mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Contrastive Vision-Language Pre-training with Limited Resources
Authors: Boyan Zhou, Yu Guo, Weidong Yin, Hao Wu, Osamu Yoshie, Yubo Chen Quan Cui
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Pioneering dual-encoder pre-training works (e.g., CLIP and ALIGN) have revealed the potential of aligning multi-modal representations with contrastive learning. However, these works require a tremendous amount of data and computational resources (e.g., billion-level web data and hundreds of GPUs), which prevent researchers with limited resources from reproduction and further exploration. To this end, we propose a stack of novel methods, which significantly cut down the heavy resource dependency and allow us to conduct dual-encoder multi-modal representation alignment with limited resources. Besides, we provide a reproducible baseline of competitive results, namely ZeroVL, with only 14M publicly accessible academic datasets and 8 V100 GPUs. Additionally, we collect 100M web data for pre-training, and achieve comparable or superior results than state-of-the-art methods, further proving the effectiveness of our methods on large-scale data. We hope that this work will provide useful data points and experience for future research in contrastive vision-language pre-training. Code is available at https://github.com/zerovl/ZeroVL."
Learning Linguistic Association towards Efficient Text-Video Retrieval
Authors: Shuhui Wang, Junbao Zhuo, Xinzhe Han, Qingming Huang Sheng Fang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Text-video retrieval attracts growing attention recently. A dominant approach is to learn a common space for aligning two modalities. However, video deliver richer content than text in general situations and captions usually miss certain events or details in the video. The information imbalance between two modalities makes it difficult to align their representations. In this paper, we propose a general framework, LINguistic ASsociation (LINAS), which utilizes the complementarity between captions corresponding to the same video. Concretely, we first train a teacher model taking extra relevant captions as inputs, which can aggregate language semantics for obtaining more comprehensive text representations. Since the additional captions are inaccessible during inference, Knowledge Distillation is employed to train a student model with a single caption as input. We further propose Adaptive Distillation strategy, which allows the student model to adaptively learn the knowledge from the teacher model. This strategy also suppresses the spurious relations introduced during the linguistic association. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LINAS with various baseline architectures on benchmark datasets."
ASSISTER: Assistive Navigation via Conditional Instruction Generation
Authors: Zhongkai Shangguan, Jimuyang Zhang, Gilad Bar, Matthew Boyd, Eshed Ohn-Bar Zanming Huang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We introduce a novel vision-and-language navigation (VLN) task of learning to provide real-time guidance to a blind follower situated in complex dynamic navigation scenarios. Towards exploring real-time information needs and fundamental challenges in our novel modeling task, we first collect a multi-modal real-world benchmark with in-situ Orientation and Mobility (O&M) instructional guidance. Subsequently, we leverage the real-world study to inform the design of a larger-scale simulation benchmark, thus enabling comprehensive analysis of limitations in current VLN models. Motivated by how sighted O&M guides seamlessly and safely support the awareness of individuals with visual impairments when collaborating on navigation tasks, we present ASSISTER, an imitation-learned agent that can embody such effective guidance. The proposed assistive VLN agent is conditioned on navigational goals and commands for generating instructional sentences that are coherent with the surrounding visual scene, while also carefully accounting for the immediate assistive navigation task. Altogether, our introduced evaluation and training framework takes a step towards scalable development of the next generation of seamless, human-like assistive agents."
X-DETR: A Versatile Architecture for Instance-Wise Vision-Language Tasks
Authors: Gukyeong Kwon, Avinash Ravichandran, Erhan Bas, Zhuowen Tu, Rahul Bhotika, Stefano Soatto Zhaowei Cai
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "In this paper, we study the challenging instance-wise vision-language tasks, where the free-form language is required to align with the objects instead of the whole image. To address these tasks, we propose X-DETR, whose architecture has three major components: an object detector, a language encoder, and vision-language alignment. The vision and language streams are independent until the end and they are aligned using an efficient dot-product operation. The whole network is trained end-to-end, such that the detector is optimized for the vision-language tasks instead of an off-the-shelf component. To overcome the limited size of paired object-language annotations, we leverage other weak types of supervision to expand the knowledge coverage. This simple yet effective architecture of X-DETR shows good accuracy and fast speeds for multiple instance-wise vision-language tasks, e.g., 16.4 AP on LVIS detection of 1.2K categories at 20 frames per second without using any LVIS annotation during training. The code is available at https://github.com/amazon-research/cross-modal-detr."
Learning Disentanglement with Decoupled Labels for Vision-Language Navigation
Authors: Xingping Dong, Salman Khan, Jianbing Shen Wenhao Cheng
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to follow complex natural language instructions and perceive the visual environment for real-world navigation. Intuitively, we find that instruction disentanglement for each viewpoint along the agent’s path is critical for accurate navigation. However, most methods only utilize the whole complex instruction or inaccurate sub-instructions due to the lack of accurate disentanglement as an intermediate supervision stage. To address this problem, we propose a new Disentanglement framework with Decoupled Labels (DDL) for VLN. Firstly, we manually extend the benchmark dataset Room-to-Room with landmark- and action-aware labels in order to provide fine-grained information for each viewpoint. Furthermore, to enhance the generalization ability, we propose a Decoupled Label Speaker module to generate pseudo-labels for augmented data and reinforcement training. To fully use the proposed fine-grained labels, we design a Disentangled Decoding Module to guide discriminative feature extraction and help alignment of multi-modalities. To reveal the generality of our proposed method, we apply it on a LSTM-based model and two recent Transformer-based models. Extensive experiments on two VLN benchmarks (i.e., R2R and R4R) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods."
Switch-BERT: Learning to Model Multimodal Interactions by Switching Attention and Input
Authors: Kaisheng Yao, Wei Chu Qingpei Guo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "The ability to model intra-modal and inter-modal interactions is fundamental in multimodal machine learning. The current state-of-the-art models usually adopt deep learning models with fixed structures. They can achieve exceptional performances on specific tasks, but face a particularly challenging problem of modality mismatch because of diversity of input modalities and their fixed structures. In this paper, we present Switch-BERT for joint vision and language representation learning to address this problem. Switch-BERT extends BERT architecture by introducing learnable layer-wise and cross-layer interactions. It learns to optimize attention from a set of attention modes representing these interactions. One specific property of the model is that it learns to attend outputs from various depths, therefore mitigates the modality mismatch problem. We present extensive experiments on visual question answering, image-text retrieval and referring expression comprehension experiments. Results confirm that, whereas alternative architectures including ViLBERT and UNITER may excel in particular tasks, Switch-BERT can consistently achieve better or comparable performances than the current state-of-the-art models in these tasks. Ablation studies indicate that the proposed model achieves superior performances due to its ability in learning task-specific multimodal interactions."
Word-Level Fine-Grained Story Visualization
Authors: Bowen Li
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Story visualization aims to generate a sequence of images to narrate each sentence in a multi-sentence story with a global consistency across dynamic scenes and characters. Current works still struggle with output images’ quality and consistency, and rely on additional semantic information or auxiliary captioning networks. To address these challenges, we first introduce a new sentence representation, which incorporates word information from all story sentences to mitigate the inconsistency problem. Then, we propose a new discriminator with fusion features and further extend the spatial attention to improve image quality and story consistency. Extensive experiments on different datasets and human evaluation demonstrate the superior performance of our approach, compared to state-of-the-art methods, neither using segmentation masks nor auxiliary captioning networks."
Unifying Event Detection and Captioning as Sequence Generation via Pre-training
Authors: Yuqing Song, Qin Jin Qi Zhang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Dense video captioning aims to generate corresponding text descriptions for a series of events in the untrimmed video, which can be divided into two sub-tasks, event detection and event captioning. Unlike previous works that tackle the two sub-tasks separately, recent works have focused on enhancing the inter-task association between the two sub-tasks. However, designing inter-task interactions for event detection and captioning is not trivial due to the large differences in their task specific solutions. Besides, previous event detection methods normally ignore temporal dependencies between events, leading to event redundancy or inconsistency problems. To tackle above the two defects, in this paper, we define event detection as a sequence generation task and propose a unified pre-training and fine-tuning framework to naturally enhance the inter-task association between event detection and captioning. Since the model predicts each event with previous events as context, the inter-dependency between events is fully exploited and thus our model can detect more diverse and consistent events in the video. Experiments on the ActivityNet dataset show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, and can be further boosted when pre-trained on extra large-scale video-text data. Code is available at https://github.com/QiQAng/UEDVC."
Multimodal Transformer with Variable-Length Memory for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Yi Jiang, Jianfei Cai, Lizhen Qu, Gholamreza Haffari, Zehuan Yuan Chuang Lin
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a task that an agent is required to follow a language instruction to navigate to the goal position, which relies on the ongoing interactions with the environment during moving. Recent Transformer-based VLN methods have made great progress benefiting from the direct connections between visual observations and language instructions via the multimodal cross-attention mechanism. However, these methods usually represent temporal context as a fixed-length vector by using an LSTM decoder or using manually designed hidden states to build a recurrent Transformer. Considering a single fixed-length vector is often insufficient to capture long-term temporal context, in this paper, we introduce Multimodal Transformer with Variable-length Memory (MTVM) for visually-grounded natural language navigation by modeling the temporal context explicitly. Specifically, MTVM enables the agent to keep track of the navigation trajectory by directly storing activations in the previous time step in a memory bank. To further boost the performance, we propose a memory-aware consistency loss to help learn a better joint representation of temporal context with random masked instructions. We evaluate MTVM on popular R2R and CVDN datasets. Our model improves Success Rate on R2R test set by 2% and reduces Goal Process by 1.5m on CVDN test set."
Fine-Grained Visual Entailment
Authors: Yipeng Zhang, Shih-Fu Chang Christopher Thomas
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Visual entailment is a recently proposed multimodal reasoning task where the goal is to predict the logical relationship of a piece of text to an image. In this paper, we propose an extension of this task, where the goal is to predict the logical relationship of fine-grained knowledge elements within a piece of text to an image. Unlike prior work, our method is inherently explainable and makes logical predictions at different levels of granularity. Because we lack fine-grained labels to train our method, we propose a novel multi-instance learning approach which learns a fine-grained labeling using only sample-level supervision. We also impose novel semantic structural constraints which ensure that fine-grained predictions are internally semantically consistent. We evaluate our method on a new dataset of manually annotated knowledge elements and show that our method achieves 68.18% accuracy at this challenging task while significantly outperforming several strong baselines. Finally, we present extensive qualitative results illustrating our method’s predictions and the visual evidence our method relied on. Our code and annotated dataset can be found at the enclosed link."
Bottom Up Top down Detection Transformers for Language Grounding in Images and Point Clouds
Authors: Nikolaos Gkanatsios, Ishita Mediratta, Katerina Fragkiadaki Ayush Jain
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Most models tasked to ground referential utterances in 2D and 3D scenes learn to select the referred object from a pool of object proposals provided by a pre-trained detector. This is limiting because an utterance may refer to visual entities at various levels of granularity, such as the chair, the leg of the chair, or the tip of the front leg of the chair, which may be missed by the detector. We propose a language grounding model that attends on the referential utterance and on the object proposal pool computed from a pre-trained detector to decode referenced objects with a detection head, without selecting them from the pool. In this way, it is helped by powerful pre-trained object detectors without being restricted by their misses. We call our model Bottom Up Top Down DEtection TRansformers (BUTD-DETR) because it uses both language guidance (top down) and objectness guidance (bottom-up) to ground referential utterances in images and point clouds. Moreover, BUTD-DETR casts object detection as referential grounding and uses object labels as language prompts to be grounded in the visual scene, augmenting supervision for the referential grounding task in this way. The proposed model sets a new state-of-the-art across popular 3D language grounding benchmarks with significant performance gains over previous 3D approaches (12.6% on SR3D, 11.6% on NR3D and 6.3% on ScanRefer). When applied in 2D images, it performs on par with the previous state of the art. We ablate the design choices of our model and quantify their contribution to performance. Our code and checkpoints can be found at the project website https://butd-detr.github.io"
New Datasets and Models for Contextual Reasoning in Visual Dialog
Authors: Ming Jiang, Qi Zhao Yifeng Zhang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Visual Dialog (VD) is a vision-language task that requires AI systems to maintain a natural question-answering dialog about visual contents. Using the dialog history as contexts, VD models have achieved promising performance on public benchmarks. However, prior VD datasets do not provide sufficient contextually dependent questions that require knowledge from the dialog history to answer. As a result, advanced VQA models can still perform well without considering the dialog context. In this work, we focus on developing new datasets and models to highlight the role of contextual reasoning in VD. We define a hierarchy of contextual patterns to represent and organize the dialog context, enabling quantitative analyses of contextual dependencies and designs of new VD datasets and models. We then develop two new datasets, namely CLEVR-VD and GQA-VD, offering context-rich dialogs over synthetic and realistic images, respectively. Furthermore, we propose a novel neural module network method featuring contextual reasoning in VD. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed datasets and method with experimental results and model comparisons across different datasets. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SuperJohnZhang/ContextVD."
VisageSynTalk: Unseen Speaker Video-to-Speech Synthesis via Speech-Visage Feature Selection
Authors: Minsu Kim, Yong Man Ro Joanna Hong
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "The goal of this work is to reconstruct speech from a silent talking face video. Recent studies have shown impressive performance on synthesizing speech from silent talking face videos. However, they have not explicitly considered on varying identity characteristics of different speakers, which place a challenge in the video-to-speech synthesis, and this becomes more critical in unseen-speaker settings. Our approach is to separate the speech content and the visage-style from a given silent talking face video. By guiding the model to independently focus on modeling the two representations, we can obtain the speech of high intelligibility from the model even when the input video of an unseen subject is given. To this end, we introduce speech-visage selection that separates the speech content and the speaker identity from the visual features of the input video. The disentangled representations are jointly incorporated to synthesize speech through visage-style based synthesizer which generates speech by coating the visage-styles while maintaining the speech content. Thus, the proposed framework brings the advantage of synthesizing the speech containing the right content even with the silent talking face video of an unseen subject. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on the GRID, TCD-TIMIT volunteer, and LRW datasets."
Classification-Regression for Chart Comprehension
Authors: Rami Ben-Ari, Dani Lischinski Matan Levy
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Chart question answering (CQA) is a task used for assessing chart comprehension, which is fundamentally different from understanding natural images. CQA requires analyzing the relationships between the textual and the visual components of a chart, in order to answer general questions or infer numerical values. Most existing CQA datasets and models are based on simplifying assumptions that often enable surpassing human performance. In this work, we address this outcome and propose a new model that jointly learns classification and regression. Our language-vision setup uses co-attention transformers to capture the complex real-world interactions between the question and the textual elements. We validate our design with extensive experiments on the realistic PlotQA dataset, outperforming previous approaches by a large margin, while showing competitive performance on FigureQA. Our model is particularly well suited for realistic questions with out-of-vocabulary answers that require regression."
AssistQ: Affordance-Centric Question-Driven Task Completion for Egocentric Assistant
Authors: Joya Chen, You Wu, Stan Weixian Lei, Dongxing Mao, Difei Gao, Mike Zheng Shou Benita Wong
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: A long-standing goal of intelligent assistants such as AR glasses/robots has been to assist users in affordance-centric real-world scenarios, such as "how can I run the microwave for 1 minute?”. However, there is still no clear task definition and suitable benchmarks. In this paper, we define a new task called Affordance-centric Question-driven Task Completion, where the AI assistant should learn from instructional videos to provide step-by-step help in the user’s view. To support the task, we constructed AssistQ, a new dataset comprising 531 question-answer samples from 100 newly filmed instructional videos. We also developed a novel Question-to-Actions (Q2A) model to address the AQTC task and validate it on the AssistQ dataset. The results show that our model significantly outperforms several VQA-related baselines while still having large room for improvement. We expect our task and dataset to advance Egocentric AI Assistant’s development. Our project page is available at: https://showlab.github.io/assistq/.
FindIt: Generalized Localization with Natural Language Queries
Authors: Fred Bertsch, Wei Li, AJ Piergiovanni, Mohammad Saffar, Anelia Angelova Weicheng Kuo
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We propose FindIt, a simple and versatile framework that unifies a variety of visual grounding and localization tasks including referring expression comprehension, text-based localization, and object detection. Key to our architecture is an efficient multi-scale fusion module that unifies the disparate localization requirements across the tasks. In addition, we discover that a standard object detector is surprisingly effective in unifying these tasks without a need for task-specific design, losses, or pre-computed detections. Our end-to-end trainable framework responds flexibly and accurately to a wide range of referring expression, localization or detection queries for zero, one, or multiple objects. Jointly trained on these tasks, FindIt outperforms the state of the art on both referring expression and text-based localization, and shows competitive performance on object detection. Finally, FindIt generalizes better to out-of-distribution data and novel categories compared to strong single-task baselines. All of these are accomplished by a single, unified and efficient model. The code will be released at: https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/findit."
UniTAB: Unifying Text and Box Outputs for Grounded Vision-Language Modeling
Authors: Zhe Gan, Jianfeng Wang, Xiaowei Hu, Faisal Ahmed, Zicheng Liu, Yumao Lu, Lijuan Wang Zhengyuan Yang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We propose UniTAB that Unifies Text And Box outputs for grounded vision-language (VL) modeling. Grounded VL tasks such as grounded captioning require the model to generate a text description and align predicted words with object regions. To achieve this, models must generate desired text and box outputs together, and meanwhile indicate the alignments between words and boxes. In contrast to existing solutions that use multiple separate modules for different outputs, UniTAB represents both text and box outputs with a shared token sequence, and introduces a special  token to naturally indicate word-box alignments in the sequence. UniTAB thus could provide a more comprehensive and interpretable image description, by freely grounding generated words to object regions. On grounded captioning, UniTAB presents a simpler solution with a single output head, and significantly outperforms state of the art in both grounding and captioning evaluations. On general VL tasks that have different desired output formats (i.e., text, box, or their combination), UniTAB with a single network achieves better or comparable performance than task-specific state of the art. Experiments cover 7 VL benchmarks, including grounded captioning, visual grounding, image captioning, and visual question answering. Furthermore, UniTAB’s unified multi-task network and the task-agnostic output sequence design make the model parameter efficient and generalizable to new tasks."
Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels
Authors: Xiuye Gu, Yin Cui, Tsung-Yi Lin Golnaz Ghiasi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We design an open-vocabulary image segmentation model to organize an image into meaningful regions indicated by arbitrary texts. Recent works (CLIP and ALIGN), despite attaining impressive open-vocabulary classification accuracy with image-level caption labels, are unable to segment visual concepts with pixels. We argue that these models miss an important step of visual grouping, which organizes pixels into groups before learning visual-semantic alignments. We propose OpenSeg to address the above issue while still making use of scalable image-level supervision of captions. First, it learns to propose segmentation masks for possible organizations. Then it learns visual-semantic alignments by aligning each word in a caption to one or a few predicted masks. We find the mask representations are the key to support learning image segmentation from captions, making it possible to scale up the dataset and vocabulary sizes. OpenSeg significantly outperforms the recent open-vocabulary method of LSeg by +19.9 mIoU on PASCAL dataset, thanks to its scalability."
The Abduction of Sherlock Holmes: A Dataset for Visual Abductive Reasoning
Authors: Jena D. Hwang, Jae Sung Park, Rowan Zellers, Chandra Bhagavatula, Anna Rohrbach, Kate Saenko, Yejin Choi Jack Hessel
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Humans have remarkable capacity to reason abductively and hypothesize about what lies beyond the literal content of an image. By identifying concrete visual clues scattered throughout a scene, we almost can’t help but draw probable inferences beyond the literal scene based on our everyday experience and knowledge about the world. For example, if we see a “20 mph” sign alongside a road, we might assume the street sits in a residential area (rather than on a highway), even if no houses are pictured. Can machines perform similar visual reasoning? We present Sherlock, an annotated corpus of 103K images for testing machine capacity for abductive reasoning beyond literal image contents. We adopt a free-viewing paradigm: participants first observe and identify salient clues within images (e.g., objects, actions) and then provide a plausible inference about the scene, given the clue. In total, we collect 363K (clue, inference) pairs, which form a first-of-its-kind abductive visual reasoning dataset. Using our corpus, we test three complementary axes of abductive reasoning. We evaluate the capacity of models to: i) retrieve relevant inferences from a large candidate corpus; ii) localize evidence for inferences via bounding boxes, and iii) compare plausible inferences to match human judgments on a newly-collected diagnostic corpus of 19K Likert-scale judgments. While we find that fine-tuning CLIP-RN50x64 with a multitask objective outperforms strong baselines, significant headroom exists between model performance and human agreement. Data, models, and leaderboard available at http://visualabduction.com/."
Speaker-Adaptive Lip Reading with User-Dependent Padding
Authors: Hyunjun Kim, Yong Man Ro Minsu Kim
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Lip reading aims to predict speech based on lip movements alone. As it focuses on visual information to model the speech, its performance is inherently sensitive to personal lip appearances and movements. This makes the lip reading models show degraded performance when they are applied to unseen speakers due to the mismatch between training and testing conditions. Speaker adaptation technique aims to reduce this mismatch between train and test speakers, thus guiding a trained model to focus on modeling the speech content without being intervened by the speaker variations. In contrast to the efforts made in audio-based speech recognition for decades, the speaker adaptation methods have not well been studied in lip reading. In this paper, to remedy the performance degradation of lip reading model on unseen speakers, we propose a speaker-adaptive lip reading method, namely user-dependent padding. The user-dependent padding is a speaker-specific input that can participate in the visual feature extraction stage of a pre-trained lip reading model. Therefore, the lip appearances and movements information of different speakers can be considered during the visual feature encoding, adaptively for individual speakers. Moreover, the proposed method does not need 1) any additional layers, 2) to modify the learned weights of the pre-trained model, and 3) the speaker label of train data used during pre-train. It can directly adapt to unseen speakers by learning the user-dependent padding only, in a supervised or unsupervised manner. Finally, to alleviate the speaker information insufficiency in public lip reading databases, we label the speaker of a well-known audio-visual database, LRW, and design an unseen-speaker lip reading scenario named LRW-ID. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on sentence- and word-level lip reading, and we show it can further improve the performance of a well-trained model with large speaker variations."
TISE: Bag of Metrics for Text-to-Image Synthesis Evaluation
Authors: Rang Nguyen, Binh-Son Hua Tan M. Dinh
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "In this paper, we conduct a study on the state-of-the-art methods for text-to-image synthesis and propose a framework to evaluate these methods. We consider syntheses where an image contains a single or multiple objects. Our study outlines several issues in the current evaluation pipeline: (i) for image quality assessment, a commonly used metric, e.g., Inception Score (IS), is often either miscalibrated for the single-object case or misused for the multi-object case; (ii) for text relevance and object accuracy assessment, there is an overfitting phenomenon in the existing R-precision (RP) and Semantic Object Accuracy (SOA) metrics, respectively; (iii) for multi-object case, many vital factors for evaluation, e.g., object fidelity, positional alignment, counting alignment, are largely dismissed; (iv) the ranking of the methods based on current metrics is highly inconsistent with real images. To overcome these issues, we propose a combined set of existing and new metrics to systematically evaluate the methods. For existing metrics, we offer an improved version of IS named IS* by using temperature scaling to calibrate the confidence of the classifier used by IS; we also propose a solution to mitigate the overfitting issues of RP and SOA. For new metrics, we develop counting alignment, positional alignment, object-centric IS, and object-centric FID metrics for evaluating the multi-object case. We show that benchmarking with our bag of metrics results in a highly consistent ranking among existing methods that is well-aligned with human evaluation. As a by-product, we create AttnGAN++, a simple but strong baseline for the benchmark by stabilizing the training of AttnGAN using spectral normalization. We also release our toolbox, so-called TISE, for advocating fair and consistent evaluation of text-to-image models."
SemAug: Semantically Meaningful Image Augmentations for Object Detection through Language Grounding
Authors: Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi, Yong Zhang Morgan Heisler
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Data augmentation is an essential technique in improving the generalization of deep neural networks. The majority of existing image-domain augmentations either rely on geometric and structural transformations, or apply different kinds of photometric distortions. In this paper, we propose an effective technique for image augmentation by injecting contextually meaningful knowledge into the scenes. Our method of semantically meaningful image augmentation for object detection via language grounding, SemAug, starts by calculating semantically appropriate new objects that can be placed into relevant locations in the image (the what and where problems). Then it embeds these objects into their relevant target locations, thereby promoting diversity of object instance distribution. Our method allows for introducing new object instances and categories that may not even exist in the training set. Furthermore, it does not require the additional overhead of training a context network, so it can be easily added to existing architectures. Our comprehensive set of evaluations showed that the proposed method is very effective in improving the generalization, while the overhead is negligible. In particular, for a wide range of model architectures, our method achieved 2-4% and 1-2% mAP improvements for the task of object detection on the Pascal VOC and COCO datasets, respectively. Code is available as supplementary."
Referring Object Manipulation of Natural Images with Conditional Classifier-Free Guidance
Authors: Myungsub Choi
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "We introduce the problem of referring object manipulation (ROM), which aims to generate photo-realistic image edits regarding two textual descriptions: 1) a text referring to an object in the input image and 2) a text describing how to manipulate the referred object. A successful ROM model would enable users to simply use natural language to manipulate images, removing the need for learning sophisticated image editing software. We present one of the first approach to address this challenging multi-modal problem by combining a referring image segmentation method with a text-guided diffusion model. Specifically, we propose a conditional classifier-free guidance scheme to better guide the diffusion process along the direction from the referring expression to the target prompt. In addition, we provide a new localized ranking method and further improvements to make the generated edits more robust. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can serve as a simple but strong baseline for referring object manipulation. Also, comparisons with several baseline text-guided diffusion models demonstrate the effectiveness of our conditional classifier-free guidance technique."
NewsStories: Illustrating Articles with Visual Summaries
Authors: Bryan A. Plummer, Kate Saenko, JP Lewis, Avneesh Sud, Thomas Leung Reuben Tan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Recent self-supervised approaches have used large-scale image-text datasets to learn powerful representations that transfer to many tasks without finetuning. These methods often assume that there is one-to-one correspondence between its images and their (short) captions. However, many tasks require reasoning about multiple images and long text narratives, such as describing news articles with visual summaries. Thus, we explore a novel setting where the goal is to learn a self-supervised visual-language representation that is robust to varying text length and the number of images. In addition, unlike prior work which assumed captions have a literal relation to the image, we assume images only contain loose illustrative correspondence with the text. To explore this problem, we introduce a large-scale multimodal dataset containing over 31M articles, 22M images and 1M videos. We show that state-of-the-art image-text alignment methods are not robust to longer narratives with multiple images. Finally, we introduce an intuitive baseline that outperforms these methods on zero-shot image-set retrieval by 10% on the GoodNews dataset."
Webly Supervised Concept Expansion for General Purpose Vision Models
Authors: Christopher Clark, Tanmay Gupta, Eric Kolve, Derek Hoiem, Aniruddha Kembhavi Amita Kamath
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "General purpose vision (GPV) systems are models that are designed to solve a wide array of visual tasks without requiring architectural changes. Today, GPVs primarily learn both skills and concepts from large fully supervised datasets. Scaling GPVs to tens of thousands of concepts by acquiring data to learn each concept for every skill quickly becomes prohibitive. This work presents an effective and inexpensive alternative: learn skills from supervised datasets, learn concepts from web image search, and leverage a key characteristic of GPVs -- the ability to transfer visual knowledge across skills. We use a dataset of 1M+ images spanning 10k+ visual concepts to demonstrate webly-supervised concept expansion for two existing GPVs (GPV-1 and VL-T5) on 3 benchmarks - 5 COCO based datasets (80 primary concepts), a newly curated series of 5 datasets based on the OpenImages and VisualGenome repositories ( 500 concepts) and the Web-derived dataset (10k+ concepts). We also propose a new architecture, GPV-2 that supports a variety of tasks -- from vision tasks like classification and localization to vision+language tasks like QA and captioning to more niche ones like human-object interaction detection. GPV-2 benefits hugely from web data and outperforms GPV-1 and VL-T5 across these benchmarks."
FedVLN: Privacy-Preserving Federated Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Xin Eric Wang Kaiwen Zhou
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Data privacy is a central problem for embodied agents that can perceive the environment, communicate with humans, and act in the real world. While helping humans complete tasks, the agent may observe and process sensitive information of users, such as house environments, human activities, etc. In this work, we introduce privacy-preserving embodied agent learning for the task of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN), where an embodied agent navigates house environments by following natural language instructions. We view each house environment as a local client, which shares nothing other than local updates with the cloud server and other clients, and propose a novel federated vision-and-language navigation (FedVLN) framework to protect data privacy during both training and pre-exploration. Particularly, we propose a decentralized training strategy to limit the data of each client to its local model training and a federated pre-exploration method to do partial model aggregation to improve model generalizability to unseen environments. Extensive results on R2R and RxR datasets show that under our FedVLN framework, decentralized VLN models achieve comparable results with centralized training while protecting seen environment privacy, and federated pre-exploration significantly outperforms centralized pre-exploration while preserving unseen environment privacy. Code is available at https://github.com/eric-ai-lab/FedVLN."
CODER: Coupled Diversity-Sensitive Momentum Contrastive Learning for Image-Text Retrieval
Authors: Dongliang He, Wenhao Wu, Boyang Xia, Min Yang, Fu Li, Yunlong Yu, Zhong Ji, Errui Ding, Jingdong Wang Haoran Wang
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Image-Text Retrieval (ITR) is challenging in bridging visual and lingual modalities. Contrastive learning has been adopted by most prior arts. Except for limited amount of negative image-text pairs, the capability of constrastive learning is restricted by manually weighting negative pairs as well as unawareness of external knowledge. In this paper, we propose our novel Coupled Diversity-Sensitive Momentum Constrastive Learning (CODER) for improving cross-modal representation. Firstly, a novel diversity-sensitive contrastive learning (DCL) architecture is invented. We introduce dynamic dictionaries for both modalities to enlarge the scale of image-text pairs, and diversity-sensitiveness is achieved by adaptive negative pair weighting. Furthermore, two branches are designed in CODER. One learns instance-level embeddings from image/text, and it also generates pseudo online clustering labels for its input image/text based on their embeddings. Meanwhile, the other branch learns to query from commonsense knowledge graph to form concept-level descriptors for both modalities. Afterwards, both branches leverage DCL to align the cross-modal embedding spaces while an extra pseudo clustering label prediction loss is utilized to promote concept-level representation learning for the second branch. Extensive experiments conducted on two popular benchmarks, i.e. MSCOCO and Flicker30K, validate CODER remarkably outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches."
Language-Driven Artistic Style Transfer
Authors: Xin Eric Wang, William Yang Wang Tsu-Jui Fu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Despite having promising results, style transfer, which requires preparing style images in advance, may result in lack of creativity and accessibility. Following human instruction, on the other hand, is the most natural way to perform artistic style transfer that can significantly improve controllability for visual effect applications. We introduce a new task---language-driven artistic style transfer (LDAST)---to manipulate the style of a content image, guided by a text. We propose contrastive language visual artist (CLVA) that learns to extract visual semantics from style instructions and accomplish LDAST by the patch-wise style discriminator. The discriminator considers the correlation between language and patches of style images or transferred results to jointly embed style instructions. CLVA further compares contrastive pairs of content image and style instruction to improve the mutual relativeness. The results from the same content image can preserve consistent content structures. Besides, they should present analogous style patterns from style instructions that contain similar visual semantics. The experiments show that our CLVA is effective and achieves superb transferred results on LDAST."
Single-Stream Multi-level Alignment for Vision-Language Pretraining
Authors: Vijay Kumar B G, Xiang Yu, Samuel Schulter, Manmohan Chandraker, Yun Fu Zaid Khan
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "Self-supervised vision-language pretraining from pure images and text with a contrastive loss is effective, but ignores fine-grained alignment due to a dual-stream architecture that aligns image and text representations only on a global level. Earlier, supervised, non-contrastive methods were capable of finer-grained alignment, but required dense annotations that were not scalable. We propose a single stream architecture that aligns images and language at multiple levels: global, fine-grained patch-token, and conceptual/semantic, using two novel tasks: symmetric cross-modality reconstruction (XMM) and a pseudo-labeled key word prediction (PSL). In XMM, we mask input tokens from one modality and use cross-modal information to reconstruct the masked token, thus improving fine-grained alignment between the two modalities. In PSL, we use attention to select keywords in a caption, use a momentum encoder to recommend other important keywords that are missing from the caption but represented in the image, and then train the visual encoder to predict the presence of those keywords, helping it learn semantic concepts that are essential for grounding a textual token to an image region. We demonstrate competitive performance and improved data efficiency on image-text retrieval, grounding, visual question answering/reasoning against larger models and models trained on more data. Code and models available at zaidkhan.me/SIMLA."
Most and Least Retrievable Images in Visual-Language Query Systems
Authors: Rui Ning, Jiang Li, Chunsheng Xin, Hongyi Wu Liuwan Zhu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This is the first work to introduce the Most Retrievable Image(MRI) and Least Retrievable Image(LRI) concepts in modern text-to-image retrieval systems. An MRI is associated with and thus can be retrieved by many unrelated texts, while an LRI is disassociated from and thus not retrievable by related texts. Both of them have important practical applications and implications. Due to their one-to-many nature, it is fundamentally challenging to construct MRI and LRI. This research addresses this nontrivial problem by developing novel and effective loss functions to craft perturbations that essentially corrupt feature correlation between visual and language spaces, thus enabling MRI and LRI. The proposed schemes are implemented based on CLIP, a state-of-the-art image and text representation model, to demonstrate MRI and LRI and their application in privacy-preserved image sharing and malicious advertisement. They are evaluated by extensive experiments based on the modern visual-language models on multiple benchmarks, including Paris, ImageNet, Flickr30k, and MSCOCO. The experimental results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed schemes for constructing MRI and LRI."
Sports Video Analysis on Large-Scale Data
Authors: He Zhao, Xingce Bao, Richard P. Wildes Dekun Wu
Published in: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022 (Main Conference Track), 2022

Abstract: "This paper investigates the modeling of automated machine description on sports video, which has seen much progress recently. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art approaches fall quite short of capturing how human experts analyze sports scenes. There are several major reasons: (1) The used dataset is collected from non-official providers, which naturally creates a gap between models trained on those datasets and real-world applications; (2) previously proposed methods require extensive annotation efforts (i.e., player and ball segmentation at pixel level) on localizing useful visual features to yield acceptable results; (3) very few public datasets are available. In this paper, we propose a novel large-scale NBA dataset for Sports Video Analysis (NSVA) with a focus on captioning, to address the above challenges. We also design a unified approach to process raw videos into a stack of meaningful features with minimum labelling efforts, showing that cross modeling on such features using a transformer architecture leads to strong performance. In addition, we demonstrate the broad application of NSVA by addressing two additional tasks, namely fine-grained sports action recognition and salient player identification. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/jackwu502/NSVA."