traditional approach using the softmax scores. Unlike softmax confidence scores, energy scores are theoretically aligned with the probability density of the inputs and are less susceptible to the overconfidence issue. Within this framework, energy can be flexibly used as a scoring function for any pre-trained neural classifier as well as a trainable cost function to shape the energy surface explicitly for OOD detection. On a CIFAR-10 pre-trained WideResNet, using the energy score reduces the average FPR (at TPR 95%) by 18.03% compared to the softmax confidence score. With energy-based training, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on common benchmarks.
Point-GCC: Universal Self-supervised 3D Scene Pre-training via Geometry-Color Contrast
Geometry and color information provided by the point clouds are both crucial for 3D scene understanding. Two pieces of information characterize the different aspects of point clouds, but existing methods lack an elaborate design for the discrimination and relevance. Hence we explore a 3D self-supervised paradigm that can better utilize the relations of point cloud information. Specifically, we propose a universal 3D scene pre-training framework via Geometry-Color Contrast (Point-GCC), which aligns geometry and color information using a Siamese network. To take care of actual application tasks, we design (i) hierarchical supervision with point-level contrast and reconstruct and object-level contrast based on the novel deep clustering module to close the gap between pre-training and downstream tasks; (ii) architecture-agnostic backbone to adapt for various downstream models. Benefiting from the object-level representation associated with downstream tasks, Point-GCC can directly evaluate model performance and the result demonstrates the effectiveness of our methods. Transfer learning results on a wide range of tasks also show consistent improvements across all datasets. e.g., new state-of-the-art object detection results on SUN RGB-D and S3DIS datasets. Codes will be released at https://github.com/Asterisci/Point-GCC.
ImageNet-OOD: Deciphering Modern Out-of-Distribution Detection Algorithms
The task of out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is notoriously ill-defined. Earlier works focused on new-class detection, aiming to identify label-altering data distribution shifts, also known as "semantic shift." However, recent works argue for a focus on failure detection, expanding the OOD evaluation framework to account for label-preserving data distribution shifts, also known as "covariate shift." Intriguingly, under this new framework, complex OOD detectors that were previously considered state-of-the-art now perform similarly to, or even worse than the simple maximum softmax probability baseline. This raises the question: what are the latest OOD detectors actually detecting? Deciphering the behavior of OOD detection algorithms requires evaluation datasets that decouples semantic shift and covariate shift. To aid our investigations, we present ImageNet-OOD, a clean semantic shift dataset that minimizes the interference of covariate shift. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that OOD detectors are more sensitive to covariate shift than to semantic shift, and the benefits of recent OOD detection algorithms on semantic shift detection is minimal. Our dataset and analyses provide important insights for guiding the design of future OOD detectors.
Out-of-Dynamics Imitation Learning from Multimodal Demonstrations
Existing imitation learning works mainly assume that the demonstrator who collects demonstrations shares the same dynamics as the imitator. However, the assumption limits the usage of imitation learning, especially when collecting demonstrations for the imitator is difficult. In this paper, we study out-of-dynamics imitation learning (OOD-IL), which relaxes the assumption to that the demonstrator and the imitator have the same state spaces but could have different action spaces and dynamics. OOD-IL enables imitation learning to utilize demonstrations from a wide range of demonstrators but introduces a new challenge: some demonstrations cannot be achieved by the imitator due to the different dynamics. Prior works try to filter out such demonstrations by feasibility measurements, but ignore the fact that the demonstrations exhibit a multimodal distribution since the different demonstrators may take different policies in different dynamics. We develop a better transferability measurement to tackle this newly-emerged challenge. We firstly design a novel sequence-based contrastive clustering algorithm to cluster demonstrations from the same mode to avoid the mutual interference of demonstrations from different modes, and then learn the transferability of each demonstration with an adversarial-learning based algorithm in each cluster. Experiment results on several MuJoCo environments, a driving environment, and a simulated robot environment show that the proposed transferability measurement more accurately finds and down-weights non-transferable demonstrations and outperforms prior works on the final imitation learning performance. We show the videos of our experiment results on our website.
LASA: Instance Reconstruction from Real Scans using A Large-scale Aligned Shape Annotation Dataset
Instance shape reconstruction from a 3D scene involves recovering the full geometries of multiple objects at the semantic instance level. Many methods leverage data-driven learning due to the intricacies of scene complexity and significant indoor occlusions. Training these methods often requires a large-scale, high-quality dataset with aligned and paired shape annotations with real-world scans. Existing datasets are either synthetic or misaligned, restricting the performance of data-driven methods on real data. To this end, we introduce LASA, a Large-scale Aligned Shape Annotation Dataset comprising 10,412 high-quality CAD annotations aligned with 920 real-world scene scans from ArkitScenes, created manually by professional artists. On this top, we propose a novel Diffusion-based Cross-Modal Shape Reconstruction (DisCo) method. It is empowered by a hybrid feature aggregation design to fuse multi-modal inputs and recover high-fidelity object geometries. Besides, we present an Occupancy-Guided 3D Object Detection (OccGOD) method and demonstrate that our shape annotations provide scene occupancy clues that can further improve 3D object detection. Supported by LASA, extensive experiments show that our methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in both instance-level scene reconstruction and 3D object detection tasks.
DISK: Learning local features with policy gradient
Local feature frameworks are difficult to learn in an end-to-end fashion, due to the discreteness inherent to the selection and matching of sparse keypoints. We introduce DISK (DIScrete Keypoints), a novel method that overcomes these obstacles by leveraging principles from Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimizing end-to-end for a high number of correct feature matches. Our simple yet expressive probabilistic model lets us keep the training and inference regimes close, while maintaining good enough convergence properties to reliably train from scratch. Our features can be extracted very densely while remaining discriminative, challenging commonly held assumptions about what constitutes a good keypoint, as showcased in Fig. 1, and deliver state-of-the-art results on three public benchmarks.
Localizing Objects with Self-Supervised Transformers and no Labels
Localizing objects in image collections without supervision can help to avoid expensive annotation campaigns. We propose a simple approach to this problem, that leverages the activation features of a vision transformer pre-trained in a self-supervised manner. Our method, LOST, does not require any external object proposal nor any exploration of the image collection; it operates on a single image. Yet, we outperform state-of-the-art object discovery methods by up to 8 CorLoc points on PASCAL VOC 2012. We also show that training a class-agnostic detector on the discovered objects boosts results by another 7 points. Moreover, we show promising results on the unsupervised object discovery task. The code to reproduce our results can be found at https://github.com/valeoai/LOST.
ZoeDepth: Zero-shot Transfer by Combining Relative and Metric Depth
This paper tackles the problem of depth estimation from a single image. Existing work either focuses on generalization performance disregarding metric scale, i.e. relative depth estimation, or state-of-the-art results on specific datasets, i.e. metric depth estimation. We propose the first approach that combines both worlds, leading to a model with excellent generalization performance while maintaining metric scale. Our flagship model, ZoeD-M12-NK, is pre-trained on 12 datasets using relative depth and fine-tuned on two datasets using metric depth. We use a lightweight head with a novel bin adjustment design called metric bins module for each domain. During inference, each input image is automatically routed to the appropriate head using a latent classifier. Our framework admits multiple configurations depending on the datasets used for relative depth pre-training and metric fine-tuning. Without pre-training, we can already significantly improve the state of the art (SOTA) on the NYU Depth v2 indoor dataset. Pre-training on twelve datasets and fine-tuning on the NYU Depth v2 indoor dataset, we can further improve SOTA for a total of 21% in terms of relative absolute error (REL). Finally, ZoeD-M12-NK is the first model that can jointly train on multiple datasets (NYU Depth v2 and KITTI) without a significant drop in performance and achieve unprecedented zero-shot generalization performance to eight unseen datasets from both indoor and outdoor domains. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/isl-org/ZoeDepth .
Generalized Few-Shot Point Cloud Segmentation Via Geometric Words
Existing fully-supervised point cloud segmentation methods suffer in the dynamic testing environment with emerging new classes. Few-shot point cloud segmentation algorithms address this problem by learning to adapt to new classes at the sacrifice of segmentation accuracy for the base classes, which severely impedes its practicality. This largely motivates us to present the first attempt at a more practical paradigm of generalized few-shot point cloud segmentation, which requires the model to generalize to new categories with only a few support point clouds and simultaneously retain the capability to segment base classes. We propose the geometric words to represent geometric components shared between the base and novel classes, and incorporate them into a novel geometric-aware semantic representation to facilitate better generalization to the new classes without forgetting the old ones. Moreover, we introduce geometric prototypes to guide the segmentation with geometric prior knowledge. Extensive experiments on S3DIS and ScanNet consistently illustrate the superior performance of our method over baseline methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Pixie8888/GFS-3DSeg_GWs.
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.
Exploring Transformers for Open-world Instance Segmentation
Open-world instance segmentation is a rising task, which aims to segment all objects in the image by learning from a limited number of base-category objects. This task is challenging, as the number of unseen categories could be hundreds of times larger than that of seen categories. Recently, the DETR-like models have been extensively studied in the closed world while stay unexplored in the open world. In this paper, we utilize the Transformer for open-world instance segmentation and present SWORD. Firstly, we introduce to attach the stop-gradient operation before classification head and further add IoU heads for discovering novel objects. We demonstrate that a simple stop-gradient operation not only prevents the novel objects from being suppressed as background, but also allows the network to enjoy the merit of heuristic label assignment. Secondly, we propose a novel contrastive learning framework to enlarge the representations between objects and background. Specifically, we maintain a universal object queue to obtain the object center, and dynamically select positive and negative samples from the object queries for contrastive learning. While the previous works only focus on pursuing average recall and neglect average precision, we show the prominence of SWORD by giving consideration to both criteria. Our models achieve state-of-the-art performance in various open-world cross-category and cross-dataset generalizations. Particularly, in VOC to non-VOC setup, our method sets new state-of-the-art results of 40.0% on ARb100 and 34.9% on ARm100. For COCO to UVO generalization, SWORD significantly outperforms the previous best open-world model by 5.9% on APm and 8.1% on ARm100.
Dual-level Adaptive Self-Labeling for Novel Class Discovery in Point Cloud Segmentation
We tackle the novel class discovery in point cloud segmentation, which discovers novel classes based on the semantic knowledge of seen classes. Existing work proposes an online point-wise clustering method with a simplified equal class-size constraint on the novel classes to avoid degenerate solutions. However, the inherent imbalanced distribution of novel classes in point clouds typically violates the equal class-size constraint. Moreover, point-wise clustering ignores the rich spatial context information of objects, which results in less expressive representation for semantic segmentation. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel self-labeling strategy that adaptively generates high-quality pseudo-labels for imbalanced classes during model training. In addition, we develop a dual-level representation that incorporates regional consistency into the point-level classifier learning, reducing noise in generated segmentation. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two widely used datasets, SemanticKITTI and SemanticPOSS, and the results show our method outperforms the state of the art by a large margin.
Distilled Reverse Attention Network for Open-world Compositional Zero-Shot Learning
Open-World Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (OW-CZSL) aims to recognize new compositions of seen attributes and objects. In OW-CZSL, methods built on the conventional closed-world setting degrade severely due to the unconstrained OW test space. While previous works alleviate the issue by pruning compositions according to external knowledge or correlations in seen pairs, they introduce biases that harm the generalization. Some methods thus predict state and object with independently constructed and trained classifiers, ignoring that attributes are highly context-dependent and visually entangled with objects. In this paper, we propose a novel Distilled Reverse Attention Network to address the challenges. We also model attributes and objects separately but with different motivations, capturing contextuality and locality, respectively. We further design a reverse-and-distill strategy that learns disentangled representations of elementary components in training data supervised by reverse attention and knowledge distillation. We conduct experiments on three datasets and consistently achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.
Tailoring Self-Supervision for Supervised Learning
Recently, it is shown that deploying a proper self-supervision is a prospective way to enhance the performance of supervised learning. Yet, the benefits of self-supervision are not fully exploited as previous pretext tasks are specialized for unsupervised representation learning. To this end, we begin by presenting three desirable properties for such auxiliary tasks to assist the supervised objective. First, the tasks need to guide the model to learn rich features. Second, the transformations involved in the self-supervision should not significantly alter the training distribution. Third, the tasks are preferred to be light and generic for high applicability to prior arts. Subsequently, to show how existing pretext tasks can fulfill these and be tailored for supervised learning, we propose a simple auxiliary self-supervision task, predicting localizable rotation (LoRot). Our exhaustive experiments validate the merits of LoRot as a pretext task tailored for supervised learning in terms of robustness and generalization capability. Our code is available at https://github.com/wjun0830/Localizable-Rotation.
Position-guided Text Prompt for Vision-Language Pre-training
Vision-Language Pre-Training (VLP) has shown promising capabilities to align image and text pairs, facilitating a broad variety of cross-modal learning tasks. However, we observe that VLP models often lack the visual grounding/localization capability which is critical for many downstream tasks such as visual reasoning. In this work, we propose a novel Position-guided Text Prompt (PTP) paradigm to enhance the visual grounding ability of cross-modal models trained with VLP. Specifically, in the VLP phase, PTP divides the image into Ntimes N blocks, and identifies the objects in each block through the widely used object detector in VLP. It then reformulates the visual grounding task into a fill-in-the-blank problem given a PTP by encouraging the model to predict the objects in the given blocks or regress the blocks of a given object, e.g. filling `P" or ``O" in aPTP ``The block P has a O". This mechanism improves the visual grounding capability of VLP models and thus helps them better handle various downstream tasks. By introducing PTP into several state-of-the-art VLP frameworks, we observe consistently significant improvements across representative cross-modal learning model architectures and several benchmarks, e.g. zero-shot Flickr30K Retrieval (+4.8 in average recall@1) for ViLT vilt baseline, and COCO Captioning (+5.3 in CIDEr) for SOTA BLIP blip baseline. Moreover, PTP achieves comparable results with object-detector based methods, and much faster inference speed since PTP discards its object detector for inference while the later cannot. Our code and pre-trained weight will be released at https://github.com/sail-sg/ptp.
Foundation Policies with Hilbert Representations
Unsupervised and self-supervised objectives, such as next token prediction, have enabled pre-training generalist models from large amounts of unlabeled data. In reinforcement learning (RL), however, finding a truly general and scalable unsupervised pre-training objective for generalist policies from offline data remains a major open question. While a number of methods have been proposed to enable generic self-supervised RL, based on principles such as goal-conditioned RL, behavioral cloning, and unsupervised skill learning, such methods remain limited in terms of either the diversity of the discovered behaviors, the need for high-quality demonstration data, or the lack of a clear prompting or adaptation mechanism for downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised framework to pre-train generalist policies that capture diverse, optimal, long-horizon behaviors from unlabeled offline data such that they can be quickly adapted to any arbitrary new tasks in a zero-shot manner. Our key insight is to learn a structured representation that preserves the temporal structure of the underlying environment, and then to span this learned latent space with directional movements, which enables various zero-shot policy "prompting" schemes for downstream tasks. Through our experiments on simulated robotic locomotion and manipulation benchmarks, we show that our unsupervised policies can solve goal-conditioned and general RL tasks in a zero-shot fashion, even often outperforming prior methods designed specifically for each setting. Our code and videos are available at https://seohong.me/projects/hilp/
S2O: Static to Openable Enhancement for Articulated 3D Objects
Despite much progress in large 3D datasets there are currently few interactive 3D object datasets, and their scale is limited due to the manual effort required in their construction. We introduce the static to openable (S2O) task which creates interactive articulated 3D objects from static counterparts through openable part detection, motion prediction, and interior geometry completion. We formulate a unified framework to tackle this task, and curate a challenging dataset of openable 3D objects that serves as a test bed for systematic evaluation. Our experiments benchmark methods from prior work and simple yet effective heuristics for the S2O task. We find that turning static 3D objects into interactively openable counterparts is possible but that all methods struggle to generalize to realistic settings of the task, and we highlight promising future work directions.
Align on the Fly: Adapting Chatbot Behavior to Established Norms
In this paper, we aim to align large language models with the ever-changing, complex, and diverse human values (e.g., social norms) across time and locations. This presents a challenge to existing alignment techniques, such as supervised fine-tuning, which internalize values within model parameters. To overcome this, we propose an On-the-fly Preference Optimization (OPO) method, which is a real-time alignment that works in a streaming way. It employs an external memory to store established rules for alignment, which can constrain LLMs' behaviors without further training, allowing for convenient updates and customization of human values. We also introduce a scalable evaluation to assess the proposed method more effectively. Experimental results on both human-annotated and auto-generated questions from legal and moral domains indicate the effectiveness of the proposed OPO method. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/OPO.
STUNT: Few-shot Tabular Learning with Self-generated Tasks from Unlabeled Tables
Learning with few labeled tabular samples is often an essential requirement for industrial machine learning applications as varieties of tabular data suffer from high annotation costs or have difficulties in collecting new samples for novel tasks. Despite the utter importance, such a problem is quite under-explored in the field of tabular learning, and existing few-shot learning schemes from other domains are not straightforward to apply, mainly due to the heterogeneous characteristics of tabular data. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework for few-shot semi-supervised tabular learning, coined Self-generated Tasks from UNlabeled Tables (STUNT). Our key idea is to self-generate diverse few-shot tasks by treating randomly chosen columns as a target label. We then employ a meta-learning scheme to learn generalizable knowledge with the constructed tasks. Moreover, we introduce an unsupervised validation scheme for hyperparameter search (and early stopping) by generating a pseudo-validation set using STUNT from unlabeled data. Our experimental results demonstrate that our simple framework brings significant performance gain under various tabular few-shot learning benchmarks, compared to prior semi- and self-supervised baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/jaehyun513/STUNT.
Cross-modal Learning for Image-Guided Point Cloud Shape Completion
In this paper we explore the recent topic of point cloud completion, guided by an auxiliary image. We show how it is possible to effectively combine the information from the two modalities in a localized latent space, thus avoiding the need for complex point cloud reconstruction methods from single views used by the state-of-the-art. We also investigate a novel weakly-supervised setting where the auxiliary image provides a supervisory signal to the training process by using a differentiable renderer on the completed point cloud to measure fidelity in the image space. Experiments show significant improvements over state-of-the-art supervised methods for both unimodal and multimodal completion. We also show the effectiveness of the weakly-supervised approach which outperforms a number of supervised methods and is competitive with the latest supervised models only exploiting point cloud information.
StageInteractor: Query-based Object Detector with Cross-stage Interaction
Previous object detectors make predictions based on dense grid points or numerous preset anchors. Most of these detectors are trained with one-to-many label assignment strategies. On the contrary, recent query-based object detectors depend on a sparse set of learnable queries and a series of decoder layers. The one-to-one label assignment is independently applied on each layer for the deep supervision during training. Despite the great success of query-based object detection, however, this one-to-one label assignment strategy demands the detectors to have strong fine-grained discrimination and modeling capacity. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a new query-based object detector with cross-stage interaction, coined as StageInteractor. During the forward propagation, we come up with an efficient way to improve this modeling ability by reusing dynamic operators with lightweight adapters. As for the label assignment, a cross-stage label assigner is applied subsequent to the one-to-one label assignment. With this assigner, the training target class labels are gathered across stages and then reallocated to proper predictions at each decoder layer. On MS COCO benchmark, our model improves the baseline by 2.2 AP, and achieves 44.8 AP with ResNet-50 as backbone, 100 queries and 12 training epochs. With longer training time and 300 queries, StageInteractor achieves 51.1 AP and 52.2 AP with ResNeXt-101-DCN and Swin-S, respectively.
Category-Agnostic 6D Pose Estimation with Conditional Neural Processes
We present a novel meta-learning approach for 6D pose estimation on unknown objects. In contrast to ``instance-level" and ``category-level" pose estimation methods, our algorithm learns object representation in a category-agnostic way, which endows it with strong generalization capabilities across object categories. Specifically, we employ a neural process-based meta-learning approach to train an encoder to capture texture and geometry of an object in a latent representation, based on very few RGB-D images and ground-truth keypoints. The latent representation is then used by a simultaneously meta-trained decoder to predict the 6D pose of the object in new images. Furthermore, we propose a novel geometry-aware decoder for the keypoint prediction using a Graph Neural Network (GNN), which explicitly takes geometric constraints specific to each object into consideration. To evaluate our algorithm, extensive experiments are conducted on the \linemod dataset, and on our new fully-annotated synthetic datasets generated from Multiple Categories in Multiple Scenes (MCMS). Experimental results demonstrate that our model performs well on unseen objects with very different shapes and appearances. Remarkably, our model also shows robust performance on occluded scenes although trained fully on data without occlusion. To our knowledge, this is the first work exploring cross-category level 6D pose estimation.
Multi-Level Knowledge Distillation for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text
Self-supervised representation learning has proved to be a valuable component for out-of-distribution (OoD) detection with only the texts of in-distribution (ID) examples. These approaches either train a language model from scratch or fine-tune a pre-trained language model using ID examples, and then take the perplexity output by the language model as OoD scores. In this paper, we analyze the complementary characteristics of both OoD detection methods and propose a multi-level knowledge distillation approach that integrates their strengths while mitigating their limitations. Specifically, we use a fine-tuned model as the teacher to teach a randomly initialized student model on the ID examples. Besides the prediction layer distillation, we present a similarity-based intermediate layer distillation method to thoroughly explore the representation space of the teacher model. In this way, the learned student can better represent the ID data manifold while gaining a stronger ability to map OoD examples outside the ID data manifold with the regularization inherited from pre-training. Besides, the student model sees only ID examples during parameter learning, further promoting more distinguishable features for OoD detection. We conduct extensive experiments over multiple benchmark datasets, i.e., CLINC150, SST, ROSTD, 20 NewsGroups, and AG News; showing that the proposed method yields new state-of-the-art performance. We also explore its application as an AIGC detector to distinguish between answers generated by ChatGPT and human experts. It is observed that our model exceeds human evaluators in the pair-expert task on the Human ChatGPT Comparison Corpus.
PromptDet: Towards Open-vocabulary Detection using Uncurated Images
The goal of this work is to establish a scalable pipeline for expanding an object detector towards novel/unseen categories, using zero manual annotations. To achieve that, we make the following four contributions: (i) in pursuit of generalisation, we propose a two-stage open-vocabulary object detector, where the class-agnostic object proposals are classified with a text encoder from pre-trained visual-language model; (ii) To pair the visual latent space (of RPN box proposals) with that of the pre-trained text encoder, we propose the idea of regional prompt learning to align the textual embedding space with regional visual object features; (iii) To scale up the learning procedure towards detecting a wider spectrum of objects, we exploit the available online resource via a novel self-training framework, which allows to train the proposed detector on a large corpus of noisy uncurated web images. Lastly, (iv) to evaluate our proposed detector, termed as PromptDet, we conduct extensive experiments on the challenging LVIS and MS-COCO dataset. PromptDet shows superior performance over existing approaches with fewer additional training images and zero manual annotations whatsoever. Project page with code: https://fcjian.github.io/promptdet.
Self-supervised Learning of Geometrically Stable Features Through Probabilistic Introspection
Self-supervision can dramatically cut back the amount of manually-labelled data required to train deep neural networks. While self-supervision has usually been considered for tasks such as image classification, in this paper we aim at extending it to geometry-oriented tasks such as semantic matching and part detection. We do so by building on several recent ideas in unsupervised landmark detection. Our approach learns dense distinctive visual descriptors from an unlabelled dataset of images using synthetic image transformations. It does so by means of a robust probabilistic formulation that can introspectively determine which image regions are likely to result in stable image matching. We show empirically that a network pre-trained in this manner requires significantly less supervision to learn semantic object parts compared to numerous pre-training alternatives. We also show that the pre-trained representation is excellent for semantic object matching.
PointCLIP V2: Prompting CLIP and GPT for Powerful 3D Open-world Learning
Large-scale pre-trained models have shown promising open-world performance for both vision and language tasks. However, their transferred capacity on 3D point clouds is still limited and only constrained to the classification task. In this paper, we first collaborate CLIP and GPT to be a unified 3D open-world learner, named as PointCLIP V2, which fully unleashes their potential for zero-shot 3D classification, segmentation, and detection. To better align 3D data with the pre-trained language knowledge, PointCLIP V2 contains two key designs. For the visual end, we prompt CLIP via a shape projection module to generate more realistic depth maps, narrowing the domain gap between projected point clouds with natural images. For the textual end, we prompt the GPT model to generate 3D-specific text as the input of CLIP's textual encoder. Without any training in 3D domains, our approach significantly surpasses PointCLIP by +42.90%, +40.44%, and +28.75% accuracy on three datasets for zero-shot 3D classification. On top of that, V2 can be extended to few-shot 3D classification, zero-shot 3D part segmentation, and 3D object detection in a simple manner, demonstrating our generalization ability for unified 3D open-world learning.
UniGoal: Towards Universal Zero-shot Goal-oriented Navigation
In this paper, we propose a general framework for universal zero-shot goal-oriented navigation. Existing zero-shot methods build inference framework upon large language models (LLM) for specific tasks, which differs a lot in overall pipeline and fails to generalize across different types of goal. Towards the aim of universal zero-shot navigation, we propose a uniform graph representation to unify different goals, including object category, instance image and text description. We also convert the observation of agent into an online maintained scene graph. With this consistent scene and goal representation, we preserve most structural information compared with pure text and are able to leverage LLM for explicit graph-based reasoning. Specifically, we conduct graph matching between the scene graph and goal graph at each time instant and propose different strategies to generate long-term goal of exploration according to different matching states. The agent first iteratively searches subgraph of goal when zero-matched. With partial matching, the agent then utilizes coordinate projection and anchor pair alignment to infer the goal location. Finally scene graph correction and goal verification are applied for perfect matching. We also present a blacklist mechanism to enable robust switch between stages. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks show that our UniGoal achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on three studied navigation tasks with a single model, even outperforming task-specific zero-shot methods and supervised universal methods.
TÜLU 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training
Language model post-training is applied to refine behaviors and unlock new skills across a wide range of recent language models, but open recipes for applying these techniques lag behind proprietary ones. The underlying training data and recipes for post-training are simultaneously the most important pieces of the puzzle and the portion with the least transparency. To bridge this gap, we introduce T\"ULU 3, a family of fully-open state-of-the-art post-trained models, alongside its data, code, and training recipes, serving as a comprehensive guide for modern post-training techniques. T\"ULU 3, which builds on Llama 3.1 base models, achieves results surpassing the instruct versions of Llama 3.1, Qwen 2.5, Mistral, and even closed models such as GPT-4o-mini and Claude 3.5-Haiku. The training algorithms for our models include supervised finetuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and a novel method we call Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). With T\"ULU 3, we introduce a multi-task evaluation scheme for post-training recipes with development and unseen evaluations, standard benchmark implementations, and substantial decontamination of existing open datasets on said benchmarks. We conclude with analysis and discussion of training methods that did not reliably improve performance. In addition to the T\"ULU 3 model weights and demo, we release the complete recipe -- including datasets for diverse core skills, a robust toolkit for data curation and evaluation, the training code and infrastructure, and, most importantly, a detailed report for reproducing and further adapting the T\"ULU 3 approach to more domains.
Distillation with Contrast is All You Need for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Representation Learning
In this paper, we propose a simple and general framework for self-supervised point cloud representation learning. Human beings understand the 3D world by extracting two levels of information and establishing the relationship between them. One is the global shape of an object, and the other is the local structures of it. However, few existing studies in point cloud representation learning explored how to learn both global shapes and local-to-global relationships without a specified network architecture. Inspired by how human beings understand the world, we utilize knowledge distillation to learn both global shape information and the relationship between global shape and local structures. At the same time, we combine contrastive learning with knowledge distillation to make the teacher network be better updated. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on linear classification and multiple other downstream tasks. Especially, we develop a variant of ViT for 3D point cloud feature extraction, which also achieves comparable results with existing backbones when combined with our framework, and visualization of the attention maps show that our model does understand the point cloud by combining the global shape information and multiple local structural information, which is consistent with the inspiration of our representation learning method. Our code will be released soon.
SegPrompt: Boosting Open-world Segmentation via Category-level Prompt Learning
Current closed-set instance segmentation models rely on pre-defined class labels for each mask during training and evaluation, largely limiting their ability to detect novel objects. Open-world instance segmentation (OWIS) models address this challenge by detecting unknown objects in a class-agnostic manner. However, previous OWIS approaches completely erase category information during training to keep the model's ability to generalize to unknown objects. In this work, we propose a novel training mechanism termed SegPrompt that uses category information to improve the model's class-agnostic segmentation ability for both known and unknown categories. In addition, the previous OWIS training setting exposes the unknown classes to the training set and brings information leakage, which is unreasonable in the real world. Therefore, we provide a new open-world benchmark closer to a real-world scenario by dividing the dataset classes into known-seen-unseen parts. For the first time, we focus on the model's ability to discover objects that never appear in the training set images. Experiments show that SegPrompt can improve the overall and unseen detection performance by 5.6% and 6.1% in AR on our new benchmark without affecting the inference efficiency. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on existing cross-dataset transfer and strongly supervised settings, leading to 5.5% and 12.3% relative improvement.
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.
Anomaly-Aware Semantic Segmentation via Style-Aligned OoD Augmentation
Within the context of autonomous driving, encountering unknown objects becomes inevitable during deployment in the open world. Therefore, it is crucial to equip standard semantic segmentation models with anomaly awareness. Many previous approaches have utilized synthetic out-of-distribution (OoD) data augmentation to tackle this problem. In this work, we advance the OoD synthesis process by reducing the domain gap between the OoD data and driving scenes, effectively mitigating the style difference that might otherwise act as an obvious shortcut during training. Additionally, we propose a simple fine-tuning loss that effectively induces a pre-trained semantic segmentation model to generate a ``none of the given classes" prediction, leveraging per-pixel OoD scores for anomaly segmentation. With minimal fine-tuning effort, our pipeline enables the use of pre-trained models for anomaly segmentation while maintaining the performance on the original task.
Point Contrastive Prediction with Semantic Clustering for Self-Supervised Learning on Point Cloud Videos
We propose a unified point cloud video self-supervised learning framework for object-centric and scene-centric data. Previous methods commonly conduct representation learning at the clip or frame level and cannot well capture fine-grained semantics. Instead of contrasting the representations of clips or frames, in this paper, we propose a unified self-supervised framework by conducting contrastive learning at the point level. Moreover, we introduce a new pretext task by achieving semantic alignment of superpoints, which further facilitates the representations to capture semantic cues at multiple scales. In addition, due to the high redundancy in the temporal dimension of dynamic point clouds, directly conducting contrastive learning at the point level usually leads to massive undesired negatives and insufficient modeling of positive representations. To remedy this, we propose a selection strategy to retain proper negatives and make use of high-similarity samples from other instances as positive supplements. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms supervised counterparts on a wide range of downstream tasks and demonstrates the superior transferability of the learned representations.
Point-Cloud Completion with Pretrained Text-to-image Diffusion Models
Point-cloud data collected in real-world applications are often incomplete. Data is typically missing due to objects being observed from partial viewpoints, which only capture a specific perspective or angle. Additionally, data can be incomplete due to occlusion and low-resolution sampling. Existing completion approaches rely on datasets of predefined objects to guide the completion of noisy and incomplete, point clouds. However, these approaches perform poorly when tested on Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) objects, that are poorly represented in the training dataset. Here we leverage recent advances in text-guided image generation, which lead to major breakthroughs in text-guided shape generation. We describe an approach called SDS-Complete that uses a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model and leverages the text semantics of a given incomplete point cloud of an object, to obtain a complete surface representation. SDS-Complete can complete a variety of objects using test-time optimization without expensive collection of 3D information. We evaluate SDS Complete on incomplete scanned objects, captured by real-world depth sensors and LiDAR scanners. We find that it effectively reconstructs objects that are absent from common datasets, reducing Chamfer loss by 50% on average compared with current methods. Project page: https://sds-complete.github.io/
Self-Supervised Any-Point Tracking by Contrastive Random Walks
We present a simple, self-supervised approach to the Tracking Any Point (TAP) problem. We train a global matching transformer to find cycle consistent tracks through video via contrastive random walks, using the transformer's attention-based global matching to define the transition matrices for a random walk on a space-time graph. The ability to perform "all pairs" comparisons between points allows the model to obtain high spatial precision and to obtain a strong contrastive learning signal, while avoiding many of the complexities of recent approaches (such as coarse-to-fine matching). To do this, we propose a number of design decisions that allow global matching architectures to be trained through self-supervision using cycle consistency. For example, we identify that transformer-based methods are sensitive to shortcut solutions, and propose a data augmentation scheme to address them. Our method achieves strong performance on the TapVid benchmarks, outperforming previous self-supervised tracking methods, such as DIFT, and is competitive with several supervised methods.
Igeood: An Information Geometry Approach to Out-of-Distribution Detection
Reliable out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is fundamental to implementing safer modern machine learning (ML) systems. In this paper, we introduce Igeood, an effective method for detecting OOD samples. Igeood applies to any pre-trained neural network, works under various degrees of access to the ML model, does not require OOD samples or assumptions on the OOD data but can also benefit (if available) from OOD samples. By building on the geodesic (Fisher-Rao) distance between the underlying data distributions, our discriminator can combine confidence scores from the logits outputs and the learned features of a deep neural network. Empirically, we show that Igeood outperforms competing state-of-the-art methods on a variety of network architectures and datasets.
Divide and Conquer: 3D Point Cloud Instance Segmentation With Point-Wise Binarization
Instance segmentation on point clouds is crucially important for 3D scene understanding. Most SOTAs adopt distance clustering, which is typically effective but does not perform well in segmenting adjacent objects with the same semantic label (especially when they share neighboring points). Due to the uneven distribution of offset points, these existing methods can hardly cluster all instance points. To this end, we design a novel divide-and-conquer strategy named PBNet that binarizes each point and clusters them separately to segment instances. Our binary clustering divides offset instance points into two categories: high and low density points (HPs vs. LPs). Adjacent objects can be clearly separated by removing LPs, and then be completed and refined by assigning LPs via a neighbor voting method. To suppress potential over-segmentation, we propose to construct local scenes with the weight mask for each instance. As a plug-in, the proposed binary clustering can replace the traditional distance clustering and lead to consistent performance gains on many mainstream baselines. A series of experiments on ScanNetV2 and S3DIS datasets indicate the superiority of our model. In particular, PBNet ranks first on the ScanNetV2 official benchmark challenge, achieving the highest mAP.
Point-PEFT: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for 3D Pre-trained Models
The popularity of pre-trained large models has revolutionized downstream tasks across diverse fields, such as language, vision, and multi-modality. To minimize the adaption cost for downstream tasks, many Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques are proposed for language and 2D image pre-trained models. However, the specialized PEFT method for 3D pre-trained models is still under-explored. To this end, we introduce Point-PEFT, a novel framework for adapting point cloud pre-trained models with minimal learnable parameters. Specifically, for a pre-trained 3D model, we freeze most of its parameters, and only tune the newly added PEFT modules on downstream tasks, which consist of a Point-prior Prompt and a Geometry-aware Adapter. The Point-prior Prompt adopts a set of learnable prompt tokens, for which we propose to construct a memory bank with domain-specific knowledge, and utilize a parameter-free attention to enhance the prompt tokens. The Geometry-aware Adapter aims to aggregate point cloud features within spatial neighborhoods to capture fine-grained geometric information through local interactions. Extensive experiments indicate that our Point-PEFT can achieve better performance than the full fine-tuning on various downstream tasks, while using only 5% of the trainable parameters, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Code is released at https://github.com/Ivan-Tang-3D/Point-PEFT.
Tight Lower Bounds on Worst-Case Guarantees for Zero-Shot Learning with Attributes
We develop a rigorous mathematical analysis of zero-shot learning with attributes. In this setting, the goal is to label novel classes with no training data, only detectors for attributes and a description of how those attributes are correlated with the target classes, called the class-attribute matrix. We develop the first non-trivial lower bound on the worst-case error of the best map from attributes to classes for this setting, even with perfect attribute detectors. The lower bound characterizes the theoretical intrinsic difficulty of the zero-shot problem based on the available information -- the class-attribute matrix -- and the bound is practically computable from it. Our lower bound is tight, as we show that we can always find a randomized map from attributes to classes whose expected error is upper bounded by the value of the lower bound. We show that our analysis can be predictive of how standard zero-shot methods behave in practice, including which classes will likely be confused with others.
From CAD models to soft point cloud labels: An automatic annotation pipeline for cheaply supervised 3D semantic segmentation
We propose a fully automatic annotation scheme that takes a raw 3D point cloud with a set of fitted CAD models as input and outputs convincing point-wise labels that can be used as cheap training data for point cloud segmentation. Compared with manual annotations, we show that our automatic labels are accurate while drastically reducing the annotation time and eliminating the need for manual intervention or dataset-specific parameters. Our labeling pipeline outputs semantic classes and soft point-wise object scores, which can either be binarized into standard one-hot-encoded labels, thresholded into weak labels with ambiguous points left unlabeled, or used directly as soft labels during training. We evaluate the label quality and segmentation performance of PointNet++ on a dataset of real industrial point clouds and Scan2CAD, a public dataset of indoor scenes. Our results indicate that reducing supervision in areas that are more difficult to label automatically is beneficial compared with the conventional approach of naively assigning a hard "best guess" label to every point.
Enhancing Novel Object Detection via Cooperative Foundational Models
In this work, we address the challenging and emergent problem of novel object detection (NOD), focusing on the accurate detection of both known and novel object categories during inference. Traditional object detection algorithms are inherently closed-set, limiting their capability to handle NOD. We present a novel approach to transform existing closed-set detectors into open-set detectors. This transformation is achieved by leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained foundational models, specifically CLIP and SAM, through our cooperative mechanism. Furthermore, by integrating this mechanism with state-of-the-art open-set detectors such as GDINO, we establish new benchmarks in object detection performance. Our method achieves 17.42 mAP in novel object detection and 42.08 mAP for known objects on the challenging LVIS dataset. Adapting our approach to the COCO OVD split, we surpass the current state-of-the-art by a margin of 7.2 AP_{50} for novel classes. Our code is available at https://github.com/rohit901/cooperative-foundational-models .
Rethinking Weak-to-Strong Augmentation in Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection
Source-Free domain adaptive Object Detection (SFOD) aims to transfer a detector (pre-trained on source domain) to new unlabelled target domains. Current SFOD methods typically follow the Mean Teacher framework, where weak-to-strong augmentation provides diverse and sharp contrast for self-supervised learning. However, this augmentation strategy suffers from an inherent problem called crucial semantics loss: Due to random, strong disturbance, strong augmentation is prone to losing typical visual components, hindering cross-domain feature extraction. To address this thus-far ignored limitation, this paper introduces a novel Weak-to-Strong Contrastive Learning (WSCoL) approach. The core idea is to distill semantics lossless knowledge in the weak features (from the weak/teacher branch) to guide the representation learning upon the strong features (from the strong/student branch). To achieve this, we project the original features into a shared space using a mapping network, thereby reducing the bias between the weak and strong features. Meanwhile, a weak features-guided contrastive learning is performed in a weak-to-strong manner alternatively. Specifically, we first conduct an adaptation-aware prototype-guided clustering on the weak features to generate pseudo labels for corresponding strong features matched through proposals. Sequentially, we identify positive-negative samples based on the pseudo labels and perform cross-category contrastive learning on the strong features where an uncertainty estimator encourages adaptive background contrast. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WSCoL yields new state-of-the-art performance, offering a built-in mechanism mitigating crucial semantics loss for traditional Mean Teacher framework. The code and data will be released soon.
SoPo: Text-to-Motion Generation Using Semi-Online Preference Optimization
Text-to-motion generation is essential for advancing the creative industry but often presents challenges in producing consistent, realistic motions. To address this, we focus on fine-tuning text-to-motion models to consistently favor high-quality, human-preferred motions, a critical yet largely unexplored problem. In this work, we theoretically investigate the DPO under both online and offline settings, and reveal their respective limitation: overfitting in offline DPO, and biased sampling in online DPO. Building on our theoretical insights, we introduce Semi-online Preference Optimization (SoPo), a DPO-based method for training text-to-motion models using "semi-online" data pair, consisting of unpreferred motion from online distribution and preferred motion in offline datasets. This method leverages both online and offline DPO, allowing each to compensate for the other's limitations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SoPo outperforms other preference alignment methods, with an MM-Dist of 3.25% (vs e.g. 0.76% of MoDiPO) on the MLD model, 2.91% (vs e.g. 0.66% of MoDiPO) on MDM model, respectively. Additionally, the MLD model fine-tuned by our SoPo surpasses the SoTA model in terms of R-precision and MM Dist. Visualization results also show the efficacy of our SoPo in preference alignment. Our project page is https://sopo-motion.github.io.
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.
Geometry-Aware Adaptation for Pretrained Models
Machine learning models -- including prominent zero-shot models -- are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes -- or, in the case of zero-shot prediction, to improve its performance -- without any additional training. Our technique is a drop-in replacement of the standard prediction rule, swapping argmax with the Fr\'echet mean. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for this approach, studying (i) learning-theoretic results trading off label space diameter, sample complexity, and model dimension, (ii) characterizations of the full range of scenarios in which it is possible to predict any unobserved class, and (iii) an optimal active learning-like next class selection procedure to obtain optimal training classes for when it is not possible to predict the entire range of unobserved classes. Empirically, using easily-available external metrics, our proposed approach, Loki, gains up to 29.7% relative improvement over SimCLR on ImageNet and scales to hundreds of thousands of classes. When no such metric is available, Loki can use self-derived metrics from class embeddings and obtains a 10.5% improvement on pretrained zero-shot models such as CLIP.
OPDMulti: Openable Part Detection for Multiple Objects
Openable part detection is the task of detecting the openable parts of an object in a single-view image, and predicting corresponding motion parameters. Prior work investigated the unrealistic setting where all input images only contain a single openable object. We generalize this task to scenes with multiple objects each potentially possessing openable parts, and create a corresponding dataset based on real-world scenes. We then address this more challenging scenario with OPDFormer: a part-aware transformer architecture. Our experiments show that the OPDFormer architecture significantly outperforms prior work. The more realistic multiple-object scenarios we investigated remain challenging for all methods, indicating opportunities for future work.
Aligning Modalities in Vision Large Language Models via Preference Fine-tuning
Instruction-following Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) have achieved significant progress recently on a variety of tasks. These approaches merge strong pre-trained vision models and large language models (LLMs). Since these components are trained separately, the learned representations need to be aligned with joint training on additional image-language pairs. This procedure is not perfect and can cause the model to hallucinate - provide answers that do not accurately reflect the image, even when the core LLM is highly factual and the vision backbone has sufficiently complete representations. In this work, we frame the hallucination problem as an alignment issue, tackle it with preference tuning. Specifically, we propose POVID to generate feedback data with AI models. We use ground-truth instructions as the preferred response and a two-stage approach to generate dispreferred data. First, we prompt GPT-4V to inject plausible hallucinations into the correct answer. Second, we distort the image to trigger the inherent hallucination behavior of the VLLM. This is an automated approach, which does not rely on human data generation or require a perfect expert, which makes it easily scalable. Finally, both of these generation strategies are integrated into an RLHF pipeline via Direct Preference Optimization. In experiments across broad benchmarks, we show that we can not only reduce hallucinations, but improve model performance across standard benchmarks, outperforming prior approaches. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/YiyangZhou/POVID.
POA: Pre-training Once for Models of All Sizes
Large-scale self-supervised pre-training has paved the way for one foundation model to handle many different vision tasks. Most pre-training methodologies train a single model of a certain size at one time. Nevertheless, various computation or storage constraints in real-world scenarios require substantial efforts to develop a series of models with different sizes to deploy. Thus, in this study, we propose a novel tri-branch self-supervised training framework, termed as POA (Pre-training Once for All), to tackle this aforementioned issue. Our approach introduces an innovative elastic student branch into a modern self-distillation paradigm. At each pre-training step, we randomly sample a sub-network from the original student to form the elastic student and train all branches in a self-distilling fashion. Once pre-trained, POA allows the extraction of pre-trained models of diverse sizes for downstream tasks. Remarkably, the elastic student facilitates the simultaneous pre-training of multiple models with different sizes, which also acts as an additional ensemble of models of various sizes to enhance representation learning. Extensive experiments, including k-nearest neighbors, linear probing evaluation and assessments on multiple downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our POA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance using ViT, Swin Transformer and ResNet backbones, producing around a hundred models with different sizes through a single pre-training session. The code is available at: https://github.com/Qichuzyy/POA.
Aligning CodeLLMs with Direct Preference Optimization
The last year has witnessed the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) across diverse domains. Among them, CodeLLMs have garnered particular attention because they can not only assist in completing various programming tasks but also represent the decision-making and logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs. However, current CodeLLMs mainly focus on pre-training and supervised fine-tuning scenarios, leaving the alignment stage, which is important for post-training LLMs, under-explored. This work first identifies that the commonly used PPO algorithm may be suboptimal for the alignment of CodeLLM because the involved reward rules are routinely coarse-grained and potentially flawed. We then advocate addressing this using the DPO algorithm. Based on only preference data pairs, DPO can render the model rank data automatically, giving rise to a fine-grained rewarding pattern more robust than human intervention. We also contribute a pipeline for collecting preference pairs for DPO on CodeLLMs. Studies show that our method significantly improves the performance of existing CodeLLMs on benchmarks such as MBPP and HumanEval.
Negative Label Guided OOD Detection with Pretrained Vision-Language Models
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection aims at identifying samples from unknown classes, playing a crucial role in trustworthy models against errors on unexpected inputs. Extensive research has been dedicated to exploring OOD detection in the vision modality. Vision-language models (VLMs) can leverage both textual and visual information for various multi-modal applications, whereas few OOD detection methods take into account information from the text modality. In this paper, we propose a novel post hoc OOD detection method, called NegLabel, which takes a vast number of negative labels from extensive corpus databases. We design a novel scheme for the OOD score collaborated with negative labels. Theoretical analysis helps to understand the mechanism of negative labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method NegLabel achieves state-of-the-art performance on various OOD detection benchmarks and generalizes well on multiple VLM architectures. Furthermore, our method NegLabel exhibits remarkable robustness against diverse domain shifts. The codes are available at https://github.com/tmlr-group/NegLabel.
Operational Latent Spaces
We investigate the construction of latent spaces through self-supervised learning to support semantically meaningful operations. Analogous to operational amplifiers, these "operational latent spaces" (OpLaS) not only demonstrate semantic structure such as clustering but also support common transformational operations with inherent semantic meaning. Some operational latent spaces are found to have arisen "unintentionally" in the progress toward some (other) self-supervised learning objective, in which unintended but still useful properties are discovered among the relationships of points in the space. Other spaces may be constructed "intentionally" by developers stipulating certain kinds of clustering or transformations intended to produce the desired structure. We focus on the intentional creation of operational latent spaces via self-supervised learning, including the introduction of rotation operators via a novel "FiLMR" layer, which can be used to enable ring-like symmetries found in some musical constructions.
ShAPO: Implicit Representations for Multi-Object Shape, Appearance, and Pose Optimization
Our method studies the complex task of object-centric 3D understanding from a single RGB-D observation. As it is an ill-posed problem, existing methods suffer from low performance for both 3D shape and 6D pose and size estimation in complex multi-object scenarios with occlusions. We present ShAPO, a method for joint multi-object detection, 3D textured reconstruction, 6D object pose and size estimation. Key to ShAPO is a single-shot pipeline to regress shape, appearance and pose latent codes along with the masks of each object instance, which is then further refined in a sparse-to-dense fashion. A novel disentangled shape and appearance database of priors is first learned to embed objects in their respective shape and appearance space. We also propose a novel, octree-based differentiable optimization step, allowing us to further improve object shape, pose and appearance simultaneously under the learned latent space, in an analysis-by-synthesis fashion. Our novel joint implicit textured object representation allows us to accurately identify and reconstruct novel unseen objects without having access to their 3D meshes. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method, trained on simulated indoor scenes, accurately regresses the shape, appearance and pose of novel objects in the real-world with minimal fine-tuning. Our method significantly out-performs all baselines on the NOCS dataset with an 8% absolute improvement in mAP for 6D pose estimation. Project page: https://zubair-irshad.github.io/projects/ShAPO.html
Spatial Self-Distillation for Object Detection with Inaccurate Bounding Boxes
Object detection via inaccurate bounding boxes supervision has boosted a broad interest due to the expensive high-quality annotation data or the occasional inevitability of low annotation quality (\eg tiny objects). The previous works usually utilize multiple instance learning (MIL), which highly depends on category information, to select and refine a low-quality box. Those methods suffer from object drift, group prediction and part domination problems without exploring spatial information. In this paper, we heuristically propose a Spatial Self-Distillation based Object Detector (SSD-Det) to mine spatial information to refine the inaccurate box in a self-distillation fashion. SSD-Det utilizes a Spatial Position Self-Distillation (SPSD) module to exploit spatial information and an interactive structure to combine spatial information and category information, thus constructing a high-quality proposal bag. To further improve the selection procedure, a Spatial Identity Self-Distillation (SISD) module is introduced in SSD-Det to obtain spatial confidence to help select the best proposals. Experiments on MS-COCO and VOC datasets with noisy box annotation verify our method's effectiveness and achieve state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/ucas-vg/PointTinyBenchmark/tree/SSD-Det.
Unleashing Mask: Explore the Intrinsic Out-of-Distribution Detection Capability
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is an indispensable aspect of secure AI when deploying machine learning models in real-world applications. Previous paradigms either explore better scoring functions or utilize the knowledge of outliers to equip the models with the ability of OOD detection. However, few of them pay attention to the intrinsic OOD detection capability of the given model. In this work, we generally discover the existence of an intermediate stage of a model trained on in-distribution (ID) data having higher OOD detection performance than that of its final stage across different settings, and further identify one critical data-level attribution to be learning with the atypical samples. Based on such insights, we propose a novel method, Unleashing Mask, which aims to restore the OOD discriminative capabilities of the well-trained model with ID data. Our method utilizes a mask to figure out the memorized atypical samples, and then finetune the model or prune it with the introduced mask to forget them. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/Unleashing-Mask.
ZeroFlow: Scalable Scene Flow via Distillation
Scene flow estimation is the task of describing the 3D motion field between temporally successive point clouds. State-of-the-art methods use strong priors and test-time optimization techniques, but require on the order of tens of seconds to process full-size point clouds, making them unusable as computer vision primitives for real-time applications such as open world object detection. Feedforward methods are considerably faster, running on the order of tens to hundreds of milliseconds for full-size point clouds, but require expensive human supervision. To address both limitations, we propose Scene Flow via Distillation, a simple, scalable distillation framework that uses a label-free optimization method to produce pseudo-labels to supervise a feedforward model. Our instantiation of this framework, ZeroFlow, achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Argoverse 2 Self-Supervised Scene Flow Challenge while using zero human labels by simply training on large-scale, diverse unlabeled data. At test-time, ZeroFlow is over 1000x faster than label-free state-of-the-art optimization-based methods on full-size point clouds (34 FPS vs 0.028 FPS) and over 1000x cheaper to train on unlabeled data compared to the cost of human annotation (\394 vs ~750,000). To facilitate further research, we will release our code, trained model weights, and high quality pseudo-labels for the Argoverse 2 and Waymo Open datasets.
Projecting Points to Axes: Oriented Object Detection via Point-Axis Representation
This paper introduces the point-axis representation for oriented object detection, emphasizing its flexibility and geometrically intuitive nature with two key components: points and axes. 1) Points delineate the spatial extent and contours of objects, providing detailed shape descriptions. 2) Axes define the primary directionalities of objects, providing essential orientation cues crucial for precise detection. The point-axis representation decouples location and rotation, addressing the loss discontinuity issues commonly encountered in traditional bounding box-based approaches. For effective optimization without introducing additional annotations, we propose the max-projection loss to supervise point set learning and the cross-axis loss for robust axis representation learning. Further, leveraging this representation, we present the Oriented DETR model, seamlessly integrating the DETR framework for precise point-axis prediction and end-to-end detection. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements in oriented object detection tasks.
Vision-Driven Prompt Optimization for Large Language Models in Multimodal Generative Tasks
Vision generation remains a challenging frontier in artificial intelligence, requiring seamless integration of visual understanding and generative capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Vision-Driven Prompt Optimization (VDPO), that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically generate textual prompts from visual inputs, guiding high-fidelity image synthesis. VDPO combines a visual embedding prompt tuner, a textual instruction generator, and a vision generation module to achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse vision generation tasks. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as COCO and Sketchy demonstrate that VDPO consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving significant improvements in FID, LPIPS, and BLEU/CIDEr scores. Additional analyses reveal the scalability, robustness, and generalization capabilities of VDPO, making it a versatile solution for in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Human evaluations further validate the practical superiority of VDPO in generating visually appealing and semantically coherent outputs.
One Prompt is not Enough: Automated Construction of a Mixture-of-Expert Prompts
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong generalization capabilities to novel tasks when prompted with language instructions and in-context demos. Since this ability sensitively depends on the quality of prompts, various methods have been explored to automate the instruction design. While these methods demonstrated promising results, they also restricted the searched prompt to one instruction. Such simplification significantly limits their capacity, as a single demo-free instruction might not be able to cover the entire complex problem space of the targeted task. To alleviate this issue, we adopt the Mixture-of-Expert paradigm and divide the problem space into a set of sub-regions; Each sub-region is governed by a specialized expert, equipped with both an instruction and a set of demos. A two-phase process is developed to construct the specialized expert for each region: (1) demo assignment: Inspired by the theoretical connection between in-context learning and kernel regression, we group demos into experts based on their semantic similarity; (2) instruction assignment: A region-based joint search of an instruction per expert complements the demos assigned to it, yielding a synergistic effect. The resulting method, codenamed Mixture-of-Prompts (MoP), achieves an average win rate of 81% against prior arts across several major benchmarks.
Label, Verify, Correct: A Simple Few Shot Object Detection Method
The objective of this paper is few-shot object detection (FSOD) -- the task of expanding an object detector for a new category given only a few instances for training. We introduce a simple pseudo-labelling method to source high-quality pseudo-annotations from the training set, for each new category, vastly increasing the number of training instances and reducing class imbalance; our method finds previously unlabelled instances. Na\"ively training with model predictions yields sub-optimal performance; we present two novel methods to improve the precision of the pseudo-labelling process: first, we introduce a verification technique to remove candidate detections with incorrect class labels; second, we train a specialised model to correct poor quality bounding boxes. After these two novel steps, we obtain a large set of high-quality pseudo-annotations that allow our final detector to be trained end-to-end. Additionally, we demonstrate our method maintains base class performance, and the utility of simple augmentations in FSOD. While benchmarking on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO, our method achieves state-of-the-art or second-best performance compared to existing approaches across all number of shots.
PS-TTL: Prototype-based Soft-labels and Test-Time Learning for Few-shot Object Detection
In recent years, Few-Shot Object Detection (FSOD) has gained widespread attention and made significant progress due to its ability to build models with a good generalization power using extremely limited annotated data. The fine-tuning based paradigm is currently dominating this field, where detectors are initially pre-trained on base classes with sufficient samples and then fine-tuned on novel ones with few samples, but the scarcity of labeled samples of novel classes greatly interferes precisely fitting their data distribution, thus hampering the performance. To address this issue, we propose a new framework for FSOD, namely Prototype-based Soft-labels and Test-Time Learning (PS-TTL). Specifically, we design a Test-Time Learning (TTL) module that employs a mean-teacher network for self-training to discover novel instances from test data, allowing detectors to learn better representations and classifiers for novel classes. Furthermore, we notice that even though relatively low-confidence pseudo-labels exhibit classification confusion, they still tend to recall foreground. We thus develop a Prototype-based Soft-labels (PS) strategy through assessing similarities between low-confidence pseudo-labels and category prototypes as soft-labels to unleash their potential, which substantially mitigates the constraints posed by few-shot samples. Extensive experiments on both the VOC and COCO benchmarks show that PS-TTL achieves the state-of-the-art, highlighting its effectiveness. The code and model are available at https://github.com/gaoyingjay/PS-TTL.
Metric3D: Towards Zero-shot Metric 3D Prediction from A Single Image
Reconstructing accurate 3D scenes from images is a long-standing vision task. Due to the ill-posedness of the single-image reconstruction problem, most well-established methods are built upon multi-view geometry. State-of-the-art (SOTA) monocular metric depth estimation methods can only handle a single camera model and are unable to perform mixed-data training due to the metric ambiguity. Meanwhile, SOTA monocular methods trained on large mixed datasets achieve zero-shot generalization by learning affine-invariant depths, which cannot recover real-world metrics. In this work, we show that the key to a zero-shot single-view metric depth model lies in the combination of large-scale data training and resolving the metric ambiguity from various camera models. We propose a canonical camera space transformation module, which explicitly addresses the ambiguity problems and can be effortlessly plugged into existing monocular models. Equipped with our module, monocular models can be stably trained with over 8 million images with thousands of camera models, resulting in zero-shot generalization to in-the-wild images with unseen camera settings. Experiments demonstrate SOTA performance of our method on 7 zero-shot benchmarks. Notably, our method won the championship in the 2nd Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge. Our method enables the accurate recovery of metric 3D structures on randomly collected internet images, paving the way for plausible single-image metrology. The potential benefits extend to downstream tasks, which can be significantly improved by simply plugging in our model. For example, our model relieves the scale drift issues of monocular-SLAM (Fig. 1), leading to high-quality metric scale dense mapping. The code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/Metric3D.
Self-Improving Robust Preference Optimization
Both online and offline RLHF methods such as PPO and DPO have been extremely successful in aligning AI with human preferences. Despite their success, the existing methods suffer from a fundamental problem that their optimal solution is highly task-dependent (i.e., not robust to out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks). Here we address this challenge by proposing Self-Improving Robust Preference Optimization SRPO, a practical and mathematically principled offline RLHF framework that is completely robust to the changes in the task. The key idea of SRPO is to cast the problem of learning from human preferences as a self-improvement process, which can be mathematically expressed in terms of a min-max objective that aims at joint optimization of self-improvement policy and the generative policy in an adversarial fashion. The solution for this optimization problem is independent of the training task and thus it is robust to its changes. We then show that this objective can be re-expressed in the form of a non-adversarial offline loss which can be optimized using standard supervised optimization techniques at scale without any need for reward model and online inference. We show the effectiveness of SRPO in terms of AI Win-Rate (WR) against human (GOLD) completions. In particular, when SRPO is evaluated on the OOD XSUM dataset, it outperforms the celebrated DPO by a clear margin of 15% after 5 self-revisions, achieving WR of 90%.
POINTS: Improving Your Vision-language Model with Affordable Strategies
In recent years, vision-language models have made significant strides, excelling in tasks like optical character recognition and geometric problem-solving. However, several critical issues remain: 1) Proprietary models often lack transparency about their architectures, while open-source models need more detailed ablations of their training strategies. 2) Pre-training data in open-source works is under-explored, with datasets added empirically, making the process cumbersome. 3) Fine-tuning often focuses on adding datasets, leading to diminishing returns. To address these issues, we propose the following contributions: 1) We trained a robust baseline model using the latest advancements in vision-language models, introducing effective improvements and conducting comprehensive ablation and validation for each technique. 2) Inspired by recent work on large language models, we filtered pre-training data using perplexity, selecting the lowest perplexity data for training. This approach allowed us to train on a curated 1M dataset, achieving competitive performance. 3) During visual instruction tuning, we used model soup on different datasets when adding more datasets yielded marginal improvements. These innovations resulted in a 9B parameter model that performs competitively with state-of-the-art models. Our strategies are efficient and lightweight, making them easily adoptable by the community.
Multi-Task Off-Policy Learning from Bandit Feedback
Many practical applications, such as recommender systems and learning to rank, involve solving multiple similar tasks. One example is learning of recommendation policies for users with similar movie preferences, where the users may still rank the individual movies slightly differently. Such tasks can be organized in a hierarchy, where similar tasks are related through a shared structure. In this work, we formulate this problem as a contextual off-policy optimization in a hierarchical graphical model from logged bandit feedback. To solve the problem, we propose a hierarchical off-policy optimization algorithm (HierOPO), which estimates the parameters of the hierarchical model and then acts pessimistically with respect to them. We instantiate HierOPO in linear Gaussian models, for which we also provide an efficient implementation and analysis. We prove per-task bounds on the suboptimality of the learned policies, which show a clear improvement over not using the hierarchical model. We also evaluate the policies empirically. Our theoretical and empirical results show a clear advantage of using the hierarchy over solving each task independently.
BootsTAP: Bootstrapped Training for Tracking-Any-Point
To endow models with greater understanding of physics and motion, it is useful to enable them to perceive how solid surfaces move and deform in real scenes. This can be formalized as Tracking-Any-Point (TAP), which requires the algorithm to be able to track any point corresponding to a solid surface in a video, potentially densely in space and time. Large-scale ground-truth training data for TAP is only available in simulation, which currently has limited variety of objects and motion. In this work, we demonstrate how large-scale, unlabeled, uncurated real-world data can improve a TAP model with minimal architectural changes, using a self-supervised student-teacher setup. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the TAP-Vid benchmark surpassing previous results by a wide margin: for example, TAP-Vid-DAVIS performance improves from 61.3% to 66.4%, and TAP-Vid-Kinetics from 57.2% to 61.5%.
Cyclic-Bootstrap Labeling for Weakly Supervised Object Detection
Recent progress in weakly supervised object detection is featured by a combination of multiple instance detection networks (MIDN) and ordinal online refinement. However, with only image-level annotation, MIDN inevitably assigns high scores to some unexpected region proposals when generating pseudo labels. These inaccurate high-scoring region proposals will mislead the training of subsequent refinement modules and thus hamper the detection performance. In this work, we explore how to ameliorate the quality of pseudo-labeling in MIDN. Formally, we devise Cyclic-Bootstrap Labeling (CBL), a novel weakly supervised object detection pipeline, which optimizes MIDN with rank information from a reliable teacher network. Specifically, we obtain this teacher network by introducing a weighted exponential moving average strategy to take advantage of various refinement modules. A novel class-specific ranking distillation algorithm is proposed to leverage the output of weighted ensembled teacher network for distilling MIDN with rank information. As a result, MIDN is guided to assign higher scores to accurate proposals among their neighboring ones, thus benefiting the subsequent pseudo labeling. Extensive experiments on the prevalent PASCAL VOC 2007 \& 2012 and COCO datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our CBL framework. Code will be available at https://github.com/Yinyf0804/WSOD-CBL/.
Universalizing Weak Supervision
Weak supervision (WS) frameworks are a popular way to bypass hand-labeling large datasets for training data-hungry models. These approaches synthesize multiple noisy but cheaply-acquired estimates of labels into a set of high-quality pseudolabels for downstream training. However, the synthesis technique is specific to a particular kind of label, such as binary labels or sequences, and each new label type requires manually designing a new synthesis algorithm. Instead, we propose a universal technique that enables weak supervision over any label type while still offering desirable properties, including practical flexibility, computational efficiency, and theoretical guarantees. We apply this technique to important problems previously not tackled by WS frameworks including learning to rank, regression, and learning in hyperbolic space. Theoretically, our synthesis approach produces a consistent estimators for learning some challenging but important generalizations of the exponential family model. Experimentally, we validate our framework and show improvement over baselines in diverse settings including real-world learning-to-rank and regression problems along with learning on hyperbolic manifolds.
UniPLV: Towards Label-Efficient Open-World 3D Scene Understanding by Regional Visual Language Supervision
We present UniPLV, a powerful framework that unifies point clouds, images and text in a single learning paradigm for open-world 3D scene understanding. UniPLV employs the image modal as a bridge to co-embed 3D points with pre-aligned images and text in a shared feature space without requiring carefully crafted point cloud text pairs. To accomplish multi-modal alignment, we propose two key strategies:(i) logit and feature distillation modules between images and point clouds, and (ii) a vison-point matching module is given to explicitly correct the misalignment caused by points to pixels projection. To further improve the performance of our unified framework, we adopt four task-specific losses and a two-stage training strategy. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by an average of 15.6% and 14.8% for semantic segmentation over Base-Annotated and Annotation-Free tasks, respectively. The code will be released later.
Two-shot Video Object Segmentation
Previous works on video object segmentation (VOS) are trained on densely annotated videos. Nevertheless, acquiring annotations in pixel level is expensive and time-consuming. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of training a satisfactory VOS model on sparsely annotated videos-we merely require two labeled frames per training video while the performance is sustained. We term this novel training paradigm as two-shot video object segmentation, or two-shot VOS for short. The underlying idea is to generate pseudo labels for unlabeled frames during training and to optimize the model on the combination of labeled and pseudo-labeled data. Our approach is extremely simple and can be applied to a majority of existing frameworks. We first pre-train a VOS model on sparsely annotated videos in a semi-supervised manner, with the first frame always being a labeled one. Then, we adopt the pre-trained VOS model to generate pseudo labels for all unlabeled frames, which are subsequently stored in a pseudo-label bank. Finally, we retrain a VOS model on both labeled and pseudo-labeled data without any restrictions on the first frame. For the first time, we present a general way to train VOS models on two-shot VOS datasets. By using 7.3% and 2.9% labeled data of YouTube-VOS and DAVIS benchmarks, our approach achieves comparable results in contrast to the counterparts trained on fully labeled set. Code and models are available at https://github.com/yk-pku/Two-shot-Video-Object-Segmentation.
NPC: Neural Point Characters from Video
High-fidelity human 3D models can now be learned directly from videos, typically by combining a template-based surface model with neural representations. However, obtaining a template surface requires expensive multi-view capture systems, laser scans, or strictly controlled conditions. Previous methods avoid using a template but rely on a costly or ill-posed mapping from observation to canonical space. We propose a hybrid point-based representation for reconstructing animatable characters that does not require an explicit surface model, while being generalizable to novel poses. For a given video, our method automatically produces an explicit set of 3D points representing approximate canonical geometry, and learns an articulated deformation model that produces pose-dependent point transformations. The points serve both as a scaffold for high-frequency neural features and an anchor for efficiently mapping between observation and canonical space. We demonstrate on established benchmarks that our representation overcomes limitations of prior work operating in either canonical or in observation space. Moreover, our automatic point extraction approach enables learning models of human and animal characters alike, matching the performance of the methods using rigged surface templates despite being more general. Project website: https://lemonatsu.github.io/npc/
PIN: Positional Insert Unlocks Object Localisation Abilities in VLMs
Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as Flamingo and GPT-4V, have shown immense potential by integrating large language models with vision systems. Nevertheless, these models face challenges in the fundamental computer vision task of object localisation, due to their training on multimodal data containing mostly captions without explicit spatial grounding. While it is possible to construct custom, supervised training pipelines with bounding box annotations that integrate with VLMs, these result in specialized and hard-to-scale models. In this paper, we aim to explore the limits of caption-based VLMs and instead propose to tackle the challenge in a simpler manner by i) keeping the weights of a caption-based VLM frozen and ii) not using any supervised detection data. To this end, we introduce an input-agnostic Positional Insert (PIN), a learnable spatial prompt, containing a minimal set of parameters that are slid inside the frozen VLM, unlocking object localisation capabilities. Our PIN module is trained with a simple next-token prediction task on synthetic data without requiring the introduction of new output heads. Our experiments demonstrate strong zero-shot localisation performances on a variety of images, including Pascal VOC, COCO, LVIS, and diverse images like paintings or cartoons.
Online Continual Learning Without the Storage Constraint
Online continual learning (OCL) research has primarily focused on mitigating catastrophic forgetting with fixed and limited storage allocation throughout the agent's lifetime. However, the growing affordability of data storage highlights a broad range of applications that do not adhere to these assumptions. In these cases, the primary concern lies in managing computational expenditures rather than storage. In this paper, we target such settings, investigating the online continual learning problem by relaxing storage constraints and emphasizing fixed, limited economical budget. We provide a simple algorithm that can compactly store and utilize the entirety of the incoming data stream under tiny computational budgets using a kNN classifier and universal pre-trained feature extractors. Our algorithm provides a consistency property attractive to continual learning: It will never forget past seen data. We set a new state of the art on two large-scale OCL datasets: Continual LOCalization (CLOC), which has 39M images over 712 classes, and Continual Google Landmarks V2 (CGLM), which has 580K images over 10,788 classes -- beating methods under far higher computational budgets than ours in terms of both reducing catastrophic forgetting of past data and quickly adapting to rapidly changing data streams. We provide code to reproduce our results at https://github.com/drimpossible/ACM.
2 OLMo 2 Furious
We present OLMo 2, the next generation of our fully open language models. OLMo 2 includes dense autoregressive models with improved architecture and training recipe, pretraining data mixtures, and instruction tuning recipes. Our modified model architecture and training recipe achieve both better training stability and improved per-token efficiency. Our updated pretraining data mixture introduces a new, specialized data mix called Dolmino Mix 1124, which significantly improves model capabilities across many downstream task benchmarks when introduced via late-stage curriculum training (i.e. specialized data during the annealing phase of pretraining). Finally, we incorporate best practices from T\"ulu 3 to develop OLMo 2-Instruct, focusing on permissive data and extending our final-stage reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). Our OLMo 2 base models sit at the Pareto frontier of performance to compute, often matching or outperforming open-weight only models like Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2.5 while using fewer FLOPs and with fully transparent training data, code, and recipe. Our fully open OLMo 2-Instruct models are competitive with or surpassing open-weight only models of comparable size, including Qwen 2.5, Llama 3.1 and Gemma 2. We release all OLMo 2 artifacts openly -- models at 7B and 13B scales, both pretrained and post-trained, including their full training data, training code and recipes, training logs and thousands of intermediate checkpoints. The final instruction model is available on the Ai2 Playground as a free research demo.
Point-DETR3D: Leveraging Imagery Data with Spatial Point Prior for Weakly Semi-supervised 3D Object Detection
Training high-accuracy 3D detectors necessitates massive labeled 3D annotations with 7 degree-of-freedom, which is laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, the form of point annotations is proposed to offer significant prospects for practical applications in 3D detection, which is not only more accessible and less expensive but also provides strong spatial information for object localization. In this paper, we empirically discover that it is non-trivial to merely adapt Point-DETR to its 3D form, encountering two main bottlenecks: 1) it fails to encode strong 3D prior into the model, and 2) it generates low-quality pseudo labels in distant regions due to the extreme sparsity of LiDAR points. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Point-DETR3D, a teacher-student framework for weakly semi-supervised 3D detection, designed to fully capitalize on point-wise supervision within a constrained instance-wise annotation budget.Different from Point-DETR which encodes 3D positional information solely through a point encoder, we propose an explicit positional query initialization strategy to enhance the positional prior. Considering the low quality of pseudo labels at distant regions produced by the teacher model, we enhance the detector's perception by incorporating dense imagery data through a novel Cross-Modal Deformable RoI Fusion (D-RoI).Moreover, an innovative point-guided self-supervised learning technique is proposed to allow for fully exploiting point priors, even in student models.Extensive experiments on representative nuScenes dataset demonstrate our Point-DETR3D obtains significant improvements compared to previous works. Notably, with only 5% of labeled data, Point-DETR3D achieves over 90% performance of its fully supervised counterpart.
OP-Align: Object-level and Part-level Alignment for Self-supervised Category-level Articulated Object Pose Estimation
Category-level articulated object pose estimation focuses on the pose estimation of unknown articulated objects within known categories. Despite its significance, this task remains challenging due to the varying shapes and poses of objects, expensive dataset annotation costs, and complex real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised approach that leverages a single-frame point cloud to solve this task. Our model consistently generates reconstruction with a canonical pose and joint state for the entire input object, and it estimates object-level poses that reduce overall pose variance and part-level poses that align each part of the input with its corresponding part of the reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous self-supervised methods and is comparable to the state-of-the-art supervised methods. To assess the performance of our model in real-world scenarios, we also introduce a new real-world articulated object benchmark dataset.
UniPose: Detecting Any Keypoints
This work proposes a unified framework called UniPose to detect keypoints of any articulated (e.g., human and animal), rigid, and soft objects via visual or textual prompts for fine-grained vision understanding and manipulation. Keypoint is a structure-aware, pixel-level, and compact representation of any object, especially articulated objects. Existing fine-grained promptable tasks mainly focus on object instance detection and segmentation but often fail to identify fine-grained granularity and structured information of image and instance, such as eyes, leg, paw, etc. Meanwhile, prompt-based keypoint detection is still under-explored. To bridge the gap, we make the first attempt to develop an end-to-end prompt-based keypoint detection framework called UniPose to detect keypoints of any objects. As keypoint detection tasks are unified in this framework, we can leverage 13 keypoint detection datasets with 338 keypoints across 1,237 categories over 400K instances to train a generic keypoint detection model. UniPose can effectively align text-to-keypoint and image-to-keypoint due to the mutual enhancement of textual and visual prompts based on the cross-modality contrastive learning optimization objectives. Our experimental results show that UniPose has strong fine-grained localization and generalization abilities across image styles, categories, and poses. Based on UniPose as a generalist keypoint detector, we hope it could serve fine-grained visual perception, understanding, and generation.