Daily Papers

Feature pyramid has been an efficient method to extract features at different scales. Development over this method mainly focuses on aggregating contextual information at different levels while seldom touching the inter-level correlation in the feature pyramid. Early computer vision methods extracted scale-invariant features by locating the feature extrema in both spatial and scale dimension. Inspired by this, a convolution across the pyramid level is proposed in this study, which is termed pyramid convolution and is a modified 3-D convolution. Stacked pyramid convolutions directly extract 3-D (scale and spatial) features and outperforms other meticulously designed feature fusion modules. Based on the viewpoint of 3-D convolution, an integrated batch normalization that collects statistics from the whole feature pyramid is naturally inserted after the pyramid convolution. Furthermore, we also show that the naive pyramid convolution, together with the design of RetinaNet head, actually best applies for extracting features from a Gaussian pyramid, whose properties can hardly be satisfied by a feature pyramid. In order to alleviate this discrepancy, we build a scale-equalizing pyramid convolution (SEPC) that aligns the shared pyramid convolution kernel only at high-level feature maps. Being computationally efficient and compatible with the head design of most single-stage object detectors, the SEPC module brings significant performance improvement (>4AP increase on MS-COCO2017 dataset) in state-of-the-art one-stage object detectors, and a light version of SEPC also has sim3.5AP gain with only around 7% inference time increase. The pyramid convolution also functions well as a stand-alone module in two-stage object detectors and is able to improve the performance by sim2AP. The source code can be found at https://github.com/jshilong/SEPC.

Diffusion models have significantly advanced the state of the art in image, audio, and video generation tasks. However, their applications in practical scenarios are hindered by slow inference speed. Drawing inspiration from the approximation strategies utilized in consistency models, we propose the Sub-path Linear Approximation Model (SLAM), which accelerates diffusion models while maintaining high-quality image generation. SLAM treats the PF-ODE trajectory as a series of PF-ODE sub-paths divided by sampled points, and harnesses sub-path linear (SL) ODEs to form a progressive and continuous error estimation along each individual PF-ODE sub-path. The optimization on such SL-ODEs allows SLAM to construct denoising mappings with smaller cumulative approximated errors. An efficient distillation method is also developed to facilitate the incorporation of more advanced diffusion models, such as latent diffusion models. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that SLAM achieves an efficient training regimen, requiring only 6 A100 GPU days to produce a high-quality generative model capable of 2 to 4-step generation with high performance. Comprehensive evaluations on LAION, MS COCO 2014, and MS COCO 2017 datasets also illustrate that SLAM surpasses existing acceleration methods in few-step generation tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance both on FID and the quality of the generated images.

In this paper we describe the Microsoft COCO Caption dataset and evaluation server. When completed, the dataset will contain over one and a half million captions describing over 330,000 images. For the training and validation images, five independent human generated captions will be provided. To ensure consistency in evaluation of automatic caption generation algorithms, an evaluation server is used. The evaluation server receives candidate captions and scores them using several popular metrics, including BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE and CIDEr. Instructions for using the evaluation server are provided.

This paper introduces the COCONut-PanCap dataset, created to enhance panoptic segmentation and grounded image captioning. Building upon the COCO dataset with advanced COCONut panoptic masks, this dataset aims to overcome limitations in existing image-text datasets that often lack detailed, scene-comprehensive descriptions. The COCONut-PanCap dataset incorporates fine-grained, region-level captions grounded in panoptic segmentation masks, ensuring consistency and improving the detail of generated captions. Through human-edited, densely annotated descriptions, COCONut-PanCap supports improved training of vision-language models (VLMs) for image understanding and generative models for text-to-image tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that COCONut-PanCap significantly boosts performance across understanding and generation tasks, offering complementary benefits to large-scale datasets. This dataset sets a new benchmark for evaluating models on joint panoptic segmentation and grounded captioning tasks, addressing the need for high-quality, detailed image-text annotations in multi-modal learning.

Image-Text matching (ITM) is a common task for evaluating the quality of Vision and Language (VL) models. However, existing ITM benchmarks have a significant limitation. They have many missing correspondences, originating from the data construction process itself. For example, a caption is only matched with one image although the caption can be matched with other similar images and vice versa. To correct the massive false negatives, we construct the Extended COCO Validation (ECCV) Caption dataset by supplying the missing associations with machine and human annotators. We employ five state-of-the-art ITM models with diverse properties for our annotation process. Our dataset provides x3.6 positive image-to-caption associations and x8.5 caption-to-image associations compared to the original MS-COCO. We also propose to use an informative ranking-based metric mAP@R, rather than the popular Recall@K (R@K). We re-evaluate the existing 25 VL models on existing and proposed benchmarks. Our findings are that the existing benchmarks, such as COCO 1K R@K, COCO 5K R@K, CxC R@1 are highly correlated with each other, while the rankings change when we shift to the ECCV mAP@R. Lastly, we delve into the effect of the bias introduced by the choice of machine annotator. Source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/eccv-caption

State-of-The-Art (SoTA) image captioning models often rely on the Microsoft COCO (MS-COCO) dataset for training. This dataset contains annotations provided by human annotators, who typically produce captions averaging around ten tokens. However, this constraint presents a challenge in effectively capturing complex scenes and conveying detailed information. Furthermore, captioning models tend to exhibit bias towards the ``average'' caption, which captures only the more general aspects. What would happen if we were able to automatically generate longer captions, thereby making them more detailed? Would these captions, evaluated by humans, be more or less representative of the image content compared to the original MS-COCO captions? In this paper, we present a novel approach to address previous challenges by showcasing how captions generated from different SoTA models can be effectively fused, resulting in richer captions. Our proposed method leverages existing models from the literature, eliminating the need for additional training. Instead, it utilizes an image-text based metric to rank the captions generated by SoTA models for a given image. Subsequently, the top two captions are fused using a Large Language Model (LLM). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, as the captions generated by our model exhibit higher consistency with human judgment when evaluated on the MS-COCO test set. By combining the strengths of various SoTA models, our method enhances the quality and appeal of image captions, bridging the gap between automated systems and the rich, informative nature of human-generated descriptions. This advance opens up new possibilities for generating captions that are more suitable for the training of both vision-language and captioning models.

Modern image captioning system relies heavily on extracting knowledge from images to capture the concept of a static story. In this paper, we propose a textual visual context dataset for captioning, in which the publicly available dataset COCO Captions (Lin et al., 2014) has been extended with information about the scene (such as objects in the image). Since this information has a textual form, it can be used to leverage any NLP task, such as text similarity or semantic relation methods, into captioning systems, either as an end-to-end training strategy or a post-processing based approach.

Current captioning datasets, focus on object-centric captions, describing the visible objects in the image, often ending up stating the obvious (for humans), e.g. "people eating food in a park". Although these datasets are useful to evaluate the ability of Vision & Language models to recognize the visual content, they lack in expressing trivial abstract concepts, e.g. "people having a picnic". Such concepts are licensed by human's personal experience and contribute to forming common sense assumptions. We present the High-Level Dataset; a dataset extending 14997 images of the COCO dataset with 134973 human-annotated (high-level) abstract captions collected along three axes: scenes, actions and rationales. We describe and release such dataset and we show how it can be used to assess models' multimodal grounding of abstract concepts and enrich models' visio-lingusitic representations. Moreover, we describe potential tasks enabled by this dataset involving high- and low-level concepts interactions.

We present a new challenging dataset, CPPE - 5 (Medical Personal Protective Equipment), with the goal to allow the study of subordinate categorization of medical personal protective equipments, which is not possible with other popular data sets that focus on broad-level categories (such as PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, Microsoft COCO, OpenImages, etc). To make it easy for models trained on this dataset to be used in practical scenarios in complex scenes, our dataset mainly contains images that show complex scenes with several objects in each scene in their natural context. The image collection for this dataset focuses on: obtaining as many non-iconic images as possible and making sure all the images are real-life images, unlike other existing datasets in this area. Our dataset includes 5 object categories (coveralls, face shields, gloves, masks, and goggles), and each image is annotated with a set of bounding boxes and positive labels. We present a detailed analysis of the dataset in comparison to other popular broad category datasets as well as datasets focusing on personal protective equipments, we also find that at present there exist no such publicly available datasets. Finally, we also analyze performance and compare model complexities on baseline and state-of-the-art models for bounding box results. Our code, data, and trained models are available at https://git.io/cppe5-dataset.

We propose a method that can generate an unambiguous description (known as a referring expression) of a specific object or region in an image, and which can also comprehend or interpret such an expression to infer which object is being described. We show that our method outperforms previous methods that generate descriptions of objects without taking into account other potentially ambiguous objects in the scene. Our model is inspired by recent successes of deep learning methods for image captioning, but while image captioning is difficult to evaluate, our task allows for easy objective evaluation. We also present a new large-scale dataset for referring expressions, based on MS-COCO. We have released the dataset and a toolbox for visualization and evaluation, see https://github.com/mjhucla/Google_Refexp_toolbox

In recent decades, the vision community has witnessed remarkable progress in visual recognition, partially owing to advancements in dataset benchmarks. Notably, the established COCO benchmark has propelled the development of modern detection and segmentation systems. However, the COCO segmentation benchmark has seen comparatively slow improvement over the last decade. Originally equipped with coarse polygon annotations for thing instances, it gradually incorporated coarse superpixel annotations for stuff regions, which were subsequently heuristically amalgamated to yield panoptic segmentation annotations. These annotations, executed by different groups of raters, have resulted not only in coarse segmentation masks but also in inconsistencies between segmentation types. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive reevaluation of the COCO segmentation annotations. By enhancing the annotation quality and expanding the dataset to encompass 383K images with more than 5.18M panoptic masks, we introduce COCONut, the COCO Next Universal segmenTation dataset. COCONut harmonizes segmentation annotations across semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation with meticulously crafted high-quality masks, and establishes a robust benchmark for all segmentation tasks. To our knowledge, COCONut stands as the inaugural large-scale universal segmentation dataset, verified by human raters. We anticipate that the release of COCONut will significantly contribute to the community's ability to assess the progress of novel neural networks.

We present Pix2Cap-COCO, the first panoptic pixel-level caption dataset designed to advance fine-grained visual understanding. To achieve this, we carefully design an automated annotation pipeline that prompts GPT-4V to generate pixel-aligned, instance-specific captions for individual objects within images, enabling models to learn more granular relationships between objects and their contexts. This approach results in 167,254 detailed captions, with an average of 22.94 words per caption. Building on Pix2Cap-COCO, we introduce a novel task, panoptic segmentation-captioning, which challenges models to recognize instances in an image and provide detailed descriptions for each simultaneously. To benchmark this task, we design a robust baseline based on X-Decoder. The experimental results demonstrate that Pix2Cap-COCO is a particularly challenging dataset, as it requires models to excel in both fine-grained visual understanding and detailed language generation. Furthermore, we leverage Pix2Cap-COCO for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on large multimodal models (LMMs) to enhance their performance. For example, training with Pix2Cap-COCO significantly improves the performance of GPT4RoI, yielding gains in CIDEr +1.4%, ROUGE +0.4%, and SPICE +0.5% on Visual Genome dataset, and strengthens its region understanding ability on the ViP-BENCH, with an overall improvement of +5.1%, including notable increases in recognition accuracy +11.2% and language generation quality +22.2%.

The evaluation of object detection models is usually performed by optimizing a single metric, e.g. mAP, on a fixed set of datasets, e.g. Microsoft COCO and Pascal VOC. Due to image retrieval and annotation costs, these datasets consist largely of images found on the web and do not represent many real-life domains that are being modelled in practice, e.g. satellite, microscopic and gaming, making it difficult to assert the degree of generalization learned by the model. We introduce the Roboflow-100 (RF100) consisting of 100 datasets, 7 imagery domains, 224,714 images, and 805 class labels with over 11,170 labelling hours. We derived RF100 from over 90,000 public datasets, 60 million public images that are actively being assembled and labelled by computer vision practitioners in the open on the web application Roboflow Universe. By releasing RF100, we aim to provide a semantically diverse, multi-domain benchmark of datasets to help researchers test their model's generalizability with real-life data. RF100 download and benchmark replication are available on GitHub.

We propose Dataset Reinforcement, a strategy to improve a dataset once such that the accuracy of any model architecture trained on the reinforced dataset is improved at no additional training cost for users. We propose a Dataset Reinforcement strategy based on data augmentation and knowledge distillation. Our generic strategy is designed based on extensive analysis across CNN- and transformer-based models and performing large-scale study of distillation with state-of-the-art models with various data augmentations. We create a reinforced version of the ImageNet training dataset, called ImageNet+, as well as reinforced datasets CIFAR-100+, Flowers-102+, and Food-101+. Models trained with ImageNet+ are more accurate, robust, and calibrated, and transfer well to downstream tasks (e.g., segmentation and detection). As an example, the accuracy of ResNet-50 improves by 1.7% on the ImageNet validation set, 3.5% on ImageNetV2, and 10.0% on ImageNet-R. Expected Calibration Error (ECE) on the ImageNet validation set is also reduced by 9.9%. Using this backbone with Mask-RCNN for object detection on MS-COCO, the mean average precision improves by 0.8%. We reach similar gains for MobileNets, ViTs, and Swin-Transformers. For MobileNetV3 and Swin-Tiny we observe significant improvements on ImageNet-R/A/C of up to 10% improved robustness. Models pretrained on ImageNet+ and fine-tuned on CIFAR-100+, Flowers-102+, and Food-101+, reach up to 3.4% improved accuracy.

Image description datasets play a crucial role in the advancement of various applications such as image understanding, text-to-image generation, and text-image retrieval. Currently, image description datasets primarily originate from two sources. One source is the scraping of image-text pairs from the web. Despite their abundance, these descriptions are often of low quality and noisy. Another is through human labeling. Datasets such as COCO are generally very short and lack details. Although detailed image descriptions can be annotated by humans, the high annotation cost limits the feasibility. These limitations underscore the need for more efficient and scalable methods to generate accurate and detailed image descriptions. In this paper, we propose an innovative framework termed Image Textualization (IT), which automatically produces high-quality image descriptions by leveraging existing multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) and multiple vision expert models in a collaborative manner, which maximally convert the visual information into text. To address the current lack of benchmarks for detailed descriptions, we propose several benchmarks for comprehensive evaluation, which verifies the quality of image descriptions created by our framework. Furthermore, we show that LLaVA-7B, benefiting from training on IT-curated descriptions, acquire improved capability to generate richer image descriptions, substantially increasing the length and detail of their output with less hallucination.

Image captioning has made substantial progress with huge supporting image collections sourced from the web. However, recent studies have pointed out that captioning datasets, such as COCO, contain gender bias found in web corpora. As a result, learning models could heavily rely on the learned priors and image context for gender identification, leading to incorrect or even offensive errors. To encourage models to learn correct gender features, we reorganize the COCO dataset and present two new splits COCO-GB V1 and V2 datasets where the train and test sets have different gender-context joint distribution. Models relying on contextual cues will suffer from huge gender prediction errors on the anti-stereotypical test data. Benchmarking experiments reveal that most captioning models learn gender bias, leading to high gender prediction errors, especially for women. To alleviate the unwanted bias, we propose a new Guided Attention Image Captioning model (GAIC) which provides self-guidance on visual attention to encourage the model to capture correct gender visual evidence. Experimental results validate that GAIC can significantly reduce gender prediction errors with a competitive caption quality. Our codes and the designed benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/datamllab/Mitigating_Gender_Bias_In_Captioning_System.

Visual scene understanding is the core task in making any crucial decision in any computer vision system. Although popular computer vision datasets like Cityscapes, MS-COCO, PASCAL provide good benchmarks for several tasks (e.g. image classification, segmentation, object detection), these datasets are hardly suitable for post disaster damage assessments. On the other hand, existing natural disaster datasets include mainly satellite imagery which have low spatial resolution and a high revisit period. Therefore, they do not have a scope to provide quick and efficient damage assessment tasks. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) can effortlessly access difficult places during any disaster and collect high resolution imagery that is required for aforementioned tasks of computer vision. To address these issues we present a high resolution UAV imagery, FloodNet, captured after the hurricane Harvey. This dataset demonstrates the post flooded damages of the affected areas. The images are labeled pixel-wise for semantic segmentation task and questions are produced for the task of visual question answering. FloodNet poses several challenges including detection of flooded roads and buildings and distinguishing between natural water and flooded water. With the advancement of deep learning algorithms, we can analyze the impact of any disaster which can make a precise understanding of the affected areas. In this paper, we compare and contrast the performances of baseline methods for image classification, semantic segmentation, and visual question answering on our dataset.

Large-scale datasets are essential to modern day deep learning. Advocates argue that understanding these methods requires dataset transparency (e.g. "dataset curation, motivation, composition, collection process, etc..."). However, almost no one has suggested the release of the detailed definitions and visual category examples provided to annotators - information critical to understanding the structure of the annotations present in each dataset. These labels are at the heart of public datasets, yet few datasets include the instructions that were used to generate them. We introduce a new task, Labeling Instruction Generation, to address missing publicly available labeling instructions. In Labeling Instruction Generation, we take a reasonably annotated dataset and: 1) generate a set of examples that are visually representative of each category in the dataset; 2) provide a text label that corresponds to each of the examples. We introduce a framework that requires no model training to solve this task and includes a newly created rapid retrieval system that leverages a large, pre-trained vision and language model. This framework acts as a proxy to human annotators that can help to both generate a final labeling instruction set and evaluate its quality. Our framework generates multiple diverse visual and text representations of dataset categories. The optimized instruction set outperforms our strongest baseline across 5 folds by 7.06 mAP for NuImages and 12.9 mAP for COCO.

Observing the close relationship among panoptic, semantic and instance segmentation tasks, we propose to train a universal multi-dataset multi-task segmentation model: DaTaSeg.We use a shared representation (mask proposals with class predictions) for all tasks. To tackle task discrepancy, we adopt different merge operations and post-processing for different tasks. We also leverage weak-supervision, allowing our segmentation model to benefit from cheaper bounding box annotations. To share knowledge across datasets, we use text embeddings from the same semantic embedding space as classifiers and share all network parameters among datasets. We train DaTaSeg on ADE semantic, COCO panoptic, and Objects365 detection datasets. DaTaSeg improves performance on all datasets, especially small-scale datasets, achieving 54.0 mIoU on ADE semantic and 53.5 PQ on COCO panoptic. DaTaSeg also enables weakly-supervised knowledge transfer on ADE panoptic and Objects365 instance segmentation. Experiments show DaTaSeg scales with the number of training datasets and enables open-vocabulary segmentation through direct transfer. In addition, we annotate an Objects365 instance segmentation set of 1,000 images and will release it as a public benchmark.

Multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) has emerged as a promising research direction. Nonetheless, numerous limitations exist within existing public MSMO datasets, including insufficient upkeep, data inaccessibility, limited size, and the absence of proper categorization, which pose significant challenges to effective research. To address these challenges and provide a comprehensive dataset for this new direction, we have meticulously curated the MultiSum dataset. Our new dataset features (1) Human-validated summaries for both video and textual content, providing superior human instruction and labels for multimodal learning. (2) Comprehensively and meticulously arranged categorization, spanning 17 principal categories and 170 subcategories to encapsulate a diverse array of real-world scenarios. (3) Benchmark tests performed on the proposed dataset to assess varied tasks and methods, including video temporal segmentation, video summarization, text summarization, and multimodal summarization. To champion accessibility and collaboration, we release the MultiSum dataset and the data collection tool as fully open-source resources, fostering transparency and accelerating future developments. Our project website can be found at https://multisum-dataset.github.io/.

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

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

In mainstream computer vision and machine learning, public datasets such as ImageNet, COCO and KITTI have helped drive enormous improvements by enabling researchers to understand the strengths and limitations of different algorithms via performance comparison. However, this type of approach has had limited translation to problems in robotic assisted surgery as this field has never established the same level of common datasets and benchmarking methods. In 2015 a sub-challenge was introduced at the EndoVis workshop where a set of robotic images were provided with automatically generated annotations from robot forward kinematics. However, there were issues with this dataset due to the limited background variation, lack of complex motion and inaccuracies in the annotation. In this work we present the results of the 2017 challenge on robotic instrument segmentation which involved 10 teams participating in binary, parts and type based segmentation of articulated da Vinci robotic instruments.

Do deep learning models for instance segmentation generalize to novel objects in a systematic way? For classification, such behavior has been questioned. In this study, we aim to understand if certain design decisions such as framework, architecture or pre-training contribute to the semantic understanding of instance segmentation. To answer this question, we consider a special case of robustness and compare pre-trained models on a challenging benchmark for object-centric, out-of-distribution texture. We do not introduce another method in this work. Instead, we take a step back and evaluate a broad range of existing literature. This includes Cascade and Mask R-CNN, Swin Transformer, BMask, YOLACT(++), DETR, BCNet, SOTR and SOLOv2. We find that YOLACT++, SOTR and SOLOv2 are significantly more robust to out-of-distribution texture than other frameworks. In addition, we show that deeper and dynamic architectures improve robustness whereas training schedules, data augmentation and pre-training have only a minor impact. In summary we evaluate 68 models on 61 versions of MS COCO for a total of 4148 evaluations.

Image captioning models are typically trained by treating all samples equally, neglecting to account for mismatched or otherwise difficult data points. In contrast, recent work has shown the effectiveness of training models by scheduling the data using curriculum learning strategies. This paper contributes to this direction by actively curating difficult samples in datasets without increasing the total number of samples. We explore the effect of using three data curation methods within the training process: complete removal of an sample, caption replacement, or image replacement via a text-to-image generation model. Experiments on the Flickr30K and COCO datasets with the BLIP and BEiT-3 models demonstrate that these curation methods do indeed yield improved image captioning models, underscoring their efficacy.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has heightened the demand for AI-based scientific assistants capable of understanding scientific articles and figures. Despite progress, there remains a significant gap in evaluating models' comprehension of professional, graduate-level, and even PhD-level scientific content. Current datasets and benchmarks primarily focus on relatively simple scientific tasks and figures, lacking comprehensive assessments across diverse advanced scientific disciplines. To bridge this gap, we collected a multimodal, multidisciplinary dataset from open-access scientific articles published in Nature Communications journals. This dataset spans 72 scientific disciplines, ensuring both diversity and quality. We created benchmarks with various tasks and settings to comprehensively evaluate LMMs' capabilities in understanding scientific figures and content. Our evaluation revealed that these tasks are highly challenging: many open-source models struggled significantly, and even GPT-4V and GPT-4o faced difficulties. We also explored using our dataset as training resources by constructing visual instruction-following data, enabling the 7B LLaVA model to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4V/o on our benchmark. Additionally, we investigated the use of our interleaved article texts and figure images for pre-training LMMs, resulting in improvements on the material generation task. The source dataset, including articles, figures, constructed benchmarks, and visual instruction-following data, is open-sourced.

Semantic classes can be either things (objects with a well-defined shape, e.g. car, person) or stuff (amorphous background regions, e.g. grass, sky). While lots of classification and detection works focus on thing classes, less attention has been given to stuff classes. Nonetheless, stuff classes are important as they allow to explain important aspects of an image, including (1) scene type; (2) which thing classes are likely to be present and their location (through contextual reasoning); (3) physical attributes, material types and geometric properties of the scene. To understand stuff and things in context we introduce COCO-Stuff, which augments all 164K images of the COCO 2017 dataset with pixel-wise annotations for 91 stuff classes. We introduce an efficient stuff annotation protocol based on superpixels, which leverages the original thing annotations. We quantify the speed versus quality trade-off of our protocol and explore the relation between annotation time and boundary complexity. Furthermore, we use COCO-Stuff to analyze: (a) the importance of stuff and thing classes in terms of their surface cover and how frequently they are mentioned in image captions; (b) the spatial relations between stuff and things, highlighting the rich contextual relations that make our dataset unique; (c) the performance of a modern semantic segmentation method on stuff and thing classes, and whether stuff is easier to segment than things.

Automated medical image analysis systems often require large amounts of training data with high quality labels, which are difficult and time consuming to generate. This paper introduces Radiology Object in COntext version 2 (ROCOv2), a multimodal dataset consisting of radiological images and associated medical concepts and captions extracted from the PMC Open Access subset. It is an updated version of the ROCO dataset published in 2018, and adds 35,705 new images added to PMC since 2018. It further provides manually curated concepts for imaging modalities with additional anatomical and directional concepts for X-rays. The dataset consists of 79,789 images and has been used, with minor modifications, in the concept detection and caption prediction tasks of ImageCLEFmedical Caption 2023. The dataset is suitable for training image annotation models based on image-caption pairs, or for multi-label image classification using Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts provided with each image. In addition, it can serve for pre-training of medical domain models, and evaluation of deep learning models for multi-task learning.

Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers---8x deeper than VGG nets but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

Systematic literature reviews (SLRs) play an essential role in summarising, synthesising and validating scientific evidence. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning techniques to automate the identification of relevant studies for SLRs. However, the lack of standardised evaluation datasets makes comparing the performance of such automated literature screening systems difficult. In this paper, we analyse the citation screening evaluation datasets, revealing that many of the available datasets are either too small, suffer from data leakage or have limited applicability to systems treating automated literature screening as a classification task, as opposed to, for example, a retrieval or question-answering task. To address these challenges, we introduce CSMeD, a meta-dataset consolidating nine publicly released collections, providing unified access to 325 SLRs from the fields of medicine and computer science. CSMeD serves as a comprehensive resource for training and evaluating the performance of automated citation screening models. Additionally, we introduce CSMeD-FT, a new dataset designed explicitly for evaluating the full text publication screening task. To demonstrate the utility of CSMeD, we conduct experiments and establish baselines on new datasets.

Image Captioning, the task of automatic generation of image captions, has attracted attentions from researchers in many fields of computer science, being computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning in recent years. This paper contributes to research on Image Captioning task in terms of extending dataset to a different language - Vietnamese. So far, there is no existed Image Captioning dataset for Vietnamese language, so this is the foremost fundamental step for developing Vietnamese Image Captioning. In this scope, we first build a dataset which contains manually written captions for images from Microsoft COCO dataset relating to sports played with balls, we called this dataset UIT-ViIC. UIT-ViIC consists of 19,250 Vietnamese captions for 3,850 images. Following that, we evaluate our dataset on deep neural network models and do comparisons with English dataset and two Vietnamese datasets built by different methods. UIT-ViIC is published on our lab website for research purposes.

Today, the exponential rise of large models developed by academic and industrial institutions with the help of massive computing resources raises the question of whether someone without access to such resources can make a valuable scientific contribution. To explore this, we tried to solve the challenging task of multilingual image retrieval having a limited budget of $1,000. As a result, we present NLLB-CLIP - CLIP model with a text encoder from the NLLB model. To train the model, we used an automatically created dataset of 106,246 good-quality images with captions in 201 languages derived from the LAION COCO dataset. We trained multiple models using image and text encoders of various sizes and kept different parts of the model frozen during the training. We thoroughly analyzed the trained models using existing evaluation datasets and newly created XTD200 and Flickr30k-200 datasets. We show that NLLB-CLIP is comparable in quality to state-of-the-art models and significantly outperforms them on low-resource languages.

We introduce a large scale MAchine Reading COmprehension dataset, which we name MS MARCO. The dataset comprises of 1,010,916 anonymized questions---sampled from Bing's search query logs---each with a human generated answer and 182,669 completely human rewritten generated answers. In addition, the dataset contains 8,841,823 passages---extracted from 3,563,535 web documents retrieved by Bing---that provide the information necessary for curating the natural language answers. A question in the MS MARCO dataset may have multiple answers or no answers at all. Using this dataset, we propose three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (i) predict if a question is answerable given a set of context passages, and extract and synthesize the answer as a human would (ii) generate a well-formed answer (if possible) based on the context passages that can be understood with the question and passage context, and finally (iii) rank a set of retrieved passages given a question. The size of the dataset and the fact that the questions are derived from real user search queries distinguishes MS MARCO from other well-known publicly available datasets for machine reading comprehension and question-answering. We believe that the scale and the real-world nature of this dataset makes it attractive for benchmarking machine reading comprehension and question-answering models.

Practical object detection application can lose its effectiveness on image inputs with natural distribution shifts. This problem leads the research community to pay more attention on the robustness of detectors under Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) inputs. Existing works construct datasets to benchmark the detector's OOD robustness for a specific application scenario, e.g., Autonomous Driving. However, these datasets lack universality and are hard to benchmark general detectors built on common tasks such as COCO. To give a more comprehensive robustness assessment, we introduce COCO-O(ut-of-distribution), a test dataset based on COCO with 6 types of natural distribution shifts. COCO-O has a large distribution gap with training data and results in a significant 55.7% relative performance drop on a Faster R-CNN detector. We leverage COCO-O to conduct experiments on more than 100 modern object detectors to investigate if their improvements are credible or just over-fitting to the COCO test set. Unfortunately, most classic detectors in early years do not exhibit strong OOD generalization. We further study the robustness effect on recent breakthroughs of detector's architecture design, augmentation and pre-training techniques. Some empirical findings are revealed: 1) Compared with detection head or neck, backbone is the most important part for robustness; 2) An end-to-end detection transformer design brings no enhancement, and may even reduce robustness; 3) Large-scale foundation models have made a great leap on robust object detection. We hope our COCO-O could provide a rich testbed for robustness study of object detection. The dataset will be available at https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust/tree/main/benchmarks/coco_o.

There has been a recent spike in interest in multi-modal Language and Vision problems. On the language side, most of these models primarily focus on English since most multi-modal datasets are monolingual. We try to bridge this gap with a zero-shot approach for learning multi-modal representations using cross-lingual pre-training on the text side. We present a simple yet practical approach for building a cross-lingual image retrieval model which trains on a monolingual training dataset but can be used in a zero-shot cross-lingual fashion during inference. We also introduce a new objective function which tightens the text embedding clusters by pushing dissimilar texts from each other. Finally, we introduce a new 1K multi-lingual MSCOCO2014 caption test dataset (XTD10) in 7 languages that we collected using a crowdsourcing platform. We use this as the test set for evaluating zero-shot model performance across languages. XTD10 dataset is made publicly available here: https://github.com/adobe-research/Cross-lingual-Test-Dataset-XTD10

In computer vision, it is well-known that a lack of data diversity will impair model performance. In this study, we address the challenges of enhancing the dataset diversity problem in order to benefit various downstream tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. We propose a simple yet effective data augmentation approach by leveraging advancements in generative models, specifically text-to-image synthesis technologies like Stable Diffusion. Our method focuses on generating variations of labeled real images, utilizing generative object and background augmentation via inpainting to augment existing training data without the need for additional annotations. We find that background augmentation, in particular, significantly improves the models' robustness and generalization capabilities. We also investigate how to adjust the prompt and mask to ensure the generated content comply with the existing annotations. The efficacy of our augmentation techniques is validated through comprehensive evaluations of the COCO dataset and several other key object detection benchmarks, demonstrating notable enhancements in model performance across diverse scenarios. This approach offers a promising solution to the challenges of dataset enhancement, contributing to the development of more accurate and robust computer vision models.

Seeking answers to questions within long scientific research articles is a crucial area of study that aids readers in quickly addressing their inquiries. However, existing question-answering (QA) datasets based on scientific papers are limited in scale and focus solely on textual content. To address this limitation, we introduce SPIQA (Scientific Paper Image Question Answering), the first large-scale QA dataset specifically designed to interpret complex figures and tables within the context of scientific research articles across various domains of computer science. Leveraging the breadth of expertise and ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand figures, we employ automatic and manual curation to create the dataset. We craft an information-seeking task involving multiple images that cover a wide variety of plots, charts, tables, schematic diagrams, and result visualizations. SPIQA comprises 270K questions divided into training, validation, and three different evaluation splits. Through extensive experiments with 12 prominent foundational models, we evaluate the ability of current multimodal systems to comprehend the nuanced aspects of research articles. Additionally, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation strategy with in-context retrieval that allows fine-grained, step-by-step assessment and improves model performance. We further explore the upper bounds of performance enhancement with additional textual information, highlighting its promising potential for future research and the dataset's impact on revolutionizing how we interact with scientific literature.

Image captioning, like many tasks involving vision and language, currently relies on Transformer-based architectures for extracting the semantics in an image and translating it into linguistically coherent descriptions. Although successful, the attention operator only considers a weighted summation of projections of the current input sample, therefore ignoring the relevant semantic information which can come from the joint observation of other samples. In this paper, we devise a network which can perform attention over activations obtained while processing other training samples, through a prototypical memory model. Our memory models the distribution of past keys and values through the definition of prototype vectors which are both discriminative and compact. Experimentally, we assess the performance of the proposed model on the COCO dataset, in comparison with carefully designed baselines and state-of-the-art approaches, and by investigating the role of each of the proposed components. We demonstrate that our proposal can increase the performance of an encoder-decoder Transformer by 3.7 CIDEr points both when training in cross-entropy only and when fine-tuning with self-critical sequence training. Source code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/PMA-Net.

Data is a crucial component of machine learning. The field is reliant on data to train, validate, and test models. With increased technical capabilities, machine learning research has boomed in both academic and industry settings, and one major focus has been on computer vision. Computer vision is a popular domain of machine learning increasingly pertinent to real-world applications, from facial recognition in policing to object detection for autonomous vehicles. Given computer vision's propensity to shape machine learning research and impact human life, we seek to understand disciplinary practices around dataset documentation - how data is collected, curated, annotated, and packaged into datasets for computer vision researchers and practitioners to use for model tuning and development. Specifically, we examine what dataset documentation communicates about the underlying values of vision data and the larger practices and goals of computer vision as a field. To conduct this study, we collected a corpus of about 500 computer vision datasets, from which we sampled 114 dataset publications across different vision tasks. Through both a structured and thematic content analysis, we document a number of values around accepted data practices, what makes desirable data, and the treatment of humans in the dataset construction process. We discuss how computer vision datasets authors value efficiency at the expense of care; universality at the expense of contextuality; impartiality at the expense of positionality; and model work at the expense of data work. Many of the silenced values we identify sit in opposition with social computing practices. We conclude with suggestions on how to better incorporate silenced values into the dataset creation and curation process.

In this work, we present a framework to measure and mitigate intrinsic biases with respect to protected variables --such as gender-- in visual recognition tasks. We show that trained models significantly amplify the association of target labels with gender beyond what one would expect from biased datasets. Surprisingly, we show that even when datasets are balanced such that each label co-occurs equally with each gender, learned models amplify the association between labels and gender, as much as if data had not been balanced! To mitigate this, we adopt an adversarial approach to remove unwanted features corresponding to protected variables from intermediate representations in a deep neural network -- and provide a detailed analysis of its effectiveness. Experiments on two datasets: the COCO dataset (objects), and the imSitu dataset (actions), show reductions in gender bias amplification while maintaining most of the accuracy of the original models.

Every day, the human brain processes an immense volume of visual information, relying on intricate neural mechanisms to perceive and interpret these stimuli. Recent breakthroughs in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have enabled scientists to extract visual information from human brain activity patterns. In this study, we present an innovative method for decoding brain activity into meaningful images and captions, with a specific focus on brain captioning due to its enhanced flexibility as compared to brain decoding into images. Our approach takes advantage of cutting-edge image captioning models and incorporates a unique image reconstruction pipeline that utilizes latent diffusion models and depth estimation. We utilized the Natural Scenes Dataset, a comprehensive fMRI dataset from eight subjects who viewed images from the COCO dataset. We employed the Generative Image-to-text Transformer (GIT) as our backbone for captioning and propose a new image reconstruction pipeline based on latent diffusion models. The method involves training regularized linear regression models between brain activity and extracted features. Additionally, we incorporated depth maps from the ControlNet model to further guide the reconstruction process. We evaluate our methods using quantitative metrics for both generated captions and images. Our brain captioning approach outperforms existing methods, while our image reconstruction pipeline generates plausible images with improved spatial relationships. In conclusion, we demonstrate significant progress in brain decoding, showcasing the enormous potential of integrating vision and language to better understand human cognition. Our approach provides a flexible platform for future research, with potential applications in various fields, including neural art, style transfer, and portable devices.

Benchmarks of the multilingual capabilities of text-to-image (T2I) models compare generated images prompted in a test language to an expected image distribution over a concept set. One such benchmark, "Conceptual Coverage Across Languages" (CoCo-CroLa), assesses the tangible noun inventory of T2I models by prompting them to generate pictures from a concept list translated to seven languages and comparing the output image populations. Unfortunately, we find that this benchmark contains translation errors of varying severity in Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. We provide corrections for these errors and analyze how impactful they are on the utility and validity of CoCo-CroLa as a benchmark. We reassess multiple baseline T2I models with the revisions, compare the outputs elicited under the new translations to those conditioned on the old, and show that a correction's impactfulness on the image-domain benchmark results can be predicted in the text domain with similarity scores. Our findings will guide the future development of T2I multilinguality metrics by providing analytical tools for practical translation decisions.

Recent approaches attempt to adapt powerful interactive segmentation models, such as SAM, to interactive matting and fine-tune the models based on synthetic matting datasets. However, models trained on synthetic data fail to generalize to complex and occlusion scenes. We address this challenge by proposing a new matting dataset based on the COCO dataset, namely COCO-Matting. Specifically, the construction of our COCO-Matting includes accessory fusion and mask-to-matte, which selects real-world complex images from COCO and converts semantic segmentation masks to matting labels. The built COCO-Matting comprises an extensive collection of 38,251 human instance-level alpha mattes in complex natural scenarios. Furthermore, existing SAM-based matting methods extract intermediate features and masks from a frozen SAM and only train a lightweight matting decoder by end-to-end matting losses, which do not fully exploit the potential of the pre-trained SAM. Thus, we propose SEMat which revamps the network architecture and training objectives. For network architecture, the proposed feature-aligned transformer learns to extract fine-grained edge and transparency features. The proposed matte-aligned decoder aims to segment matting-specific objects and convert coarse masks into high-precision mattes. For training objectives, the proposed regularization and trimap loss aim to retain the prior from the pre-trained model and push the matting logits extracted from the mask decoder to contain trimap-based semantic information. Extensive experiments across seven diverse datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method, proving its efficacy in interactive natural image matting. We open-source our code, models, and dataset at https://github.com/XiaRho/SEMat.

Motivated by that DETR-based approaches have established new records on COCO detection and segmentation benchmarks, many recent endeavors show increasing interest in how to further improve DETR-based approaches by pre-training the Transformer in a self-supervised manner while keeping the backbone frozen. Some studies already claimed significant improvements in accuracy. In this paper, we take a closer look at their experimental methodology and check if their approaches are still effective on the very recent state-of-the-art such as H-Deformable-DETR. We conduct thorough experiments on COCO object detection tasks to study the influence of the choice of pre-training datasets, localization, and classification target generation schemes. Unfortunately, we find the previous representative self-supervised approach such as DETReg, fails to boost the performance of the strong DETR-based approaches on full data regimes. We further analyze the reasons and find that simply combining a more accurate box predictor and Objects365 benchmark can significantly improve the results in follow-up experiments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by achieving strong object detection results of AP=59.3% on COCO val set, which surpasses H-Deformable-DETR + Swin-L by +1.4%. Last, we generate a series of synthetic pre-training datasets by combining the very recent image-to-text captioning models (LLaVA) and text-to-image generative models (SDXL). Notably, pre-training on these synthetic datasets leads to notable improvements in object detection performance. Looking ahead, we anticipate substantial advantages through the future expansion of the synthetic pre-training dataset.

Multi-dataset training provides a viable solution for exploiting heterogeneous large-scale datasets without extra annotation cost. In this work, we propose a scalable multi-dataset detector (ScaleDet) that can scale up its generalization across datasets when increasing the number of training datasets. Unlike existing multi-dataset learners that mostly rely on manual relabelling efforts or sophisticated optimizations to unify labels across datasets, we introduce a simple yet scalable formulation to derive a unified semantic label space for multi-dataset training. ScaleDet is trained by visual-textual alignment to learn the label assignment with label semantic similarities across datasets. Once trained, ScaleDet can generalize well on any given upstream and downstream datasets with seen and unseen classes. We conduct extensive experiments using LVIS, COCO, Objects365, OpenImages as upstream datasets, and 13 datasets from Object Detection in the Wild (ODinW) as downstream datasets. Our results show that ScaleDet achieves compelling strong model performance with an mAP of 50.7 on LVIS, 58.8 on COCO, 46.8 on Objects365, 76.2 on OpenImages, and 71.8 on ODinW, surpassing state-of-the-art detectors with the same backbone.

We show that the YOLOv4 object detection neural network based on the CSP approach, scales both up and down and is applicable to small and large networks while maintaining optimal speed and accuracy. We propose a network scaling approach that modifies not only the depth, width, resolution, but also structure of the network. YOLOv4-large model achieves state-of-the-art results: 55.5% AP (73.4% AP50) for the MS COCO dataset at a speed of ~16 FPS on Tesla V100, while with the test time augmentation, YOLOv4-large achieves 56.0% AP (73.3 AP50). To the best of our knowledge, this is currently the highest accuracy on the COCO dataset among any published work. The YOLOv4-tiny model achieves 22.0% AP (42.0% AP50) at a speed of 443 FPS on RTX 2080Ti, while by using TensorRT, batch size = 4 and FP16-precision the YOLOv4-tiny achieves 1774 FPS.

Pseudo-labeling is significant for semi-supervised instance segmentation, which generates instance masks and classes from unannotated images for subsequent training. However, in existing pipelines, pseudo-labels that contain valuable information may be directly filtered out due to mismatches in class and mask quality. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, called pseudo-label aligning instance segmentation (PAIS), in this paper. In PAIS, we devise a dynamic aligning loss (DALoss) that adjusts the weights of semi-supervised loss terms with varying class and mask score pairs. Through extensive experiments conducted on the COCO and Cityscapes datasets, we demonstrate that PAIS is a promising framework for semi-supervised instance segmentation, particularly in cases where labeled data is severely limited. Notably, with just 1\% labeled data, PAIS achieves 21.2 mAP (based on Mask-RCNN) and 19.9 mAP (based on K-Net) on the COCO dataset, outperforming the current state-of-the-art model, \ie, NoisyBoundary with 7.7 mAP, by a margin of over 12 points. Code is available at: https://github.com/hujiecpp/PAIS.

The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.

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.

We present CCI3.0-HQ (https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/CCI3-HQ), a high-quality 500GB subset of the Chinese Corpora Internet 3.0 (CCI3.0)(https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/CCI3-Data), developed using a novel two-stage hybrid filtering pipeline that significantly enhances data quality. To evaluate its effectiveness, we trained a 0.5B parameter model from scratch on 100B tokens across various datasets, achieving superior performance on 10 benchmarks in a zero-shot setting compared to CCI3.0, SkyPile, and WanjuanV1. The high-quality filtering process effectively distills the capabilities of the Qwen2-72B-instruct model into a compact 0.5B model, attaining optimal F1 scores for Chinese web data classification. We believe this open-access dataset will facilitate broader access to high-quality language models.

Existing image classification datasets used in computer vision tend to have a uniform distribution of images across object categories. In contrast, the natural world is heavily imbalanced, as some species are more abundant and easier to photograph than others. To encourage further progress in challenging real world conditions we present the iNaturalist species classification and detection dataset, consisting of 859,000 images from over 5,000 different species of plants and animals. It features visually similar species, captured in a wide variety of situations, from all over the world. Images were collected with different camera types, have varying image quality, feature a large class imbalance, and have been verified by multiple citizen scientists. We discuss the collection of the dataset and present extensive baseline experiments using state-of-the-art computer vision classification and detection models. Results show that current non-ensemble based methods achieve only 67% top one classification accuracy, illustrating the difficulty of the dataset. Specifically, we observe poor results for classes with small numbers of training examples suggesting more attention is needed in low-shot learning.

We do not speak word by word from scratch; our brain quickly structures a pattern like sth do sth at someplace and then fill in the detailed descriptions. To render existing encoder-decoder image captioners such human-like reasoning, we propose a novel framework: learning to Collocate Neural Modules (CNM), to generate the `inner pattern' connecting visual encoder and language decoder. Unlike the widely-used neural module networks in visual Q\&A, where the language (ie, question) is fully observable, CNM for captioning is more challenging as the language is being generated and thus is partially observable. To this end, we make the following technical contributions for CNM training: 1) compact module design --- one for function words and three for visual content words (eg, noun, adjective, and verb), 2) soft module fusion and multi-step module execution, robustifying the visual reasoning in partial observation, 3) a linguistic loss for module controller being faithful to part-of-speech collocations (eg, adjective is before noun). Extensive experiments on the challenging MS-COCO image captioning benchmark validate the effectiveness of our CNM image captioner. In particular, CNM achieves a new state-of-the-art 127.9 CIDEr-D on Karpathy split and a single-model 126.0 c40 on the official server. CNM is also robust to few training samples, eg, by training only one sentence per image, CNM can halve the performance loss compared to a strong baseline.

Large language models are increasingly becoming a cornerstone technology in artificial intelligence, the sciences, and society as a whole, yet the optimal strategies for dataset composition and filtering remain largely elusive. Many of the top-performing models lack transparency in their dataset curation and model development processes, posing an obstacle to the development of fully open language models. In this paper, we identify three core data-related challenges that must be addressed to advance open-source language models. These include (1) transparency in model development, including the data curation process, (2) access to large quantities of high-quality data, and (3) availability of artifacts and metadata for dataset curation and analysis. To address these challenges, we release RedPajama-V1, an open reproduction of the LLaMA training dataset. In addition, we release RedPajama-V2, a massive web-only dataset consisting of raw, unfiltered text data together with quality signals and metadata. Together, the RedPajama datasets comprise over 100 trillion tokens spanning multiple domains and with their quality signals facilitate the filtering of data, aiming to inspire the development of numerous new datasets. To date, these datasets have already been used in the training of strong language models used in production, such as Snowflake Arctic, Salesforce's XGen and AI2's OLMo. To provide insight into the quality of RedPajama, we present a series of analyses and ablation studies with decoder-only language models with up to 1.6B parameters. Our findings demonstrate how quality signals for web data can be effectively leveraged to curate high-quality subsets of the dataset, underscoring the potential of RedPajama to advance the development of transparent and high-performing language models at scale.

Instance-level human analysis is common in real-life scenarios and has multiple manifestations, such as human part segmentation, dense pose estimation, human-object interactions, etc. Models need to distinguish different human instances in the image panel and learn rich features to represent the details of each instance. In this paper, we present an end-to-end pipeline for solving the instance-level human analysis, named Parsing R-CNN. It processes a set of human instances simultaneously through comprehensive considering the characteristics of region-based approach and the appearance of a human, thus allowing representing the details of instances. Parsing R-CNN is very flexible and efficient, which is applicable to many issues in human instance analysis. Our approach outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on CIHP (Crowd Instance-level Human Parsing), MHP v2.0 (Multi-Human Parsing) and DensePose-COCO datasets. Based on the proposed Parsing R-CNN, we reach the 1st place in the COCO 2018 Challenge DensePose Estimation task. Code and models are public available.

Groundbreaking language-vision architectures like CLIP and DALL-E proved the utility of training on large amounts of noisy image-text data, without relying on expensive accurate labels used in standard vision unimodal supervised learning. The resulting models showed capabilities of strong text-guided image generation and transfer to downstream tasks, while performing remarkably at zero-shot classification with noteworthy out-of-distribution robustness. Since then, large-scale language-vision models like ALIGN, BASIC, GLIDE, Flamingo and Imagen made further improvements. Studying the training and capabilities of such models requires datasets containing billions of image-text pairs. Until now, no datasets of this size have been made openly available for the broader research community. To address this problem and democratize research on large-scale multi-modal models, we present LAION-5B - a dataset consisting of 5.85 billion CLIP-filtered image-text pairs, of which 2.32B contain English language. We show successful replication and fine-tuning of foundational models like CLIP, GLIDE and Stable Diffusion using the dataset, and discuss further experiments enabled with an openly available dataset of this scale. Additionally we provide several nearest neighbor indices, an improved web-interface for dataset exploration and subset generation, and detection scores for watermark, NSFW, and toxic content detection. Announcement page https://laion.ai/laion-5b-a-new-era-of-open-large-scale-multi-modal-datasets/

While knowledge distillation (transfer) has been attracting attentions from the research community, the recent development in the fields has heightened the need for reproducible studies and highly generalized frameworks to lower barriers to such high-quality, reproducible deep learning research. Several researchers voluntarily published frameworks used in their knowledge distillation studies to help other interested researchers reproduce their original work. Such frameworks, however, are usually neither well generalized nor maintained, thus researchers are still required to write a lot of code to refactor/build on the frameworks for introducing new methods, models, datasets and designing experiments. In this paper, we present our developed open-source framework built on PyTorch and dedicated for knowledge distillation studies. The framework is designed to enable users to design experiments by declarative PyYAML configuration files, and helps researchers complete the recently proposed ML Code Completeness Checklist. Using the developed framework, we demonstrate its various efficient training strategies, and implement a variety of knowledge distillation methods. We also reproduce some of their original experimental results on the ImageNet and COCO datasets presented at major machine learning conferences such as ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR and ECCV, including recent state-of-the-art methods. All the source code, configurations, log files and trained model weights are publicly available at https://github.com/yoshitomo-matsubara/torchdistill .

The proliferation of AI techniques for image generation, coupled with their increasing accessibility, has raised significant concerns about the potential misuse of these images to spread misinformation. Recent AI-generated image detection (AGID) methods include CNNDetection, NPR, DM Image Detection, Fake Image Detection, DIRE, LASTED, GAN Image Detection, AIDE, SSP, DRCT, RINE, OCC-CLIP, De-Fake, and Deep Fake Detection. However, we argue that the current state-of-the-art AGID techniques are inadequate for effectively detecting contemporary AI-generated images and advocate for a comprehensive reevaluation of these methods. We introduce the Visual Counter Turing Test (VCT^2), a benchmark comprising ~130K images generated by contemporary text-to-image models (Stable Diffusion 2.1, Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Diffusion 3, DALL-E 3, and Midjourney 6). VCT^2 includes two sets of prompts sourced from tweets by the New York Times Twitter account and captions from the MS COCO dataset. We also evaluate the performance of the aforementioned AGID techniques on the VCT^2 benchmark, highlighting their ineffectiveness in detecting AI-generated images. As image-generative AI models continue to evolve, the need for a quantifiable framework to evaluate these models becomes increasingly critical. To meet this need, we propose the Visual AI Index (V_AI), which assesses generated images from various visual perspectives, including texture complexity and object coherence, setting a new standard for evaluating image-generative AI models. To foster research in this domain, we make our https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous1233/COCO_AI and https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous1233/twitter_AI datasets publicly available.

Large datasets that were made publicly available to the research community over the last 20 years have been a key enabling factor for the advances in deep learning algorithms for NLP or computer vision. These datasets are generally pairs of aligned image / manually annotated metadata, where images are photographs of everyday life. Scholarly and historical content, on the other hand, treat subjects that are not necessarily popular to a general audience, they may not always contain a large number of data points, and new data may be difficult or impossible to collect. Some exceptions do exist, for instance, scientific or health data, but this is not the case for cultural heritage (CH). The poor performance of the best models in computer vision - when tested over artworks - coupled with the lack of extensively annotated datasets for CH, and the fact that artwork images depict objects and actions not captured by photographs, indicate that a CH-specific dataset would be highly valuable for this community. We propose DEArt, at this point primarily an object detection and pose classification dataset meant to be a reference for paintings between the XIIth and the XVIIIth centuries. It contains more than 15000 images, about 80% non-iconic, aligned with manual annotations for the bounding boxes identifying all instances of 69 classes as well as 12 possible poses for boxes identifying human-like objects. Of these, more than 50 classes are CH-specific and thus do not appear in other datasets; these reflect imaginary beings, symbolic entities and other categories related to art. Additionally, existing datasets do not include pose annotations. Our results show that object detectors for the cultural heritage domain can achieve a level of precision comparable to state-of-art models for generic images via transfer learning.

Obtaining accurate labels for instance segmentation is particularly challenging due to the complex nature of the task. Each image necessitates multiple annotations, encompassing not only the object's class but also its precise spatial boundaries. These requirements elevate the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies in both manual and automated annotation processes. By simulating different noise conditions, we provide a realistic scenario for assessing the robustness and generalization capabilities of instance segmentation models in different segmentation tasks, introducing COCO-N and Cityscapes-N. We also propose a benchmark for weakly annotation noise, dubbed COCO-WAN, which utilizes foundation models and weak annotations to simulate semi-automated annotation tools and their noisy labels. This study sheds light on the quality of segmentation masks produced by various models and challenges the efficacy of popular methods designed to address learning with label noise.

One of the major challenges in training text-to-image generation models is the need of a large number of high-quality image-text pairs. While image samples are often easily accessible, the associated text descriptions typically require careful human captioning, which is particularly time- and cost-consuming. In this paper, we propose the first work to train text-to-image generation models without any text data. Our method leverages the well-aligned multi-modal semantic space of the powerful pre-trained CLIP model: the requirement of text-conditioning is seamlessly alleviated via generating text features from image features. Extensive experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We obtain state-of-the-art results in the standard text-to-image generation tasks. Importantly, the proposed language-free model outperforms most existing models trained with full image-text pairs. Furthermore, our method can be applied in fine-tuning pre-trained models, which saves both training time and cost in training text-to-image generation models. Our pre-trained model obtains competitive results in zero-shot text-to-image generation on the MS-COCO dataset, yet with around only 1% of the model size and training data size relative to the recently proposed large DALL-E model.

As general purpose vision models get increasingly effective at a wide set of tasks, it is imperative that they be consistent across the tasks they support. Inconsistent AI models are considered brittle and untrustworthy by human users and are more challenging to incorporate into larger systems that take dependencies on their outputs. Measuring consistency between very heterogeneous tasks that might include outputs in different modalities is challenging since it is difficult to determine if the predictions are consistent with one another. As a solution, we introduce a benchmark dataset, COCOCON, where we use contrast sets created by modifying test instances for multiple tasks in small but semantically meaningful ways to change the gold label, and outline metrics for measuring if a model is consistent by ranking the original and perturbed instances across tasks. We find that state-of-the-art systems suffer from a surprisingly high degree of inconsistent behavior across tasks, especially for more heterogeneous tasks. Finally, we propose using a rank correlation-based auxiliary objective computed over large automatically created cross-task contrast sets to improve the multi-task consistency of large unified models, while retaining their original accuracy on downstream tasks. Project website available at https://adymaharana.github.io/cococon/

Climate models have been key for assessing the impact of climate change and simulating future climate scenarios. The machine learning (ML) community has taken an increased interest in supporting climate scientists' efforts on various tasks such as climate model emulation, downscaling, and prediction tasks. Many of those tasks have been addressed on datasets created with single climate models. However, both the climate science and ML communities have suggested that to address those tasks at scale, we need large, consistent, and ML-ready climate model datasets. Here, we introduce ClimateSet, a dataset containing the inputs and outputs of 36 climate models from the Input4MIPs and CMIP6 archives. In addition, we provide a modular dataset pipeline for retrieving and preprocessing additional climate models and scenarios. We showcase the potential of our dataset by using it as a benchmark for ML-based climate model emulation. We gain new insights about the performance and generalization capabilities of the different ML models by analyzing their performance across different climate models. Furthermore, the dataset can be used to train an ML emulator on several climate models instead of just one. Such a "super emulator" can quickly project new climate change scenarios, complementing existing scenarios already provided to policymakers. We believe ClimateSet will create the basis needed for the ML community to tackle climate-related tasks at scale.

Recent advances in machine learning have significantly improved the understanding of source code data and achieved good performance on a number of downstream tasks. Open source repositories like GitHub enable this process with rich unlabeled code data. However, the lack of high quality labeled data has largely hindered the progress of several code related tasks, such as program translation, summarization, synthesis, and code search. This paper introduces XLCoST, Cross-Lingual Code SnippeT dataset, a new benchmark dataset for cross-lingual code intelligence. Our dataset contains fine-grained parallel data from 8 languages (7 commonly used programming languages and English), and supports 10 cross-lingual code tasks. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest parallel dataset for source code both in terms of size and the number of languages. We also provide the performance of several state-of-the-art baseline models for each task. We believe this new dataset can be a valuable asset for the research community and facilitate the development and validation of new methods for cross-lingual code intelligence.

The rapid expansion of scientific literature in computer science presents challenges in tracking research trends and extracting key insights. Existing datasets provide metadata but lack structured summaries that capture core contributions and methodologies. We introduce CS-PaperSum, a large-scale dataset of 91,919 papers from 31 top-tier computer science conferences, enriched with AI-generated structured summaries using ChatGPT. To assess summary quality, we conduct embedding alignment analysis and keyword overlap analysis, demonstrating strong preservation of key concepts. We further present a case study on AI research trends, highlighting shifts in methodologies and interdisciplinary crossovers, including the rise of self-supervised learning, retrieval-augmented generation, and multimodal AI. Our dataset enables automated literature analysis, research trend forecasting, and AI-driven scientific discovery, providing a valuable resource for researchers, policymakers, and scientific information retrieval systems.

The development of vision-language models (VLMs) is driven by large-scale and diverse multimodal datasets. However, progress toward generalist biomedical VLMs is limited by the lack of annotated, publicly accessible datasets across biology and medicine. Existing efforts are restricted to narrow domains, missing the full diversity of biomedical knowledge encoded in scientific literature. To address this gap, we introduce BIOMEDICA, a scalable, open-source framework to extract, annotate, and serialize the entirety of the PubMed Central Open Access subset into an easy-to-use, publicly accessible dataset.Our framework produces a comprehensive archive with over 24 million unique image-text pairs from over 6 million articles. Metadata and expert-guided annotations are also provided. We demonstrate the utility and accessibility of our resource by releasing BMCA-CLIP, a suite of CLIP-style models continuously pre-trained on the BIOMEDICA dataset via streaming, eliminating the need to download 27 TB of data locally.On average, our models achieve state-of-the-art performance across 40 tasks - spanning pathology, radiology, ophthalmology, dermatology, surgery, molecular biology, parasitology, and cell biology - excelling in zero-shot classification with a 6.56% average improvement (as high as 29.8% and 17.5% in dermatology and ophthalmology, respectively), and stronger image-text retrieval, all while using 10x less compute. To foster reproducibility and collaboration, we release our codebase and dataset for the broader research community.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability to generate fluent responses to a wide variety of user queries, but this has also resulted in concerns regarding the potential misuse of such texts in journalism, educational, and academic context. In this work, we aim to develop automatic systems to identify machine-generated text and to detect potential misuse. We first introduce a large-scale benchmark M4, which is multi-generator, multi-domain, and multi-lingual corpus for machine-generated text detection. Using the dataset, we experiment with a number of methods and we show that it is challenging for detectors to generalize well on unseen examples if they are either from different domains or are generated by different large language models. In such cases, detectors tend to misclassify machine-generated text as human-written. These results show that the problem is far from solved and there is a lot of room for improvement. We believe that our dataset M4, which covers different generators, domains and languages, will enable future research towards more robust approaches for this pressing societal problem. The M4 dataset is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/M4.

The Open Images Dataset contains approximately 9 million images and is a widely accepted dataset for computer vision research. As is common practice for large datasets, the annotations are not exhaustive, with bounding boxes and attribute labels for only a subset of the classes in each image. In this paper, we present a new set of annotations on a subset of the Open Images dataset called the MIAP (More Inclusive Annotations for People) subset, containing bounding boxes and attributes for all of the people visible in those images. The attributes and labeling methodology for the MIAP subset were designed to enable research into model fairness. In addition, we analyze the original annotation methodology for the person class and its subclasses, discussing the resulting patterns in order to inform future annotation efforts. By considering both the original and exhaustive annotation sets, researchers can also now study how systematic patterns in training annotations affect modeling.

This report presents the Sony-TAu Realistic Spatial Soundscapes 2022 (STARS22) dataset for sound event localization and detection, comprised of spatial recordings of real scenes collected in various interiors of two different sites. The dataset is captured with a high resolution spherical microphone array and delivered in two 4-channel formats, first-order Ambisonics and tetrahedral microphone array. Sound events in the dataset belonging to 13 target sound classes are annotated both temporally and spatially through a combination of human annotation and optical tracking. The dataset serves as the development and evaluation dataset for the Task 3 of the DCASE2022 Challenge on Sound Event Localization and Detection and introduces significant new challenges for the task compared to the previous iterations, which were based on synthetic spatialized sound scene recordings. Dataset specifications are detailed including recording and annotation process, target classes and their presence, and details on the development and evaluation splits. Additionally, the report presents the baseline system that accompanies the dataset in the challenge with emphasis on the differences with the baseline of the previous iterations; namely, introduction of the multi-ACCDOA representation to handle multiple simultaneous occurences of events of the same class, and support for additional improved input features for the microphone array format. Results of the baseline indicate that with a suitable training strategy a reasonable detection and localization performance can be achieved on real sound scene recordings. The dataset is available in https://zenodo.org/record/6387880.

We introduce DataComp for Language Models (DCLM), a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models. As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad suite of 53 downstream evaluations. Participants in the DCLM benchmark can experiment with data curation strategies such as deduplication, filtering, and data mixing at model scales ranging from 412M to 7B parameters. As a baseline for DCLM, we conduct extensive experiments and find that model-based filtering is key to assembling a high-quality training set. The resulting dataset, DCLM-Baseline enables training a 7B parameter language model from scratch to 64% 5-shot accuracy on MMLU with 2.6T training tokens. Compared to MAP-Neo, the previous state-of-the-art in open-data language models, DCLM-Baseline represents a 6.6 percentage point improvement on MMLU while being trained with 40% less compute. Our baseline model is also comparable to Mistral-7B-v0.3 and Llama 3 8B on MMLU (63% & 66%), and performs similarly on an average of 53 natural language understanding tasks while being trained with 6.6x less compute than Llama 3 8B. Our results highlight the importance of dataset design for training language models and offer a starting point for further research on data curation.

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

The recent advancements in generative AI models, which can create realistic and human-like content, are significantly transforming how people communicate, create, and work. While the appropriate use of generative AI models can benefit the society, their misuse poses significant threats to data reliability and authentication. However, due to a lack of aligned multimodal datasets, effective and robust methods for detecting machine-generated content are still in the early stages of development. In this paper, we introduce RU-AI, a new large-scale multimodal dataset designed for the robust and efficient detection of machine-generated content in text, image, and voice. Our dataset is constructed from three large publicly available datasets: Flickr8K, COCO, and Places205, by combining the original datasets and their corresponding machine-generated pairs. Additionally, experimental results show that our proposed unified model, which incorporates a multimodal embedding module with a multilayer perceptron network, can effectively determine the origin of the data (i.e., original data samples or machine-generated ones) from RU-AI. However, future work is still required to address the remaining challenges posed by RU-AI. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ZhihaoZhang97/RU-AI.

Short-video platforms show an increasing impact on people's daily lives nowadays, with billions of active users spending plenty of time each day. The interactions between users and online platforms give rise to many scientific problems across computational social science and artificial intelligence. However, despite the rapid development of short-video platforms, currently there are serious shortcomings in existing relevant datasets on three aspects: inadequate user-video feedback, limited user attributes and lack of video content. To address these problems, we provide a large-scale dataset with rich user behavior, attributes and video content from a real mobile short-video platform. This dataset covers 10,000 voluntary users and 153,561 videos, and we conduct four-fold technical validations of the dataset. First, we verify the richness of the behavior and attribute data. Second, we confirm the representing ability of the content features. Third, we provide benchmarking results on recommendation algorithms with our dataset. Finally, we explore the filter bubble phenomenon on the platform using the dataset. We believe the dataset could support the broad research community, including but not limited to user modeling, social science, human behavior understanding, etc. The dataset and code is available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/ShortVideo_dataset.

Previous approaches for scene text detection have already achieved promising performances across various benchmarks. However, they usually fall short when dealing with challenging scenarios, even when equipped with deep neural network models, because the overall performance is determined by the interplay of multiple stages and components in the pipelines. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful pipeline that yields fast and accurate text detection in natural scenes. The pipeline directly predicts words or text lines of arbitrary orientations and quadrilateral shapes in full images, eliminating unnecessary intermediate steps (e.g., candidate aggregation and word partitioning), with a single neural network. The simplicity of our pipeline allows concentrating efforts on designing loss functions and neural network architecture. Experiments on standard datasets including ICDAR 2015, COCO-Text and MSRA-TD500 demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. On the ICDAR 2015 dataset, the proposed algorithm achieves an F-score of 0.7820 at 13.2fps at 720p resolution.

Large multimodal datasets have been instrumental in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion, and GPT-4. At the same time, datasets rarely receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a benchmark where the training code is fixed and researchers innovate by proposing new training sets. We provide a testbed for dataset experiments centered around a new candidate pool of 12.8B image-text pairs from Common Crawl. Participants in our benchmark design new filtering techniques or curate new data sources and then evaluate their new dataset by running our standardized CLIP training code and testing on 38 downstream test sets. Our benchmark consists of multiple scales, with four candidate pool sizes and associated compute budgets ranging from 12.8M to 12.8B samples seen during training. This multi-scale design facilitates the study of scaling trends and makes the benchmark accessible to researchers with varying resources. Our baseline experiments show that the DataComp workflow is a promising way of improving multimodal datasets. We introduce DataComp-1B, a dataset created by applying a simple filtering algorithm to the 12.8B candidate pool. The resulting 1.4B subset enables training a CLIP ViT-L/14 from scratch to 79.2% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet. Our new ViT-L/14 model outperforms a larger ViT-g/14 trained on LAION-2B by 0.7 percentage points while requiring 9x less training compute. We also outperform OpenAI's CLIP ViT-L/14 by 3.7 percentage points, which is trained with the same compute budget as our model. These gains highlight the potential for improving model performance by carefully curating training sets. We view DataComp-1B as only the first step and hope that DataComp paves the way toward the next generation of multimodal datasets.

We present FIND, a generalized interface for aligning foundation models' embeddings. As shown in teaser figure, a lightweight transformer interface without tuning any foundation model weights is enough for a unified image (segmentation) and dataset-level (retrieval) understanding. The proposed interface has the following favorable attributes: (1) Generalizable. It applies to various tasks spanning retrieval, segmentation, etc., under the same architecture and weights. (2) Prototypable. Different tasks are able to be implemented through prototyping attention masks and embedding types. (3) Extendable. The proposed interface is adaptive to new tasks, and new models. (4) Interleavable. With the benefit of multi-task multi-modal training, the proposed interface creates an interleaved shared embedding space. In light of the interleaved embedding space, we introduce the FIND-Bench, which introduces new training and evaluation annotations to the COCO dataset for interleave segmentation and retrieval. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on FIND-Bench and competitive performance on standard retrieval and segmentation settings. The training, evaluation, and demo code as well as the dataset have been released at https://github.com/UX-Decoder/FIND.

We introduce a new large-scale dataset for the advancement of object detection techniques and overhead object detection research. This satellite imagery dataset enables research progress pertaining to four key computer vision frontiers. We utilize a novel process for geospatial category detection and bounding box annotation with three stages of quality control. Our data is collected from WorldView-3 satellites at 0.3m ground sample distance, providing higher resolution imagery than most public satellite imagery datasets. We compare xView to other object detection datasets in both natural and overhead imagery domains and then provide a baseline analysis using the Single Shot MultiBox Detector. xView is one of the largest and most diverse publicly available object-detection datasets to date, with over 1 million objects across 60 classes in over 1,400 km^2 of imagery.

Access to labeled reference data is one of the grand challenges in supervised machine learning endeavors. This is especially true for an automated analysis of remote sensing images on a global scale, which enables us to address global challenges such as urbanization and climate change using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. To meet these pressing needs, especially in urban research, we provide open access to a valuable benchmark dataset named "So2Sat LCZ42," which consists of local climate zone (LCZ) labels of about half a million Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 image patches in 42 urban agglomerations (plus 10 additional smaller areas) across the globe. This dataset was labeled by 15 domain experts following a carefully designed labeling work flow and evaluation process over a period of six months. As rarely done in other labeled remote sensing dataset, we conducted rigorous quality assessment by domain experts. The dataset achieved an overall confidence of 85%. We believe this LCZ dataset is a first step towards an unbiased globallydistributed dataset for urban growth monitoring using machine learning methods, because LCZ provide a rather objective measure other than many other semantic land use and land cover classifications. It provides measures of the morphology, compactness, and height of urban areas, which are less dependent on human and culture. This dataset can be accessed from http://doi.org/10.14459/2018mp1483140.

This paper embarks on an exploration into the Large Language Model (LLM) datasets, which play a crucial role in the remarkable advancements of LLMs. The datasets serve as the foundational infrastructure analogous to a root system that sustains and nurtures the development of LLMs. Consequently, examination of these datasets emerges as a critical topic in research. In order to address the current lack of a comprehensive overview and thorough analysis of LLM datasets, and to gain insights into their current status and future trends, this survey consolidates and categorizes the fundamental aspects of LLM datasets from five perspectives: (1) Pre-training Corpora; (2) Instruction Fine-tuning Datasets; (3) Preference Datasets; (4) Evaluation Datasets; (5) Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) Datasets. The survey sheds light on the prevailing challenges and points out potential avenues for future investigation. Additionally, a comprehensive review of the existing available dataset resources is also provided, including statistics from 444 datasets, covering 8 language categories and spanning 32 domains. Information from 20 dimensions is incorporated into the dataset statistics. The total data size surveyed surpasses 774.5 TB for pre-training corpora and 700M instances for other datasets. We aim to present the entire landscape of LLM text datasets, serving as a comprehensive reference for researchers in this field and contributing to future studies. Related resources are available at: https://github.com/lmmlzn/Awesome-LLMs-Datasets.

The availability of large-scale image captioning and visual question answering datasets has contributed significantly to recent successes in vision-and-language pre-training. However, these datasets are often collected with overrestrictive requirements inherited from their original target tasks (e.g., image caption generation), which limit the resulting dataset scale and diversity. We take a step further in pushing the limits of vision-and-language pre-training data by relaxing the data collection pipeline used in Conceptual Captions 3M (CC3M) [Sharma et al. 2018] and introduce the Conceptual 12M (CC12M), a dataset with 12 million image-text pairs specifically meant to be used for vision-and-language pre-training. We perform an analysis of this dataset and benchmark its effectiveness against CC3M on multiple downstream tasks with an emphasis on long-tail visual recognition. Our results clearly illustrate the benefit of scaling up pre-training data for vision-and-language tasks, as indicated by the new state-of-the-art results on both the nocaps and Conceptual Captions benchmarks.

One of the key shortcomings in current text-to-image (T2I) models is their inability to consistently generate images which faithfully follow the spatial relationships specified in the text prompt. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive investigation of this limitation, while also developing datasets and methods that achieve state-of-the-art performance. First, we find that current vision-language datasets do not represent spatial relationships well enough; to alleviate this bottleneck, we create SPRIGHT, the first spatially-focused, large scale dataset, by re-captioning 6 million images from 4 widely used vision datasets. Through a 3-fold evaluation and analysis pipeline, we find that SPRIGHT largely improves upon existing datasets in capturing spatial relationships. To demonstrate its efficacy, we leverage only ~0.25% of SPRIGHT and achieve a 22% improvement in generating spatially accurate images while also improving the FID and CMMD scores. Secondly, we find that training on images containing a large number of objects results in substantial improvements in spatial consistency. Notably, we attain state-of-the-art on T2I-CompBench with a spatial score of 0.2133, by fine-tuning on <500 images. Finally, through a set of controlled experiments and ablations, we document multiple findings that we believe will enhance the understanding of factors that affect spatial consistency in text-to-image models. We publicly release our dataset and model to foster further research in this area.

Keeping track of all relevant recent publications and experimental results for a research area is a challenging task. Prior work has demonstrated the efficacy of information extraction models in various scientific areas. Recently, several datasets have been released for the yet understudied materials science domain. However, these datasets focus on sub-problems such as parsing synthesis procedures or on sub-domains, e.g., solid oxide fuel cells. In this resource paper, we present MuLMS, a new dataset of 50 open-access articles, spanning seven sub-domains of materials science. The corpus has been annotated by domain experts with several layers ranging from named entities over relations to frame structures. We present competitive neural models for all tasks and demonstrate that multi-task training with existing related resources leads to benefits.

Image-Text Matching (ITM) task, a fundamental vision-language (VL) task, suffers from the inherent ambiguity arising from multiplicity and imperfect annotations. Deterministic functions are not sufficiently powerful to capture ambiguity, prompting the exploration of probabilistic embeddings to tackle the challenge. However, the existing probabilistic ITM approach encounters two key shortcomings; the burden of heavy computations due to the Monte Carlo approximation, and the loss saturation issue in the face of abundant false negatives. To overcome the issues, this paper presents an improved Probabilistic Cross-Modal Embeddings (named PCME++) by introducing a new probabilistic distance with a closed-form solution. In addition, two optimization techniques are proposed to enhance PCME++ further: first, the incorporation of pseudo-positives to prevent the loss saturation problem under massive false negatives; second, mixed sample data augmentation for probabilistic matching. Experimental results on MS-COCO Caption and two extended benchmarks, CxC and ECCV Caption, demonstrate the effectiveness of PCME++ compared to state-of-the-art ITM methods. The robustness of PCME++ is also evaluated under noisy image-text correspondences. In addition, the potential applicability of PCME++ in automatic prompt tuning for zero-shot classification is shown. The code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/pcmepp.

We present ODISE: Open-vocabulary DIffusion-based panoptic SEgmentation, which unifies pre-trained text-image diffusion and discriminative models to perform open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation. Text-to-image diffusion models have the remarkable ability to generate high-quality images with diverse open-vocabulary language descriptions. This demonstrates that their internal representation space is highly correlated with open concepts in the real world. Text-image discriminative models like CLIP, on the other hand, are good at classifying images into open-vocabulary labels. We leverage the frozen internal representations of both these models to perform panoptic segmentation of any category in the wild. Our approach outperforms the previous state of the art by significant margins on both open-vocabulary panoptic and semantic segmentation tasks. In particular, with COCO training only, our method achieves 23.4 PQ and 30.0 mIoU on the ADE20K dataset, with 8.3 PQ and 7.9 mIoU absolute improvement over the previous state of the art. We open-source our code and models at https://github.com/NVlabs/ODISE .

Curation methods for massive vision-language datasets trade off between dataset size and quality. However, even the highest quality of available curated captions are far too short to capture the rich visual detail in an image. To show the value of dense and highly-aligned image-text pairs, we collect the Densely Captioned Images (DCI) dataset, containing 8012 natural images human-annotated with mask-aligned descriptions averaging above 1000 words each. With precise and reliable captions associated with specific parts of an image, we can evaluate vision-language models' (VLMs) understanding of image content with a novel task that matches each caption with its corresponding subcrop. As current models are often limited to 77 text tokens, we also introduce a summarized version (sDCI) in which each caption length is limited. We show that modern techniques that make progress on standard benchmarks do not correspond with significant improvement on our sDCI based benchmark. Lastly, we finetune CLIP using sDCI and show significant improvements over the baseline despite a small training set. By releasing the first human annotated dense image captioning dataset, we hope to enable the development of new benchmarks or fine-tuning recipes for the next generation of VLMs to come.

Most existing datasets for sound event recognition (SER) are relatively small and/or domain-specific, with the exception of AudioSet, based on over 2M tracks from YouTube videos and encompassing over 500 sound classes. However, AudioSet is not an open dataset as its official release consists of pre-computed audio features. Downloading the original audio tracks can be problematic due to YouTube videos gradually disappearing and usage rights issues. To provide an alternative benchmark dataset and thus foster SER research, we introduce FSD50K, an open dataset containing over 51k audio clips totalling over 100h of audio manually labeled using 200 classes drawn from the AudioSet Ontology. The audio clips are licensed under Creative Commons licenses, making the dataset freely distributable (including waveforms). We provide a detailed description of the FSD50K creation process, tailored to the particularities of Freesound data, including challenges encountered and solutions adopted. We include a comprehensive dataset characterization along with discussion of limitations and key factors to allow its audio-informed usage. Finally, we conduct sound event classification experiments to provide baseline systems as well as insight on the main factors to consider when splitting Freesound audio data for SER. Our goal is to develop a dataset to be widely adopted by the community as a new open benchmark for SER research.

Face detection is one of the most studied topics in the computer vision community. Much of the progresses have been made by the availability of face detection benchmark datasets. We show that there is a gap between current face detection performance and the real world requirements. To facilitate future face detection research, we introduce the WIDER FACE dataset, which is 10 times larger than existing datasets. The dataset contains rich annotations, including occlusions, poses, event categories, and face bounding boxes. Faces in the proposed dataset are extremely challenging due to large variations in scale, pose and occlusion, as shown in Fig. 1. Furthermore, we show that WIDER FACE dataset is an effective training source for face detection. We benchmark several representative detection systems, providing an overview of state-of-the-art performance and propose a solution to deal with large scale variation. Finally, we discuss common failure cases that worth to be further investigated. Dataset can be downloaded at: mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/WIDERFace

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

Introduction: The scientific publishing landscape is expanding rapidly, creating challenges for researchers to stay up-to-date with the evolution of the literature. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has emerged as a potent approach to automating knowledge extraction from this vast amount of publications and preprints. Tasks such as Named-Entity Recognition (NER) and Named-Entity Linking (NEL), in conjunction with context-dependent semantic interpretation, offer promising and complementary approaches to extracting structured information and revealing key concepts. Results: We present the SourceData-NLP dataset produced through the routine curation of papers during the publication process. A unique feature of this dataset is its emphasis on the annotation of bioentities in figure legends. We annotate eight classes of biomedical entities (small molecules, gene products, subcellular components, cell lines, cell types, tissues, organisms, and diseases), their role in the experimental design, and the nature of the experimental method as an additional class. SourceData-NLP contains more than 620,000 annotated biomedical entities, curated from 18,689 figures in 3,223 papers in molecular and cell biology. We illustrate the dataset's usefulness by assessing BioLinkBERT and PubmedBERT, two transformers-based models, fine-tuned on the SourceData-NLP dataset for NER. We also introduce a novel context-dependent semantic task that infers whether an entity is the target of a controlled intervention or the object of measurement. Conclusions: SourceData-NLP's scale highlights the value of integrating curation into publishing. Models trained with SourceData-NLP will furthermore enable the development of tools able to extract causal hypotheses from the literature and assemble them into knowledge graphs.

The topic of Climate Change (CC) has received limited attention in NLP despite its real world urgency. Activists and policy-makers need NLP tools in order to effectively process the vast and rapidly growing textual data produced on CC. Their utility, however, primarily depends on whether the current state-of-the-art models can generalize across various tasks in the CC domain. In order to address this gap, we introduce Climate Change Benchmark (ClimaBench), a benchmark collection of existing disparate datasets for evaluating model performance across a diverse set of CC NLU tasks systematically. Further, we enhance the benchmark by releasing two large-scale labelled text classification and question-answering datasets curated from publicly available environmental disclosures. Lastly, we provide an analysis of several generic and CC-oriented models answering whether fine-tuning on domain text offers any improvements across these tasks. We hope this work provides a standard assessment tool for research on CC text data.

Audio-language models (ALMs) process sounds to provide a linguistic description of sound-producing events and scenes. Recent advances in computing power and dataset creation have led to significant progress in this domain. This paper surveys existing datasets used for training audio-language models, emphasizing the recent trend towards using large, diverse datasets to enhance model performance. Key sources of these datasets include the Freesound platform and AudioSet that have contributed to the field's rapid growth. Although prior surveys primarily address techniques and training details, this survey categorizes and evaluates a wide array of datasets, addressing their origins, characteristics, and use cases. It also performs a data leak analysis to ensure dataset integrity and mitigate bias between datasets. This survey was conducted by analyzing research papers up to and including December 2023, and does not contain any papers after that period.

Training large vision-language models requires extensive, high-quality image-text pairs. Existing web-scraped datasets, however, are noisy and lack detailed image descriptions. To bridge this gap, we introduce PixelProse, a comprehensive dataset of over 16M (million) synthetically generated captions, leveraging cutting-edge vision-language models for detailed and accurate descriptions. To ensure data integrity, we rigorously analyze our dataset for problematic content, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), personally identifiable information (PII), and toxicity. We also provide valuable metadata such as watermark presence and aesthetic scores, aiding in further dataset filtering. We hope PixelProse will be a valuable resource for future vision-language research. PixelProse is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tomg-group-umd/pixelprose

Humans tend to decompose a sentence into different parts like sth do sth at someplace and then fill each part with certain content. Inspired by this, we follow the principle of modular design to propose a novel image captioner: learning to Collocate Visual-Linguistic Neural Modules (CVLNM). Unlike the widely used neural module networks in VQA, where the language (\ie, question) is fully observable, the task of collocating visual-linguistic modules is more challenging. This is because the language is only partially observable, for which we need to dynamically collocate the modules during the process of image captioning. To sum up, we make the following technical contributions to design and train our CVLNM: 1) distinguishable module design -- four modules in the encoder including one linguistic module for function words and three visual modules for different content words (\ie, noun, adjective, and verb) and another linguistic one in the decoder for commonsense reasoning, 2) a self-attention based module controller for robustifying the visual reasoning, 3) a part-of-speech based syntax loss imposed on the module controller for further regularizing the training of our CVLNM. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset show that our CVLNM is more effective, \eg, achieving a new state-of-the-art 129.5 CIDEr-D, and more robust, \eg, being less likely to overfit to dataset bias and suffering less when fewer training samples are available. Codes are available at https://github.com/GCYZSL/CVLMN

Recent advancements in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have leveraged extensive multimodal datasets to enhance capabilities in complex knowledge-driven tasks. However, persistent challenges in perceptual and reasoning errors limit their efficacy, particularly in interpreting intricate visual data and deducing multimodal relationships. Addressing these issues, we introduce a novel dataset format, PIN (Paired and INterleaved multimodal documents), designed to significantly improve both the depth and breadth of multimodal training. The PIN format is built on three foundational principles: knowledge intensity, scalability, and support for diverse training modalities. This innovative format combines markdown files and comprehensive images to enrich training data with a dense knowledge structure and versatile training strategies. We present PIN-14M, an open-source dataset comprising 14 million samples derived from a diverse range of Chinese and English sources, tailored to include complex web and scientific content. This dataset is constructed meticulously to ensure data quality and ethical integrity, aiming to facilitate advanced training strategies and improve model robustness against common multimodal training pitfalls. Our initial results, forming the basis of this technical report, suggest significant potential for the PIN format in refining LMM performance, with plans for future expansions and detailed evaluations of its impact on model capabilities.

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation, but their real-world applications are hampered by the extensive time needed for hundreds of diffusion steps. Although progressive distillation has been proposed to speed up diffusion sampling to 2-8 steps, it still falls short in one-step generation, and necessitates training multiple student models, which is highly parameter-extensive and time-consuming. To overcome these limitations, we introduce High-frequency-Promoting Adaptation (HiPA), a parameter-efficient approach to enable one-step text-to-image diffusion. Grounded in the insight that high-frequency information is essential but highly lacking in one-step diffusion, HiPA focuses on training one-step, low-rank adaptors to specifically enhance the under-represented high-frequency abilities of advanced diffusion models. The learned adaptors empower these diffusion models to generate high-quality images in just a single step. Compared with progressive distillation, HiPA achieves much better performance in one-step text-to-image generation (37.3 rightarrow 23.8 in FID-5k on MS-COCO 2017) and 28.6x training speed-up (108.8 rightarrow 3.8 A100 GPU days), requiring only 0.04% training parameters (7,740 million rightarrow 3.3 million). We also demonstrate HiPA's effectiveness in text-guided image editing, inpainting and super-resolution tasks, where our adapted models consistently deliver high-quality outputs in just one diffusion step. The source code will be released.

This paper presents BOUQuET, a multicentric and multi-register/domain dataset and benchmark, and its broader collaborative extension initiative. This dataset is handcrafted in non-English languages first, each of these source languages being represented among the 23 languages commonly used by half of the world's population and therefore having the potential to serve as pivot languages that will enable more accurate translations. The dataset is specially designed to avoid contamination and be multicentric, so as to enforce representation of multilingual language features. In addition, the dataset goes beyond the sentence level, as it is organized in paragraphs of various lengths. Compared with related machine translation (MT) datasets, we show that BOUQuET has a broader representation of domains while simplifying the translation task for non-experts. Therefore, BOUQuET is specially suitable for the open initiative and call for translation participation that we are launching to extend it to a multi-way parallel corpus to any written language.

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation with its exceptional quality and creativity. However, its multi-step sampling process is known to be slow, often requiring tens of inference steps to obtain satisfactory results. Previous attempts to improve its sampling speed and reduce computational costs through distillation have been unsuccessful in achieving a functional one-step model. In this paper, we explore a recent method called Rectified Flow, which, thus far, has only been applied to small datasets. The core of Rectified Flow lies in its reflow procedure, which straightens the trajectories of probability flows, refines the coupling between noises and images, and facilitates the distillation process with student models. We propose a novel text-conditioned pipeline to turn Stable Diffusion (SD) into an ultra-fast one-step model, in which we find reflow plays a critical role in improving the assignment between noise and images. Leveraging our new pipeline, we create, to the best of our knowledge, the first one-step diffusion-based text-to-image generator with SD-level image quality, achieving an FID (Frechet Inception Distance) of 23.3 on MS COCO 2017-5k, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art technique, progressive distillation, by a significant margin (37.2 rightarrow 23.3 in FID). By utilizing an expanded network with 1.7B parameters, we further improve the FID to 22.4. We call our one-step models InstaFlow. On MS COCO 2014-30k, InstaFlow yields an FID of 13.1 in just 0.09 second, the best in leq 0.1 second regime, outperforming the recent StyleGAN-T (13.9 in 0.1 second). Notably, the training of InstaFlow only costs 199 A100 GPU days. Project page:~https://github.com/gnobitab/InstaFlow.

Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence offer tremendous promise for the development of self-driving applications. Deep Neural Networks, in particular, are being utilized to support the operation of semi-autonomous cars through object identification and semantic segmentation. To assess the inadequacy of the current dataset in the context of autonomous and semi-autonomous cars, we created a new dataset named ANNA. This study discusses a custom-built dataset that includes some unidentified vehicles in the perspective of Bangladesh, which are not included in the existing dataset. A dataset validity check was performed by evaluating models using the Intersection Over Union (IOU) metric. The results demonstrated that the model trained on our custom dataset was more precise and efficient than the models trained on the KITTI or COCO dataset concerning Bangladeshi traffic. The research presented in this paper also emphasizes the importance of developing accurate and efficient object detection algorithms for the advancement of autonomous vehicles.

We present a new dataset with the goal of advancing the state-of-the-art in object recognition by placing the question of object recognition in the context of the broader question of scene understanding. This is achieved by gathering images of complex everyday scenes containing common objects in their natural context. Objects are labeled using per-instance segmentations to aid in precise object localization. Our dataset contains photos of 91 objects types that would be easily recognizable by a 4 year old. With a total of 2.5 million labeled instances in 328k images, the creation of our dataset drew upon extensive crowd worker involvement via novel user interfaces for category detection, instance spotting and instance segmentation. We present a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset in comparison to PASCAL, ImageNet, and SUN. Finally, we provide baseline performance analysis for bounding box and segmentation detection results using a Deformable Parts Model.

In Costa Rica, an average of 5 tons of seashells are extracted from ecosystems annually. Confiscated seashells, cannot be returned to their ecosystems due to the lack of origin recognition. To address this issue, we developed a convolutional neural network (CNN) specifically for seashell identification. We built a dataset from scratch, consisting of approximately 19000 images from the Pacific and Caribbean coasts. Using this dataset, the model achieved a classification accuracy exceeding 85%. The model has been integrated into a user-friendly application, which has classified over 36,000 seashells to date, delivering real-time results within 3 seconds per image. To further enhance the system's accuracy, an anomaly detection mechanism was incorporated to filter out irrelevant or anomalous inputs, ensuring only valid seashell images are processed.

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.

Pre-trained representations are becoming crucial for many NLP and perception tasks. While representation learning in NLP has transitioned to training on raw text without human annotations, visual and vision-language representations still rely heavily on curated training datasets that are expensive or require expert knowledge. For vision applications, representations are mostly learned using datasets with explicit class labels such as ImageNet or OpenImages. For vision-language, popular datasets like Conceptual Captions, MSCOCO, or CLIP all involve a non-trivial data collection (and cleaning) process. This costly curation process limits the size of datasets and hence hinders the scaling of trained models. In this paper, we leverage a noisy dataset of over one billion image alt-text pairs, obtained without expensive filtering or post-processing steps in the Conceptual Captions dataset. A simple dual-encoder architecture learns to align visual and language representations of the image and text pairs using a contrastive loss. We show that the scale of our corpus can make up for its noise and leads to state-of-the-art representations even with such a simple learning scheme. Our visual representation achieves strong performance when transferred to classification tasks such as ImageNet and VTAB. The aligned visual and language representations enables zero-shot image classification and also set new state-of-the-art results on Flickr30K and MSCOCO image-text retrieval benchmarks, even when compared with more sophisticated cross-attention models. The representations also enable cross-modality search with complex text and text + image queries.

One common trend in recent studies of language models (LMs) is the use of standardized tests for evaluation. However, despite being the fifth most spoken language worldwide, few such evaluations have been conducted in Portuguese. This is mainly due to the lack of high-quality datasets available to the community for carrying out evaluations in Portuguese. To address this gap, we introduce the Brazilian Leading Universities Entrance eXams (BLUEX), a dataset of entrance exams from the two leading universities in Brazil: UNICAMP and USP. The dataset includes annotated metadata for evaluating the performance of NLP models on a variety of subjects. Furthermore, BLUEX includes a collection of recently administered exams that are unlikely to be included in the training data of many popular LMs as of 2023. The dataset is also annotated to indicate the position of images in each question, providing a valuable resource for advancing the state-of-the-art in multimodal language understanding and reasoning. We describe the creation and characteristics of BLUEX and establish a benchmark through experiments with state-of-the-art LMs, demonstrating its potential for advancing the state-of-the-art in natural language understanding and reasoning in Portuguese. The data and relevant code can be found at https://github.com/Portuguese-Benchmark-Datasets/BLUEX

The AI community has made significant strides in developing powerful foundation models, driven by large-scale multimodal datasets. However, in the audio representation learning community, the present audio-language datasets suffer from limitations such as insufficient volume, simplistic content, and arduous collection procedures. To tackle these challenges, we present an innovative and automatic audio caption generation pipeline based on a series of public tools or APIs, and construct a large-scale, high-quality, audio-language dataset, named as Auto-ACD, comprising over 1.9M audio-text pairs. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset, we train popular models on our dataset and show performance improvement on various downstream tasks, namely, audio-language retrieval, audio captioning, environment classification. In addition, we establish a novel test set and provide a benchmark for audio-text tasks. The proposed dataset will be released at https://auto-acd.github.io/.

This paper introduces a dataset for improving real-time object recognition systems to aid blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals in navigation tasks. The dataset comprises 21 videos of BLV individuals navigating outdoor spaces, and a taxonomy of 90 objects crucial for BLV navigation, refined through a focus group study. We also provide object labeling for the 90 objects across 31 video segments created from the 21 videos. A deeper analysis reveals that most contemporary datasets used in training computer vision models contain only a small subset of the taxonomy in our dataset. Preliminary evaluation of state-of-the-art computer vision models on our dataset highlights shortcomings in accurately detecting key objects relevant to BLV navigation, emphasizing the need for specialized datasets. We make our dataset publicly available, offering valuable resources for developing more inclusive navigation systems for BLV individuals.

Remote sensing image scene classification plays an important role in a wide range of applications and hence has been receiving remarkable attention. During the past years, significant efforts have been made to develop various datasets or present a variety of approaches for scene classification from remote sensing images. However, a systematic review of the literature concerning datasets and methods for scene classification is still lacking. In addition, almost all existing datasets have a number of limitations, including the small scale of scene classes and the image numbers, the lack of image variations and diversity, and the saturation of accuracy. These limitations severely limit the development of new approaches especially deep learning-based methods. This paper first provides a comprehensive review of the recent progress. Then, we propose a large-scale dataset, termed "NWPU-RESISC45", which is a publicly available benchmark for REmote Sensing Image Scene Classification (RESISC), created by Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU). This dataset contains 31,500 images, covering 45 scene classes with 700 images in each class. The proposed NWPU-RESISC45 (i) is large-scale on the scene classes and the total image number, (ii) holds big variations in translation, spatial resolution, viewpoint, object pose, illumination, background, and occlusion, and (iii) has high within-class diversity and between-class similarity. The creation of this dataset will enable the community to develop and evaluate various data-driven algorithms. Finally, several representative methods are evaluated using the proposed dataset and the results are reported as a useful baseline for future research.

The massive growth of image-text data through web crawling inherently presents the challenge of variability in data quality. This paper introduces a novel algorithm, rooted in human knowledge, to compress this vast corpus of web-crawled image-text datasets to a compact and high-quality form. Our method unfolds in three major steps. First, we collect an image-text dataset, wherein each image is associated with multiple captions sourced from diverse origins. Then, to systemically capture human preferences regarding the best caption paired with each image, we establish a comprehensive set of both subjective and objective criteria for critically guiding the alignment assessment from labelers. Lastly, we train a reward model on the annotated dataset to internalize the nuanced human understanding of image-text alignment. The resulting reward model thus can act as a human-like referee to filter misaligned/low-quality image-text pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that we are able to secure (or even improve) model performance by compressing the image-text datasets up to ~90%. An impressive example is that, by aggressively reducing the total training sample from 130M to 15.5M (e.g., ~9x smaller), our BLIP-B/16 models still consistently show superior performance compared with the full-size-dataset counterpart on image-text retrieval (Flickr30K, COCO) by ~2.5% in Recall@1, and on image-captioning (Nocaps, COCO) by ~10.0% in CIDEr and ~2.7% in SPICE.

There are a huge number of features which are said to improve Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accuracy. Practical testing of combinations of such features on large datasets, and theoretical justification of the result, is required. Some features operate on certain models exclusively and for certain problems exclusively, or only for small-scale datasets; while some features, such as batch-normalization and residual-connections, are applicable to the majority of models, tasks, and datasets. We assume that such universal features include Weighted-Residual-Connections (WRC), Cross-Stage-Partial-connections (CSP), Cross mini-Batch Normalization (CmBN), Self-adversarial-training (SAT) and Mish-activation. We use new features: WRC, CSP, CmBN, SAT, Mish activation, Mosaic data augmentation, CmBN, DropBlock regularization, and CIoU loss, and combine some of them to achieve state-of-the-art results: 43.5% AP (65.7% AP50) for the MS COCO dataset at a realtime speed of ~65 FPS on Tesla V100. Source code is at https://github.com/AlexeyAB/darknet

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

We study the effectiveness of data-balancing for mitigating biases in contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP), identifying areas of strength and limitation. First, we reaffirm prior conclusions that CLIP models can inadvertently absorb societal stereotypes. To counter this, we present a novel algorithm, called Multi-Modal Moment Matching (M4), designed to reduce both representation and association biases (i.e. in first- and second-order statistics) in multimodal data. We use M4 to conduct an in-depth analysis taking into account various factors, such as the model, representation, and data size. Our study also explores the dynamic nature of how CLIP learns and unlearns biases. In particular, we find that fine-tuning is effective in countering representation biases, though its impact diminishes for association biases. Also, data balancing has a mixed impact on quality: it tends to improve classification but can hurt retrieval. Interestingly, data and architectural improvements seem to mitigate the negative impact of data balancing on performance; e.g. applying M4 to SigLIP-B/16 with data quality filters improves COCO image-to-text retrieval @5 from 86% (without data balancing) to 87% and ImageNet 0-shot classification from 77% to 77.5%! Finally, we conclude with recommendations for improving the efficacy of data balancing in multimodal systems.

Accurate uncertainty estimates are essential for deploying deep object detectors in safety-critical systems. The development and evaluation of probabilistic object detectors have been hindered by shortcomings in existing performance measures, which tend to involve arbitrary thresholds or limit the detector's choice of distributions. In this work, we propose to view object detection as a set prediction task where detectors predict the distribution over the set of objects. Using the negative log-likelihood for random finite sets, we present a proper scoring rule for evaluating and training probabilistic object detectors. The proposed method can be applied to existing probabilistic detectors, is free from thresholds, and enables fair comparison between architectures. Three different types of detectors are evaluated on the COCO dataset. Our results indicate that the training of existing detectors is optimized toward non-probabilistic metrics. We hope to encourage the development of new object detectors that can accurately estimate their own uncertainty. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/pmb-nll.

The lack of standardized robustness metrics and the widespread reliance on numerous unrelated benchmark datasets for testing have created a gap between academically validated robust models and their often problematic practical adoption. To address this, we introduce XIMAGENET-12, an explainable benchmark dataset with over 200K images and 15,600 manual semantic annotations. Covering 12 categories from ImageNet to represent objects commonly encountered in practical life and simulating six diverse scenarios, including overexposure, blurring, color changing, etc., we further propose a novel robustness criterion that extends beyond model generation ability assessment. This benchmark dataset, along with related code, is available at https://sites.google.com/view/ximagenet-12/home. Researchers and practitioners can leverage this resource to evaluate the robustness of their visual models under challenging conditions and ultimately benefit from the demands of practical computer vision systems.

This paper introduces a new IncidentAI dataset for safety prevention. Different from prior corpora that usually contain a single task, our dataset comprises three tasks: named entity recognition, cause-effect extraction, and information retrieval. The dataset is annotated by domain experts who have at least six years of practical experience as high-pressure gas conservation managers. We validate the contribution of the dataset in the scenario of safety prevention. Preliminary results on the three tasks show that NLP techniques are beneficial for analyzing incident reports to prevent future failures. The dataset facilitates future research in NLP and incident management communities. The access to the dataset is also provided (the IncidentAI dataset is available at: https://github.com/Cinnamon/incident-ai-dataset).

This paper presents an end-to-end semi-supervised object detection approach, in contrast to previous more complex multi-stage methods. The end-to-end training gradually improves pseudo label qualities during the curriculum, and the more and more accurate pseudo labels in turn benefit object detection training. We also propose two simple yet effective techniques within this framework: a soft teacher mechanism where the classification loss of each unlabeled bounding box is weighed by the classification score produced by the teacher network; a box jittering approach to select reliable pseudo boxes for the learning of box regression. On the COCO benchmark, the proposed approach outperforms previous methods by a large margin under various labeling ratios, i.e. 1\%, 5\% and 10\%. Moreover, our approach proves to perform also well when the amount of labeled data is relatively large. For example, it can improve a 40.9 mAP baseline detector trained using the full COCO training set by +3.6 mAP, reaching 44.5 mAP, by leveraging the 123K unlabeled images of COCO. On the state-of-the-art Swin Transformer based object detector (58.9 mAP on test-dev), it can still significantly improve the detection accuracy by +1.5 mAP, reaching 60.4 mAP, and improve the instance segmentation accuracy by +1.2 mAP, reaching 52.4 mAP. Further incorporating with the Object365 pre-trained model, the detection accuracy reaches 61.3 mAP and the instance segmentation accuracy reaches 53.0 mAP, pushing the new state-of-the-art.

Multimodal Deep Learning enhances decision-making by integrating diverse information sources, such as texts, images, audio, and videos. To develop trustworthy multimodal approaches, it is essential to understand how uncertainty impacts these models. We introduce LUMA, a unique benchmark dataset, featuring audio, image, and textual data from 50 classes, for learning from uncertain and multimodal data. It extends the well-known CIFAR 10/100 dataset with audio samples extracted from three audio corpora, and text data generated using the Gemma-7B Large Language Model (LLM). The LUMA dataset enables the controlled injection of varying types and degrees of uncertainty to achieve and tailor specific experiments and benchmarking initiatives. LUMA is also available as a Python package including the functions for generating multiple variants of the dataset with controlling the diversity of the data, the amount of noise for each modality, and adding out-of-distribution samples. A baseline pre-trained model is also provided alongside three uncertainty quantification methods: Monte-Carlo Dropout, Deep Ensemble, and Reliable Conflictive Multi-View Learning. This comprehensive dataset and its tools are intended to promote and support the development and benchmarking of trustworthy and robust multimodal deep learning approaches.

Substantial efforts have been devoted more recently to presenting various methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images. However, the current survey of datasets and deep learning based methods for object detection in optical remote sensing images is not adequate. Moreover, most of the existing datasets have some shortcomings, for example, the numbers of images and object categories are small scale, and the image diversity and variations are insufficient. These limitations greatly affect the development of deep learning based object detection methods. In the paper, we provide a comprehensive review of the recent deep learning based object detection progress in both the computer vision and earth observation communities. Then, we propose a large-scale, publicly available benchmark for object DetectIon in Optical Remote sensing images, which we name as DIOR. The dataset contains 23463 images and 192472 instances, covering 20 object classes. The proposed DIOR dataset 1) is large-scale on the object categories, on the object instance number, and on the total image number; 2) has a large range of object size variations, not only in terms of spatial resolutions, but also in the aspect of inter- and intra-class size variability across objects; 3) holds big variations as the images are obtained with different imaging conditions, weathers, seasons, and image quality; and 4) has high inter-class similarity and intra-class diversity. The proposed benchmark can help the researchers to develop and validate their data-driven methods. Finally, we evaluate several state-of-the-art approaches on our DIOR dataset to establish a baseline for future research.

The importance of Scene Text Recognition (STR) in today's increasingly digital world cannot be overstated. Given the significance of STR, data intensive deep learning approaches that auto-learn feature mappings have primarily driven the development of STR solutions. Several benchmark datasets and substantial work on deep learning models are available for Latin languages to meet this need. On more complex, syntactically and semantically, Indian languages spoken and read by 1.3 billion people, there is less work and datasets available. This paper aims to address the Indian space's lack of a comprehensive dataset by proposing the largest and most comprehensive real dataset - IndicSTR12 - and benchmarking STR performance on 12 major Indian languages. A few works have addressed the same issue, but to the best of our knowledge, they focused on a small number of Indian languages. The size and complexity of the proposed dataset are comparable to those of existing Latin contemporaries, while its multilingualism will catalyse the development of robust text detection and recognition models. It was created specifically for a group of related languages with different scripts. The dataset contains over 27000 word-images gathered from various natural scenes, with over 1000 word-images for each language. Unlike previous datasets, the images cover a broader range of realistic conditions, including blur, illumination changes, occlusion, non-iconic texts, low resolution, perspective text etc. Along with the new dataset, we provide a high-performing baseline on three models - PARSeq, CRNN, and STARNet.

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) is a natural language processing task with the objective to classify text documents into a set of classes from a structured class hierarchy. Many HTC approaches have been proposed which attempt to leverage the class hierarchy information in various ways to improve classification performance. Machine learning-based classification approaches require large amounts of training data and are most-commonly compared through three established benchmark datasets, which include the Web Of Science (WOS), Reuters Corpus Volume 1 Version 2 (RCV1-V2) and New York Times (NYT) datasets. However, apart from the RCV1-V2 dataset which is well-documented, these datasets are not accompanied with detailed description methodologies. In this paper, we introduce three new HTC benchmark datasets in the domain of research publications which comprise the titles and abstracts of papers from the Web of Science publication database. We first create two baseline datasets which use existing journal-and citation-based classification schemas. Due to the respective shortcomings of these two existing schemas, we propose an approach which combines their classifications to improve the reliability and robustness of the dataset. We evaluate the three created datasets with a clustering-based analysis and show that our proposed approach results in a higher quality dataset where documents that belong to the same class are semantically more similar compared to the other datasets. Finally, we provide the classification performance of four state-of-the-art HTC approaches on these three new datasets to provide baselines for future studies on machine learning-based techniques for scientific publication classification.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved significant progress by extending large language models. Building on this progress, the latest developments in LMMs demonstrate the ability to generate dense pixel-wise segmentation through the integration of segmentation models.Despite the innovations, the textual responses and segmentation masks of existing works remain at the instance level, showing limited ability to perform fine-grained understanding and segmentation even provided with detailed textual cues.To overcome this limitation, we introduce a Multi-Granularity Large Multimodal Model (MGLMM), which is capable of seamlessly adjusting the granularity of Segmentation and Captioning (SegCap) following user instructions, from panoptic SegCap to fine-grained SegCap. We name such a new task Multi-Granularity Segmentation and Captioning (MGSC). Observing the lack of a benchmark for model training and evaluation over the MGSC task, we establish a benchmark with aligned masks and captions in multi-granularity using our customized automated annotation pipeline. This benchmark comprises 10K images and more than 30K image-question pairs. We will release our dataset along with the implementation of our automated dataset annotation pipeline for further research.Besides, we propose a novel unified SegCap data format to unify heterogeneous segmentation datasets; it effectively facilitates learning to associate object concepts with visual features during multi-task training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MGLMM excels at tackling more than eight downstream tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in MGSC, GCG, image captioning, referring segmentation, multiple and empty segmentation, and reasoning segmentation tasks. The great performance and versatility of MGLMM underscore its potential impact on advancing multimodal research.

High-quality machine learning (ML)-ready datasets play a foundational role in developing new artificial intelligence (AI) models or fine-tuning existing models for scientific applications such as weather and climate analysis. Unfortunately, despite the growing development of new deep learning models for weather and climate, there is a scarcity of curated, pre-processed machine learning (ML)-ready datasets. Curating such high-quality datasets for developing new models is challenging particularly because the modality of the input data varies significantly for different downstream tasks addressing different atmospheric scales (spatial and temporal). Here we introduce WxC-Bench (Weather and Climate Bench), a multi-modal dataset designed to support the development of generalizable AI models for downstream use-cases in weather and climate research. WxC-Bench is designed as a dataset of datasets for developing ML-models for a complex weather and climate system, addressing selected downstream tasks as machine learning phenomenon. WxC-Bench encompasses several atmospheric processes from meso-beta (20 - 200 km) scale to synoptic scales (2500 km), such as aviation turbulence, hurricane intensity and track monitoring, weather analog search, gravity wave parameterization, and natural language report generation. We provide a comprehensive description of the dataset and also present a technical validation for baseline analysis. The dataset and code to prepare the ML-ready data have been made publicly available on Hugging Face -- https://huggingface.co/datasets/nasa-impact/WxC-Bench

Despite the progress we have recorded in the last few years in multilingual natural language processing, evaluation is typically limited to a small set of languages with available datasets which excludes a large number of low-resource languages. In this paper, we created SIB-200 -- a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 200 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). For many of the languages covered in SIB-200, this is the first publicly available evaluation dataset for NLU. The dataset is based on Flores-200 machine translation corpus. We annotated the English portion of the dataset and extended the sentence-level annotation to the remaining 203 languages covered in the corpus. Despite the simplicity of this task, our evaluation in full-supervised setting, cross-lingual transfer setting and prompting of large language model setting show that there is still a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages when multilingual evaluation is scaled to numerous world languages. We found that languages unseen during the pre-training of multilingual language models, under-represented language families (like Nilotic and Altantic-Congo), and languages from the regions of Africa, Americas, Oceania and South East Asia, often have the lowest performance on our topic classification dataset. We hope our dataset will encourage a more inclusive evaluation of multilingual language models on a more diverse set of languages. https://github.com/dadelani/sib-200

We introduce YOLO9000, a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system that can detect over 9000 object categories. First we propose various improvements to the YOLO detection method, both novel and drawn from prior work. The improved model, YOLOv2, is state-of-the-art on standard detection tasks like PASCAL VOC and COCO. At 67 FPS, YOLOv2 gets 76.8 mAP on VOC 2007. At 40 FPS, YOLOv2 gets 78.6 mAP, outperforming state-of-the-art methods like Faster RCNN with ResNet and SSD while still running significantly faster. Finally we propose a method to jointly train on object detection and classification. Using this method we train YOLO9000 simultaneously on the COCO detection dataset and the ImageNet classification dataset. Our joint training allows YOLO9000 to predict detections for object classes that don't have labelled detection data. We validate our approach on the ImageNet detection task. YOLO9000 gets 19.7 mAP on the ImageNet detection validation set despite only having detection data for 44 of the 200 classes. On the 156 classes not in COCO, YOLO9000 gets 16.0 mAP. But YOLO can detect more than just 200 classes; it predicts detections for more than 9000 different object categories. And it still runs in real-time.

We present CovidQA, the beginnings of a question answering dataset specifically designed for COVID-19, built by hand from knowledge gathered from Kaggle's COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge. To our knowledge, this is the first publicly available resource of its type, and intended as a stopgap measure for guiding research until more substantial evaluation resources become available. While this dataset, comprising 124 question-article pairs as of the present version 0.1 release, does not have sufficient examples for supervised machine learning, we believe that it can be helpful for evaluating the zero-shot or transfer capabilities of existing models on topics specifically related to COVID-19. This paper describes our methodology for constructing the dataset and presents the effectiveness of a number of baselines, including term-based techniques and various transformer-based models. The dataset is available at http://covidqa.ai/

Panoptic segmentation methods assign a known class to each pixel given in input. Even for state-of-the-art approaches, this inevitably enforces decisions that systematically lead to wrong predictions for objects outside the training categories. However, robustness against out-of-distribution samples and corner cases is crucial in safety-critical settings to avoid dangerous consequences. Since real-world datasets cannot contain enough data points to adequately sample the long tail of the underlying distribution, models must be able to deal with unseen and unknown scenarios as well. Previous methods targeted this by re-identifying already-seen unlabeled objects. In this work, we propose the necessary step to extend segmentation with a new setting which we term holistic segmentation. Holistic segmentation aims to identify and separate objects of unseen, unknown categories into instances without any prior knowledge about them while performing panoptic segmentation of known classes. We tackle this new problem with U3HS, which finds unknowns as highly uncertain regions and clusters their corresponding instance-aware embeddings into individual objects. By doing so, for the first time in panoptic segmentation with unknown objects, our U3HS is trained without unknown categories, reducing assumptions and leaving the settings as unconstrained as in real-life scenarios. Extensive experiments on public data from MS COCO, Cityscapes, and Lost&Found demonstrate the effectiveness of U3HS for this new, challenging, and assumptions-free setting called holistic segmentation. Project page: https://holisticseg.github.io.

Publishing open-source academic video recordings is an emergent and prevalent approach to sharing knowledge online. Such videos carry rich multimodal information including speech, the facial and body movements of the speakers, as well as the texts and pictures in the slides and possibly even the papers. Although multiple academic video datasets have been constructed and released, few of them support both multimodal content recognition and understanding tasks, which is partially due to the lack of high-quality human annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal, multigenre, and multipurpose audio-visual academic lecture dataset (M^3AV), which has almost 367 hours of videos from five sources covering computer science, mathematics, and medical and biology topics. With high-quality human annotations of the spoken and written words, in particular high-valued name entities, the dataset can be used for multiple audio-visual recognition and understanding tasks. Evaluations performed on contextual speech recognition, speech synthesis, and slide and script generation tasks demonstrate that the diversity of M^3AV makes it a challenging dataset.

The advent of large pre-trained models has brought about a paradigm shift in both visual representation learning and natural language processing. However, clustering unlabeled images, as a fundamental and classic machine learning problem, still lacks an effective solution, particularly for large-scale datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel image clustering pipeline that leverages the powerful feature representation of large pre-trained models such as CLIP and cluster images effectively and efficiently at scale. We first developed a novel algorithm to estimate the number of clusters in a given dataset. We then show that the pre-trained features are significantly more structured by further optimizing the rate reduction objective. The resulting features may significantly improve the clustering accuracy, e.g., from 57% to 66% on ImageNet-1k. Furthermore, by leveraging CLIP's multimodality bridge between image and text, we develop a simple yet effective self-labeling algorithm that produces meaningful text labels for the clusters. Through extensive experiments, we show that our pipeline works well on standard datasets such as CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-1k. It also extends to datasets without predefined labels, such as LAION-Aesthetics and WikiArts. We released the code in https://github.com/LeslieTrue/CPP.

Data is a critical resource for machine learning (ML), yet working with data remains a key friction point. This paper introduces Croissant, a metadata format for datasets that creates a shared representation across ML tools, frameworks, and platforms. Croissant makes datasets more discoverable, portable, and interoperable, thereby addressing significant challenges in ML data management. Croissant is already supported by several popular dataset repositories, spanning hundreds of thousands of datasets, enabling easy loading into the most commonly-used ML frameworks, regardless of where the data is stored. Our initial evaluation by human raters shows that Croissant metadata is readable, understandable, complete, yet concise.

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.

Large language models (LLMs)-based image captioning has the capability of describing objects not explicitly observed in training data; yet novel objects occur frequently, necessitating the requirement of sustaining up-to-date object knowledge for open-world comprehension. Instead of relying on large amounts of data and scaling up network parameters, we introduce a highly effective retrieval-augmented image captioning method that prompts LLMs with object names retrieved from External Visual--name memory (EVCap). We build ever-changing object knowledge memory using objects' visuals and names, enabling us to (i) update the memory at a minimal cost and (ii) effortlessly augment LLMs with retrieved object names utilizing a lightweight and fast-to-train model. Our model, which was trained only on the COCO dataset, can be adapted to out-domain data without additional fine-tuning or retraining. Our comprehensive experiments conducted on various benchmarks and synthetic commonsense-violating data demonstrate that EVCap, comprising solely 3.97M trainable parameters, exhibits superior performance compared to other methods of equivalent model size scale. Notably, it achieves competitive performance against specialist SOTAs with an enormous number of parameters. Our code is available at https://jiaxuan-li.github.io/EVCap.

Machine learning research has long focused on models rather than datasets, and prominent datasets are used for common ML tasks without regard to the breadth, difficulty, and faithfulness of the underlying problems. Neglecting the fundamental importance of data has given rise to inaccuracy, bias, and fragility in real-world applications, and research is hindered by saturation across existing dataset benchmarks. In response, we present DataPerf, a community-led benchmark suite for evaluating ML datasets and data-centric algorithms. We aim to foster innovation in data-centric AI through competition, comparability, and reproducibility. We enable the ML community to iterate on datasets, instead of just architectures, and we provide an open, online platform with multiple rounds of challenges to support this iterative development. The first iteration of DataPerf contains five benchmarks covering a wide spectrum of data-centric techniques, tasks, and modalities in vision, speech, acquisition, debugging, and diffusion prompting, and we support hosting new contributed benchmarks from the community. The benchmarks, online evaluation platform, and baseline implementations are open source, and the MLCommons Association will maintain DataPerf to ensure long-term benefits to academia and industry.

Existing research addresses scene graph generation (SGG) -- a critical technology for scene understanding in images -- from a detection perspective, i.e., objects are detected using bounding boxes followed by prediction of their pairwise relationships. We argue that such a paradigm causes several problems that impede the progress of the field. For instance, bounding box-based labels in current datasets usually contain redundant classes like hairs, and leave out background information that is crucial to the understanding of context. In this work, we introduce panoptic scene graph generation (PSG), a new problem task that requires the model to generate a more comprehensive scene graph representation based on panoptic segmentations rather than rigid bounding boxes. A high-quality PSG dataset, which contains 49k well-annotated overlapping images from COCO and Visual Genome, is created for the community to keep track of its progress. For benchmarking, we build four two-stage baselines, which are modified from classic methods in SGG, and two one-stage baselines called PSGTR and PSGFormer, which are based on the efficient Transformer-based detector, i.e., DETR. While PSGTR uses a set of queries to directly learn triplets, PSGFormer separately models the objects and relations in the form of queries from two Transformer decoders, followed by a prompting-like relation-object matching mechanism. In the end, we share insights on open challenges and future directions.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve a target image based on a query composed of a reference image and a relative caption that describes the difference between the two images. The high effort and cost required for labeling datasets for CIR hamper the widespread usage of existing methods, as they rely on supervised learning. In this work, we propose a new task, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR), that aims to address CIR without requiring a labeled training dataset. Our approach, named zero-Shot composEd imAge Retrieval with textuaL invErsion (SEARLE), maps the visual features of the reference image into a pseudo-word token in CLIP token embedding space and integrates it with the relative caption. To support research on ZS-CIR, we introduce an open-domain benchmarking dataset named Composed Image Retrieval on Common Objects in context (CIRCO), which is the first dataset for CIR containing multiple ground truths for each query. The experiments show that SEARLE exhibits better performance than the baselines on the two main datasets for CIR tasks, FashionIQ and CIRR, and on the proposed CIRCO. The dataset, the code and the model are publicly available at https://github.com/miccunifi/SEARLE.

Despite remarkable progress achieved, most neural architecture search (NAS) methods focus on searching for one single accurate and robust architecture. To further build models with better generalization capability and performance, model ensemble is usually adopted and performs better than stand-alone models. Inspired by the merits of model ensemble, we propose to search for multiple diverse models simultaneously as an alternative way to find powerful models. Searching for ensembles is non-trivial and has two key challenges: enlarged search space and potentially more complexity for the searched model. In this paper, we propose a one-shot neural ensemble architecture search (NEAS) solution that addresses the two challenges. For the first challenge, we introduce a novel diversity-based metric to guide search space shrinking, considering both the potentiality and diversity of candidate operators. For the second challenge, we enable a new search dimension to learn layer sharing among different models for efficiency purposes. The experiments on ImageNet clearly demonstrate that our solution can improve the supernet's capacity of ranking ensemble architectures, and further lead to better search results. The discovered architectures achieve superior performance compared with state-of-the-arts such as MobileNetV3 and EfficientNet families under aligned settings. Moreover, we evaluate the generalization ability and robustness of our searched architecture on the COCO detection benchmark and achieve a 3.1% improvement on AP compared with MobileNetV3. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/researchmm/NEAS.

Textual and semantic comprehension of images is essential for generating proper captions. The comprehension requires detection of objects, modeling of relations between them, an assessment of the semantics of the scene and, finally, representing the extracted knowledge in a language space. To achieve rich language capabilities while ensuring good image-language mappings, pretrained language models (LMs) were conditioned on pretrained multi-modal (image-text) models that allow for image inputs. This requires an alignment of the image representation of the multi-modal model with the language representations of a generative LM. However, it is not clear how to best transfer semantics detected by the vision encoder of the multi-modal model to the LM. We introduce two novel ways of constructing a linear mapping that successfully transfers semantics between the embedding spaces of the two pretrained models. The first aligns the embedding space of the multi-modal language encoder with the embedding space of the pretrained LM via token correspondences. The latter leverages additional data that consists of image-text pairs to construct the mapping directly from vision to language space. Using our semantic mappings, we unlock image captioning for LMs without access to gradient information. By using different sources of data we achieve strong captioning performance on MS-COCO and Flickr30k datasets. Even in the face of limited data, our method partly exceeds the performance of other zero-shot and even finetuned competitors. Our ablation studies show that even LMs at a scale of merely 250M parameters can generate decent captions employing our semantic mappings. Our approach makes image captioning more accessible for institutions with restricted computational resources.

Image-classification datasets have been used to pretrain image recognition models. Recently, web-scale image-caption datasets have emerged as a source of powerful pretraining alternative. Image-caption datasets are more ``open-domain'', containing a wider variety of scene types and vocabulary words than traditional classification datasets, and models trained on these datasets have demonstrated strong performance on few- and zero-shot recognition tasks. When naively unifying image-classification and -caption dataset, we show that such dataset biases negatively affect pre-training by reducing the generalizability of learned representations and thus jeopardizing zero-shot performance since the unification can tailor the model for the classification dataset, making it vulnerable to the distribution shift from the dataset. In this work, we address the problem by disentangling the dataset bias using prefix tokens that inform a language encoder of the type of the input dataset (e.g., image-classification or caption) at training time. This approach allows the language encoder to share the knowledge from two datasets as well as switch the mode of feature extraction, i.e., image-classification dataset or image-caption dataset tailored mode, where we use image-caption mode in the zero-shot evaluation. Our method is generic and can be easily integrated into existing VL pre-training objectives such as CLIP or UniCL. In experiments, we show that this simple technique improves the performance in zero-shot image recognition accuracy and robustness to the image-level distribution shift.

Establishing visual correspondences under large intra-class variations, which is often referred to as semantic correspondence or semantic matching, remains a challenging problem in computer vision. Despite its significance, however, most of the datasets for semantic correspondence are limited to a small amount of image pairs with similar viewpoints and scales. In this paper, we present a new large-scale benchmark dataset of semantically paired images, SPair-71k, which contains 70,958 image pairs with diverse variations in viewpoint and scale. Compared to previous datasets, it is significantly larger in number and contains more accurate and richer annotations. We believe this dataset will provide a reliable testbed to study the problem of semantic correspondence and will help to advance research in this area. We provide the results of recent methods on our new dataset as baselines for further research. Our benchmark is available online at http://cvlab.postech.ac.kr/research/SPair-71k/.

In this study, we present a novel dataset for training machine learning models translating between OpenMP Fortran and C++ code. To ensure reliability and applicability, the dataset is created from a range of representative open-source OpenMP benchmarks. It is also refined using a meticulous code similarity test. The effectiveness of our dataset is assessed using both quantitative (CodeBLEU) and qualitative (human evaluation) methods. We showcase how this dataset significantly elevates the translation competencies of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, models without prior coding knowledge experienced a boost of times~5.1 in their CodeBLEU scores, while models with some coding familiarity saw an impressive times~9.9-fold increase. The best fine-tuned model using our dataset outperforms GPT-4. It is also reaching human-level accuracy. This work underscores the immense potential of our dataset in propelling advancements in the domain of code translation for high-performance computing. The dataset is accessible at https://github.com/bin123apple/Fortran-CPP-HPC-code-translation-dataset{OpenMP-Fortran-CPP-Translation}.

Open-vocabulary image segmentation is attracting increasing attention due to its critical applications in the real world. Traditional closed-vocabulary segmentation methods are not able to characterize novel objects, whereas several recent open-vocabulary attempts obtain unsatisfactory results, i.e., notable performance reduction on the closed vocabulary and massive demand for extra data. To this end, we propose OPSNet, an omnipotent and data-efficient framework for Open-vocabulary Panoptic Segmentation. Specifically, the exquisitely designed Embedding Modulation module, together with several meticulous components, enables adequate embedding enhancement and information exchange between the segmentation model and the visual-linguistic well-aligned CLIP encoder, resulting in superior segmentation performance under both open- and closed-vocabulary settings with much fewer need of additional data. Extensive experimental evaluations are conducted across multiple datasets (e.g., COCO, ADE20K, Cityscapes, and PascalContext) under various circumstances, where the proposed OPSNet achieves state-of-the-art results, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of the proposed approach. The code and trained models will be made publicly available.

The cross-domain text-to-SQL task aims to build a system that can parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases, and the single-domain text-to-SQL task evaluates the performance on identical databases. Both of these setups confront unavoidable difficulties in real-world applications. To this end, we introduce the cross-schema text-to-SQL task, where the databases of evaluation data are different from that in the training data but come from the same domain. Furthermore, we present CSS, a large-scale CrosS-Schema Chinese text-to-SQL dataset, to carry on corresponding studies. CSS originally consisted of 4,340 question/SQL pairs across 2 databases. In order to generalize models to different medical systems, we extend CSS and create 19 new databases along with 29,280 corresponding dataset examples. Moreover, CSS is also a large corpus for single-domain Chinese text-to-SQL studies. We present the data collection approach and a series of analyses of the data statistics. To show the potential and usefulness of CSS, benchmarking baselines have been conducted and reported. Our dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/zhanghanchong/css.

With the emergence of audio-language models, constructing large-scale paired audio-language datasets has become essential yet challenging for model development, primarily due to the time-intensive and labour-heavy demands involved. While large language models (LLMs) have improved the efficiency of synthetic audio caption generation, current approaches struggle to effectively extract and incorporate detailed audio information. In this paper, we propose an automated pipeline that integrates audio-language models for fine-grained content extraction, LLMs for synthetic caption generation, and a contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) model-based refinement process to improve the quality of captions. Specifically, we employ prompt chaining techniques in the content extraction stage to obtain accurate and fine-grained audio information, while we use the refinement process to mitigate potential hallucinations in the generated captions. Leveraging the AudioSet dataset and the proposed approach, we create AudioSetCaps, a dataset comprising 1.9 million audio-caption pairs, the largest audio-caption dataset at the time of writing. The models trained with AudioSetCaps achieve state-of-the-art performance on audio-text retrieval with R@1 scores of 46.3% for text-to-audio and 59.7% for audio-to-text retrieval and automated audio captioning with the CIDEr score of 84.8. As our approach has shown promising results with AudioSetCaps, we create another dataset containing 4.1 million synthetic audio-language pairs based on the Youtube-8M and VGGSound datasets. To facilitate research in audio-language learning, we have made our pipeline, datasets with 6 million audio-language pairs, and pre-trained models publicly available at https://github.com/JishengBai/AudioSetCaps.

This paper introduces a novel framework for unified incremental few-shot object detection (iFSOD) and instance segmentation (iFSIS) using the Transformer architecture. Our goal is to create an optimal solution for situations where only a few examples of novel object classes are available, with no access to training data for base or old classes, while maintaining high performance across both base and novel classes. To achieve this, We extend Mask-DINO into a two-stage incremental learning framework. Stage 1 focuses on optimizing the model using the base dataset, while Stage 2 involves fine-tuning the model on novel classes. Besides, we incorporate a classifier selection strategy that assigns appropriate classifiers to the encoder and decoder according to their distinct functions. Empirical evidence indicates that this approach effectively mitigates the over-fitting on novel classes learning. Furthermore, we implement knowledge distillation to prevent catastrophic forgetting of base classes. Comprehensive evaluations on the COCO and LVIS datasets for both iFSIS and iFSOD tasks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Table Detection has become a fundamental task for visually rich document understanding with the surging number of electronic documents. However, popular public datasets widely used in related studies have inherent limitations, including noisy and inconsistent samples, limited training samples, and limited data sources. These limitations make these datasets unreliable to evaluate the model performance and cannot reflect the actual capacity of models. Therefore, this study revisits some open datasets with high-quality annotations, identifies and cleans the noise, and aligns the annotation definitions of these datasets to merge a larger dataset, termed Open-Tables. Moreover, to enrich the data sources, we propose a new ICT-TD dataset using the PDF files of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) commodities, a different domain containing unique samples that hardly appear in open datasets. To ensure the label quality of the dataset, we annotated the dataset manually following the guidance of a domain expert. The proposed dataset is challenging and can be a sample of actual cases in the business context. We built strong baselines using various state-of-the-art object detection models. Our experimental results show that the domain differences among existing open datasets are minor despite having different data sources. Our proposed Open-Tables and ICT-TD can provide a more reliable evaluation for models because of their high quality and consistent annotations. Besides, they are more suitable for cross-domain settings. Our experimental results show that in the cross-domain setting, benchmark models trained with cleaned Open-Tables dataset can achieve 0.6\%-2.6\% higher weighted average F1 than the corresponding ones trained with the noisy version of Open-Tables, demonstrating the reliability of the proposed datasets. The datasets are public available.

Recent advancements in large-scale foundational models have sparked widespread interest in training highly proficient large vision models. A common consensus revolves around the necessity of aggregating extensive, high-quality annotated data. However, given the inherent challenges in annotating dense tasks in computer vision, such as object detection and segmentation, a practical strategy is to combine and leverage all available data for training purposes. In this work, we propose Plain-Det, which offers flexibility to accommodate new datasets, robustness in performance across diverse datasets, training efficiency, and compatibility with various detection architectures. We utilize Def-DETR, with the assistance of Plain-Det, to achieve a mAP of 51.9 on COCO, matching the current state-of-the-art detectors. We conduct extensive experiments on 13 downstream datasets and Plain-Det demonstrates strong generalization capability. Code is release at https://github.com/ChengShiest/Plain-Det

Recent breakthroughs in large models have highlighted the critical significance of data scale, labels and modals. In this paper, we introduce MS MARCO Web Search, the first large-scale information-rich web dataset, featuring millions of real clicked query-document labels. This dataset closely mimics real-world web document and query distribution, provides rich information for various kinds of downstream tasks and encourages research in various areas, such as generic end-to-end neural indexer models, generic embedding models, and next generation information access system with large language models. MS MARCO Web Search offers a retrieval benchmark with three web retrieval challenge tasks that demand innovations in both machine learning and information retrieval system research domains. As the first dataset that meets large, real and rich data requirements, MS MARCO Web Search paves the way for future advancements in AI and system research. MS MARCO Web Search dataset is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-MARCO-Web-Search.

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

Large multimodal models trained on natural documents, which interleave images and text, outperform models trained on image-text pairs on various multimodal benchmarks. However, the datasets used to train these models have not been released, and the collection process has not been fully specified. We introduce the OBELICS dataset, an open web-scale filtered dataset of interleaved image-text documents comprising 141 million web pages extracted from Common Crawl, 353 million associated images, and 115 billion text tokens. We describe the dataset creation process, present comprehensive filtering rules, and provide an analysis of the dataset's content. To show the viability of OBELICS, we train vision and language models of 9 and 80 billion parameters named IDEFICS, and obtain competitive performance on different multimodal benchmarks. We release our dataset, models and code.

Most existing large-scale academic search engines are built to retrieve text-based information. However, there are no large-scale retrieval services for scientific figures and tables. One challenge for such services is understanding scientific figures' semantics, such as their types and purposes. A key obstacle is the need for datasets containing annotated scientific figures and tables, which can then be used for classification, question-answering, and auto-captioning. Here, we develop a pipeline that extracts figures and tables from the scientific literature and a deep-learning-based framework that classifies scientific figures using visual features. Using this pipeline, we built the first large-scale automatically annotated corpus, ACL-Fig, consisting of 112,052 scientific figures extracted from ~56K research papers in the ACL Anthology. The ACL-Fig-Pilot dataset contains 1,671 manually labeled scientific figures belonging to 19 categories. The dataset is accessible at https://huggingface.co/datasets/citeseerx/ACL-fig under a CC BY-NC license.

The proliferation of open-source scientific software for science and research presents opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we introduce the SciCat dataset -- a comprehensive collection of Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, designed to address the need for a curated repository of scientific and research software. This collection is crucial for understanding the creation of scientific software and aiding in its development. To ensure extensive coverage, our approach involves selecting projects from a pool of 131 million deforked repositories from the World of Code data source. Subsequently, we analyze README.md files using OpenAI's advanced language models. Our classification focuses on software designed for scientific purposes, research-related projects, and research support software. The SciCat dataset aims to become an invaluable tool for researching science-related software, shedding light on emerging trends, prevalent practices, and challenges in the field of scientific software development. Furthermore, it includes data that can be linked to the World of Code, GitHub, and other platforms, providing a solid foundation for conducting comparative studies between scientific and non-scientific software.

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on this question, here we take Hugging Face -- one of the largest platforms for sharing and collaborating on ML models and datasets -- as a prominent case study. By analyzing all 7,433 dataset documentation on Hugging Face, our investigation provides an overview of the Hugging Face dataset ecosystem and insights into dataset documentation practices, yielding 5 main findings: (1) The dataset card completion rate shows marked heterogeneity correlated with dataset popularity. (2) A granular examination of each section within the dataset card reveals that the practitioners seem to prioritize Dataset Description and Dataset Structure sections, while the Considerations for Using the Data section receives the lowest proportion of content. (3) By analyzing the subsections within each section and utilizing topic modeling to identify key topics, we uncover what is discussed in each section, and underscore significant themes encompassing both technical and social impacts, as well as limitations within the Considerations for Using the Data section. (4) Our findings also highlight the need for improved accessibility and reproducibility of datasets in the Usage sections. (5) In addition, our human annotation evaluation emphasizes the pivotal role of comprehensive dataset content in shaping individuals' perceptions of a dataset card's overall quality. Overall, our study offers a unique perspective on analyzing dataset documentation through large-scale data science analysis and underlines the need for more thorough dataset documentation in machine learning research.

Remote sensing imagery, despite its broad applications in helping achieve Sustainable Development Goals and tackle climate change, has not yet benefited from the recent advancements of versatile, task-agnostic vision language models (VLMs). A key reason is that the large-scale, semantically diverse image-text dataset required for developing VLMs is still absent for remote sensing images. Unlike natural images, remote sensing images and their associated text descriptions cannot be efficiently collected from the public Internet at scale. In this work, we bridge this gap by using geo-coordinates to automatically connect open, unlabeled remote sensing images with rich semantics covered in OpenStreetMap, and thus construct SkyScript, a comprehensive vision-language dataset for remote sensing images, comprising 2.6 million image-text pairs covering 29K distinct semantic tags. With continual pre-training on this dataset, we obtain a VLM that surpasses baseline models with a 6.2% average accuracy gain in zero-shot scene classification across seven benchmark datasets. It also demonstrates the ability of zero-shot transfer for fine-grained object attribute classification and cross-modal retrieval. We hope this dataset can support the advancement of VLMs for various multi-modal tasks in remote sensing, such as open-vocabulary classification, retrieval, captioning, and text-to-image synthesis.

Data curation is the problem of how to collect and organize samples into a dataset that supports efficient learning. Despite the centrality of the task, little work has been devoted towards a large-scale, systematic comparison of various curation methods. In this work, we take steps towards a formal evaluation of data curation strategies and introduce SELECT, the first large-scale benchmark of curation strategies for image classification. In order to generate baseline methods for the SELECT benchmark, we create a new dataset, ImageNet++, which constitutes the largest superset of ImageNet-1K to date. Our dataset extends ImageNet with 5 new training-data shifts, each approximately the size of ImageNet-1K itself, and each assembled using a distinct curation strategy. We evaluate our data curation baselines in two ways: (i) using each training-data shift to train identical image classification models from scratch (ii) using the data itself to fit a pretrained self-supervised representation. Our findings show interesting trends, particularly pertaining to recent methods for data curation such as synthetic data generation and lookup based on CLIP embeddings. We show that although these strategies are highly competitive for certain tasks, the curation strategy used to assemble the original ImageNet-1K dataset remains the gold standard. We anticipate that our benchmark can illuminate the path for new methods to further reduce the gap. We release our checkpoints, code, documentation, and a link to our dataset at https://github.com/jimmyxu123/SELECT.

Contrastive pretraining on parallel image-text data has attained great success in vision-language processing (VLP), as exemplified by CLIP and related methods. However, prior explorations tend to focus on general domains in the web. Biomedical images and text are rather different, but publicly available datasets are small and skew toward chest X-ray, thus severely limiting progress. In this paper, we conducted by far the largest study on biomedical VLP, using 15 million figure-caption pairs extracted from biomedical research articles in PubMed Central. Our dataset (PMC-15M) is two orders of magnitude larger than existing biomedical image-text datasets such as MIMIC-CXR, and spans a diverse range of biomedical images. The standard CLIP method is suboptimal for the biomedical domain. We propose BiomedCLIP with domain-specific adaptations tailored to biomedical VLP. We conducted extensive experiments and ablation studies on standard biomedical imaging tasks from retrieval to classification to visual question-answering (VQA). BiomedCLIP established new state of the art in a wide range of standard datasets, substantially outperformed prior VLP approaches. Surprisingly, BiomedCLIP even outperformed radiology-specific state-of-the-art models such as BioViL on radiology-specific tasks such as RSNA pneumonia detection, thus highlighting the utility in large-scale pretraining across all biomedical image types. We will release our models at https://aka.ms/biomedclip to facilitate future research in biomedical VLP.

Image captioning models are widely used to describe recent and archived pictures with the objective of improving their accessibility and retrieval. Yet, these approaches tend to be inefficient and biased at retrieving people's names. In this work we introduce AstroCaptions, a dataset for the image captioning task. This dataset specifically contains thousands of public fig-ures that are complex to identify for a traditional model. We also propose a novel post-processing method to insert identified people's names inside the caption using explainable AI tools and the grounding capabilities of vi-sion-language models. The results obtained with this method show signifi-cant improvements of captions quality and a potential of reducing halluci-nations. Up to 93.2% of the persons detected can be inserted in the image captions leading to improvements in the BLEU, ROUGE, CIDEr and METEOR scores of each captioning model.

Recent advances in multi-modal algorithms have driven and been driven by the increasing availability of large image-text datasets, leading to significant strides in various fields, including computational pathology. However, in most existing medical image-text datasets, the text typically provides high-level summaries that may not sufficiently describe sub-tile regions within a large pathology image. For example, an image might cover an extensive tissue area containing cancerous and healthy regions, but the accompanying text might only specify that this image is a cancer slide, lacking the nuanced details needed for in-depth analysis. In this study, we introduce STimage-1K4M, a novel dataset designed to bridge this gap by providing genomic features for sub-tile images. STimage-1K4M contains 1,149 images derived from spatial transcriptomics data, which captures gene expression information at the level of individual spatial spots within a pathology image. Specifically, each image in the dataset is broken down into smaller sub-image tiles, with each tile paired with 15,000-30,000 dimensional gene expressions. With 4,293,195 pairs of sub-tile images and gene expressions, STimage-1K4M offers unprecedented granularity, paving the way for a wide range of advanced research in multi-modal data analysis an innovative applications in computational pathology, and beyond.

Accurately quantifying tree cover is an important metric for ecosystem monitoring and for assessing progress in restored sites. Recent works have shown that deep learning-based segmentation algorithms are capable of accurately mapping trees at country and continental scales using high-resolution aerial and satellite imagery. Mapping at high (ideally sub-meter) resolution is necessary to identify individual trees, however there are few open-access datasets containing instance level annotations and those that exist are small or not geographically diverse. We present a novel open-access dataset for individual tree crown delineation (TCD) in high-resolution aerial imagery sourced from OpenAerialMap (OAM). Our dataset, OAM-TCD, comprises 5072 2048x2048 px images at 10 cm/px resolution with associated human-labeled instance masks for over 280k individual and 56k groups of trees. By sampling imagery from around the world, we are able to better capture the diversity and morphology of trees in different terrestrial biomes and in both urban and natural environments. Using our dataset, we train reference instance and semantic segmentation models that compare favorably to existing state-of-the-art models. We assess performance through k-fold cross-validation and comparison with existing datasets; additionally we demonstrate compelling results on independent aerial imagery captured over Switzerland and compare to municipal tree inventories and LIDAR-derived canopy maps in the city of Zurich. Our dataset, models and training/benchmark code are publicly released under permissive open-source licenses: Creative Commons (majority CC BY 4.0), and Apache 2.0 respectively.

Recent technological advances in synthetic data have enabled the generation of images with such high quality that human beings cannot tell the difference between real-life photographs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated images. Given the critical necessity of data reliability and authentication, this article proposes to enhance our ability to recognise AI-generated images through computer vision. Initially, a synthetic dataset is generated that mirrors the ten classes of the already available CIFAR-10 dataset with latent diffusion which provides a contrasting set of images for comparison to real photographs. The model is capable of generating complex visual attributes, such as photorealistic reflections in water. The two sets of data present as a binary classification problem with regard to whether the photograph is real or generated by AI. This study then proposes the use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to classify the images into two categories; Real or Fake. Following hyperparameter tuning and the training of 36 individual network topologies, the optimal approach could correctly classify the images with 92.98% accuracy. Finally, this study implements explainable AI via Gradient Class Activation Mapping to explore which features within the images are useful for classification. Interpretation reveals interesting concepts within the image, in particular, noting that the actual entity itself does not hold useful information for classification; instead, the model focuses on small visual imperfections in the background of the images. The complete dataset engineered for this study, referred to as the CIFAKE dataset, is made publicly available to the research community for future work.

Text-to-video generative models convert textual prompts into dynamic visual content, offering wide-ranging applications in film production, gaming, and education. However, their real-world performance often falls short of user expectations. One key reason is that these models have not been trained on videos related to some topics users want to create. In this paper, we propose VideoUFO, the first Video dataset specifically curated to align with Users' FOcus in real-world scenarios. Beyond this, our VideoUFO also features: (1) minimal (0.29%) overlap with existing video datasets, and (2) videos searched exclusively via YouTube's official API under the Creative Commons license. These two attributes provide future researchers with greater freedom to broaden their training sources. The VideoUFO comprises over 1.09 million video clips, each paired with both a brief and a detailed caption (description). Specifically, through clustering, we first identify 1,291 user-focused topics from the million-scale real text-to-video prompt dataset, VidProM. Then, we use these topics to retrieve videos from YouTube, split the retrieved videos into clips, and generate both brief and detailed captions for each clip. After verifying the clips with specified topics, we are left with about 1.09 million video clips. Our experiments reveal that (1) current 16 text-to-video models do not achieve consistent performance across all user-focused topics; and (2) a simple model trained on VideoUFO outperforms others on worst-performing topics. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/WenhaoWang/VideoUFO under the CC BY 4.0 License.

While conversational generative AI has shown considerable potential in enhancing decision-making for agricultural professionals, its exploration has predominantly been anchored in text-based interactions. The evolution of multimodal conversational AI, leveraging vast amounts of image-text data from diverse sources, marks a significant stride forward. However, the application of such advanced vision-language models in the agricultural domain, particularly for crop disease diagnosis, remains underexplored. In this work, we present the crop disease domain multimodal (CDDM) dataset, a pioneering resource designed to advance the field of agricultural research through the application of multimodal learning techniques. The dataset comprises 137,000 images of various crop diseases, accompanied by 1 million question-answer pairs that span a broad spectrum of agricultural knowledge, from disease identification to management practices. By integrating visual and textual data, CDDM facilitates the development of sophisticated question-answering systems capable of providing precise, useful advice to farmers and agricultural professionals. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset by finetuning state-of-the-art multimodal models, showcasing significant improvements in crop disease diagnosis. Specifically, we employed a novel finetuning strategy that utilizes low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to finetune the visual encoder, adapter and language model simultaneously. Our contributions include not only the dataset but also a finetuning strategy and a benchmark to stimulate further research in agricultural technology, aiming to bridge the gap between advanced AI techniques and practical agricultural applications. The dataset is available at https: //github.com/UnicomAI/UnicomBenchmark/tree/main/CDDMBench.

Supervised learning of image classifiers distills human knowledge into a parametric model through pairs of images and corresponding labels (X,Y). We argue that this simple and widely used representation of human knowledge neglects rich auxiliary information from the annotation procedure, such as the time-series of mouse traces and clicks left after image selection. Our insight is that such annotation byproducts Z provide approximate human attention that weakly guides the model to focus on the foreground cues, reducing spurious correlations and discouraging shortcut learning. To verify this, we create ImageNet-AB and COCO-AB. They are ImageNet and COCO training sets enriched with sample-wise annotation byproducts, collected by replicating the respective original annotation tasks. We refer to the new paradigm of training models with annotation byproducts as learning using annotation byproducts (LUAB). We show that a simple multitask loss for regressing Z together with Y already improves the generalisability and robustness of the learned models. Compared to the original supervised learning, LUAB does not require extra annotation costs. ImageNet-AB and COCO-AB are at https://github.com/naver-ai/NeglectedFreeLunch.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) is an emerging yet challenging task that allows users to search for target images using a multimodal query, comprising a reference image and a modification text specifying the user's desired changes to the reference image. Given its significant academic and practical value, CIR has become a rapidly growing area of interest in the computer vision and machine learning communities, particularly with the advances in deep learning. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no comprehensive review of CIR to provide a timely overview of this field. Therefore, we synthesize insights from over 120 publications in top conferences and journals, including ACM TOIS, SIGIR, and CVPR In particular, we systematically categorize existing supervised CIR and zero-shot CIR models using a fine-grained taxonomy. For a comprehensive review, we also briefly discuss approaches for tasks closely related to CIR, such as attribute-based CIR and dialog-based CIR. Additionally, we summarize benchmark datasets for evaluation and analyze existing supervised and zero-shot CIR methods by comparing experimental results across multiple datasets. Furthermore, we present promising future directions in this field, offering practical insights for researchers interested in further exploration. The curated collection of related works is maintained and continuously updated in https://github.com/haokunwen/Awesome-Composed-Image-Retrieval.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) such as LLaVA have shown strong performance in visual-linguistic reasoning. These models first embed images into a fixed large number of visual tokens and then feed them into a Large Language Model (LLM). However, this design causes an excessive number of tokens for dense visual scenarios such as high-resolution images and videos, leading to great inefficiency. While token pruning/merging methods do exist, they produce a single length output for each image and do not afford flexibility in trading off information density v.s. efficiency. Inspired by the concept of Matryoshka Dolls, we propose M3: Matryoshka Multimodal Models, which learns to represent visual content as nested sets of visual tokens that capture information across multiple coarse-to-fine granularities. Our approach offers several unique benefits for LMMs: (1) One can explicitly control the visual granularity per test instance during inference, e.g. , adjusting the number of tokens used to represent an image based on the anticipated complexity or simplicity of the content; (2) M3 provides a framework for analyzing the granularity needed for existing datasets, where we find that COCO-style benchmarks only need around ~9 visual tokens to obtain accuracy similar to that of using all 576 tokens; (3) Our approach provides a foundation to explore the best trade-off between performance and visual token length at sample level, where our investigation reveals that a large gap exists between the oracle upper bound and current fixed-scale representations.

MIRACL (Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages) is a multilingual dataset we have built for the WSDM 2023 Cup challenge that focuses on ad hoc retrieval across 18 different languages, which collectively encompass over three billion native speakers around the world. These languages have diverse typologies, originate from many different language families, and are associated with varying amounts of available resources -- including what researchers typically characterize as high-resource as well as low-resource languages. Our dataset is designed to support the creation and evaluation of models for monolingual retrieval, where the queries and the corpora are in the same language. In total, we have gathered over 700k high-quality relevance judgments for around 77k queries over Wikipedia in these 18 languages, where all assessments have been performed by native speakers hired by our team. Our goal is to spur research that will improve retrieval across a continuum of languages, thus enhancing information access capabilities for diverse populations around the world, particularly those that have been traditionally underserved. This overview paper describes the dataset and baselines that we share with the community. The MIRACL website is live at http://miracl.ai/.

This paper introduces ClimateGPT, a model family of domain-specific large language models that synthesize interdisciplinary research on climate change. We trained two 7B models from scratch on a science-oriented dataset of 300B tokens. For the first model, the 4.2B domain-specific tokens were included during pre-training and the second was adapted to the climate domain after pre-training. Additionally, ClimateGPT-7B, 13B and 70B are continuously pre-trained from Llama~2 on a domain-specific dataset of 4.2B tokens. Each model is instruction fine-tuned on a high-quality and human-generated domain-specific dataset that has been created in close cooperation with climate scientists. To reduce the number of hallucinations, we optimize the model for retrieval augmentation and propose a hierarchical retrieval strategy. To increase the accessibility of our model to non-English speakers, we propose to make use of cascaded machine translation and show that this approach can perform comparably to natively multilingual models while being easier to scale to a large number of languages. Further, to address the intrinsic interdisciplinary aspect of climate change we consider different research perspectives. Therefore, the model can produce in-depth answers focusing on different perspectives in addition to an overall answer. We propose a suite of automatic climate-specific benchmarks to evaluate LLMs. On these benchmarks, ClimateGPT-7B performs on par with the ten times larger Llama-2-70B Chat model while not degrading results on general domain benchmarks. Our human evaluation confirms the trends we saw in our benchmarks. All models were trained and evaluated using renewable energy and are released publicly.

Common visual recognition tasks such as classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation are rapidly reaching maturity, and given the recent rate of progress, it is not unreasonable to conjecture that techniques for many of these problems will approach human levels of performance in the next few years. In this paper we look to the future: what is the next frontier in visual recognition? We offer one possible answer to this question. We propose a detailed image annotation that captures information beyond the visible pixels and requires complex reasoning about full scene structure. Specifically, we create an amodal segmentation of each image: the full extent of each region is marked, not just the visible pixels. Annotators outline and name all salient regions in the image and specify a partial depth order. The result is a rich scene structure, including visible and occluded portions of each region, figure-ground edge information, semantic labels, and object overlap. We create two datasets for semantic amodal segmentation. First, we label 500 images in the BSDS dataset with multiple annotators per image, allowing us to study the statistics of human annotations. We show that the proposed full scene annotation is surprisingly consistent between annotators, including for regions and edges. Second, we annotate 5000 images from COCO. This larger dataset allows us to explore a number of algorithmic ideas for amodal segmentation and depth ordering. We introduce novel metrics for these tasks, and along with our strong baselines, define concrete new challenges for the community.

How well can Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) understand composite images? Composite images (CIs) are synthetic visuals created by merging multiple visual elements, such as charts, posters, or screenshots, rather than being captured directly by a camera. While CIs are prevalent in real-world applications, recent MLLM developments have primarily focused on interpreting natural images (NIs). Our research reveals that current MLLMs face significant challenges in accurately understanding CIs, often struggling to extract information or perform complex reasoning based on these images. We find that existing training data for CIs are mostly formatted for question-answer tasks (e.g., in datasets like ChartQA and ScienceQA), while high-quality image-caption datasets, critical for robust vision-language alignment, are only available for NIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce Composite Captions (CompCap), a flexible framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) and automation tools to synthesize CIs with accurate and detailed captions. Using CompCap, we curate CompCap-118K, a dataset containing 118K image-caption pairs across six CI types. We validate the effectiveness of CompCap-118K by supervised fine-tuning MLLMs of three sizes: xGen-MM-inst.-4B and LLaVA-NeXT-Vicuna-7B/13B. Empirical results show that CompCap-118K significantly enhances MLLMs' understanding of CIs, yielding average gains of 1.7%, 2.0%, and 2.9% across eleven benchmarks, respectively.

Existing open-vocabulary image segmentation methods require a fine-tuning step on mask annotations and/or image-text datasets. Mask labels are labor-intensive, which limits the number of categories in segmentation datasets. As a result, the open-vocabulary capacity of pre-trained VLMs is severely reduced after fine-tuning. However, without fine-tuning, VLMs trained under weak image-text supervision tend to make suboptimal mask predictions when there are text queries referring to non-existing concepts in the image. To alleviate these issues, we introduce a novel recurrent framework that progressively filters out irrelevant texts and enhances mask quality without training efforts. The recurrent unit is a two-stage segmenter built upon a VLM with frozen weights. Thus, our model retains the VLM's broad vocabulary space and strengthens its segmentation capability. Experimental results show that our method outperforms not only the training-free counterparts, but also those fine-tuned with millions of additional data samples, and sets new state-of-the-art records for both zero-shot semantic and referring image segmentation tasks. Specifically, we improve the current record by 28.8, 16.0, and 6.9 mIoU on Pascal VOC, COCO Object, and Pascal Context.

Computational microscopy, in which hardware and algorithms of an imaging system are jointly designed, shows promise for making imaging systems that cost less, perform more robustly, and collect new types of information. Often, the performance of computational imaging systems, especially those that incorporate machine learning, is sample-dependent. Thus, standardized datasets are an essential tool for comparing the performance of different approaches. Here, we introduce the Berkeley Single Cell Computational Microscopy (BSCCM) dataset, which contains over ~12,000,000 images of 400,000 of individual white blood cells. The dataset contains images captured with multiple illumination patterns on an LED array microscope and fluorescent measurements of the abundance of surface proteins that mark different cell types. We hope this dataset will provide a valuable resource for the development and testing of new algorithms in computational microscopy and computer vision with practical biomedical applications.

The ability to collect a large dataset of human preferences from text-to-image users is usually limited to companies, making such datasets inaccessible to the public. To address this issue, we create a web app that enables text-to-image users to generate images and specify their preferences. Using this web app we build Pick-a-Pic, a large, open dataset of text-to-image prompts and real users' preferences over generated images. We leverage this dataset to train a CLIP-based scoring function, PickScore, which exhibits superhuman performance on the task of predicting human preferences. Then, we test PickScore's ability to perform model evaluation and observe that it correlates better with human rankings than other automatic evaluation metrics. Therefore, we recommend using PickScore for evaluating future text-to-image generation models, and using Pick-a-Pic prompts as a more relevant dataset than MS-COCO. Finally, we demonstrate how PickScore can enhance existing text-to-image models via ranking.

Precise crop yield prediction is essential for improving agricultural practices and ensuring crop resilience in varying climates. Integrating weather data across the growing season, especially for different crop varieties, is crucial for understanding their adaptability in the face of climate change. In the MLCAS2021 Crop Yield Prediction Challenge, we utilized a dataset comprising 93,028 training records to forecast yields for 10,337 test records, covering 159 locations across 28 U.S. states and Canadian provinces over 13 years (2003-2015). This dataset included details on 5,838 distinct genotypes and daily weather data for a 214-day growing season, enabling comprehensive analysis. As one of the winning teams, we developed two novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures: the CNN-DNN model, combining CNN and fully-connected networks, and the CNN-LSTM-DNN model, with an added LSTM layer for weather variables. Leveraging the Generalized Ensemble Method (GEM), we determined optimal model weights, resulting in superior performance compared to baseline models. The GEM model achieved lower RMSE (5.55% to 39.88%), reduced MAE (5.34% to 43.76%), and higher correlation coefficients (1.1% to 10.79%) when evaluated on test data. We applied the CNN-DNN model to identify top-performing genotypes for various locations and weather conditions, aiding genotype selection based on weather variables. Our data-driven approach is valuable for scenarios with limited testing years. Additionally, a feature importance analysis using RMSE change highlighted the significance of location, MG, year, and genotype, along with the importance of weather variables MDNI and AP.

This paper introduces the MERIT Dataset, a multimodal (text + image + layout) fully labeled dataset within the context of school reports. Comprising over 400 labels and 33k samples, the MERIT Dataset is a valuable resource for training models in demanding Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU) tasks. By its nature (student grade reports), the MERIT Dataset can potentially include biases in a controlled way, making it a valuable tool to benchmark biases induced in Language Models (LLMs). The paper outlines the dataset's generation pipeline and highlights its main features in the textual, visual, layout, and bias domains. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we present a benchmark with token classification models, showing that the dataset poses a significant challenge even for SOTA models and that these would greatly benefit from including samples from the MERIT Dataset in their pretraining phase.

In this report, we introduce NICE (New frontiers for zero-shot Image Captioning Evaluation) project and share the results and outcomes of 2023 challenge. This project is designed to challenge the computer vision community to develop robust image captioning models that advance the state-of-the-art both in terms of accuracy and fairness. Through the challenge, the image captioning models were tested using a new evaluation dataset that includes a large variety of visual concepts from many domains. There was no specific training data provided for the challenge, and therefore the challenge entries were required to adapt to new types of image descriptions that had not been seen during training. This report includes information on the newly proposed NICE dataset, evaluation methods, challenge results, and technical details of top-ranking entries. We expect that the outcomes of the challenge will contribute to the improvement of AI models on various vision-language tasks.

Researchers use figures to communicate rich, complex information in scientific papers. The captions of these figures are critical to conveying effective messages. However, low-quality figure captions commonly occur in scientific articles and may decrease understanding. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end neural framework to automatically generate informative, high-quality captions for scientific figures. To this end, we introduce SCICAP, a large-scale figure-caption dataset based on computer science arXiv papers published between 2010 and 2020. After pre-processing - including figure-type classification, sub-figure identification, text normalization, and caption text selection - SCICAP contained more than two million figures extracted from over 290,000 papers. We then established baseline models that caption graph plots, the dominant (19.2%) figure type. The experimental results showed both opportunities and steep challenges of generating captions for scientific figures.

A major barrier to developing vision large language models (LLMs) in dermatology is the lack of large image--text pairs dataset. We introduce DermaSynth, a dataset comprising of 92,020 synthetic image--text pairs curated from 45,205 images (13,568 clinical and 35,561 dermatoscopic) for dermatology-related clinical tasks. Leveraging state-of-the-art LLMs, using Gemini 2.0, we used clinically related prompts and self-instruct method to generate diverse and rich synthetic texts. Metadata of the datasets were incorporated into the input prompts by targeting to reduce potential hallucinations. The resulting dataset builds upon open access dermatological image repositories (DERM12345, BCN20000, PAD-UFES-20, SCIN, and HIBA) that have permissive CC-BY-4.0 licenses. We also fine-tuned a preliminary Llama-3.2-11B-Vision-Instruct model, DermatoLlama 1.0, on 5,000 samples. We anticipate this dataset to support and accelerate AI research in dermatology. Data and code underlying this work are accessible at https://github.com/abdurrahimyilmaz/DermaSynth.

Artificial intelligence has significantly advanced skin cancer diagnosis by enabling rapid and accurate detection of malignant lesions. In this domain, most publicly available image datasets consist of single, isolated skin lesions positioned at the center of the image. While these lesion-centric datasets have been fundamental for developing diagnostic algorithms, they lack the context of the surrounding skin, which is critical for improving lesion detection. The iToBoS dataset was created to address this challenge. It includes 16,954 images of skin regions from 100 participants, captured using 3D total body photography. Each image roughly corresponds to a 7 times 9 cm section of skin with all suspicious lesions annotated using bounding boxes. Additionally, the dataset provides metadata such as anatomical location, age group, and sun damage score for each image. This dataset aims to facilitate training and benchmarking of algorithms, with the goal of enabling early detection of skin cancer and deployment of this technology in non-clinical environments.

Pir\'a is a reading comprehension dataset focused on the ocean, the Brazilian coast, and climate change, built from a collection of scientific abstracts and reports on these topics. This dataset represents a versatile language resource, particularly useful for testing the ability of current machine learning models to acquire expert scientific knowledge. Despite its potential, a detailed set of baselines has not yet been developed for Pir\'a. By creating these baselines, researchers can more easily utilize Pir\'a as a resource for testing machine learning models across a wide range of question answering tasks. In this paper, we define six benchmarks over the Pir\'a dataset, covering closed generative question answering, machine reading comprehension, information retrieval, open question answering, answer triggering, and multiple choice question answering. As part of this effort, we have also produced a curated version of the original dataset, where we fixed a number of grammar issues, repetitions, and other shortcomings. Furthermore, the dataset has been extended in several new directions, so as to face the aforementioned benchmarks: translation of supporting texts from English into Portuguese, classification labels for answerability, automatic paraphrases of questions and answers, and multiple choice candidates. The results described in this paper provide several points of reference for researchers interested in exploring the challenges provided by the Pir\'a dataset.

Modern machine learning research relies on relatively few carefully curated datasets. Even in these datasets, and typically in `untidy' or raw data, practitioners are faced with significant issues of data quality and diversity which can be prohibitively labor intensive to address. Existing methods for dealing with these challenges tend to make strong assumptions about the particular issues at play, and often require a priori knowledge or metadata such as domain labels. Our work is orthogonal to these methods: we instead focus on providing a unified and efficient framework for Metadata Archaeology -- uncovering and inferring metadata of examples in a dataset. We curate different subsets of data that might exist in a dataset (e.g. mislabeled, atypical, or out-of-distribution examples) using simple transformations, and leverage differences in learning dynamics between these probe suites to infer metadata of interest. Our method is on par with far more sophisticated mitigation methods across different tasks: identifying and correcting mislabeled examples, classifying minority-group samples, prioritizing points relevant for training and enabling scalable human auditing of relevant examples.

While an important problem in the vision community is to design algorithms that can automatically caption images, few publicly-available datasets for algorithm development directly address the interests of real users. Observing that people who are blind have relied on (human-based) image captioning services to learn about images they take for nearly a decade, we introduce the first image captioning dataset to represent this real use case. This new dataset, which we call VizWiz-Captions, consists of over 39,000 images originating from people who are blind that are each paired with five captions. We analyze this dataset to (1) characterize the typical captions, (2) characterize the diversity of content found in the images, and (3) compare its content to that found in eight popular vision datasets. We also analyze modern image captioning algorithms to identify what makes this new dataset challenging for the vision community. We publicly-share the dataset with captioning challenge instructions at https://vizwiz.org

Training and evaluating language models increasingly requires the construction of meta-datasets --diverse collections of curated data with clear provenance. Natural language prompting has recently lead to improved zero-shot generalization by transforming existing, supervised datasets into a diversity of novel pretraining tasks, highlighting the benefits of meta-dataset curation. While successful in general-domain text, translating these data-centric approaches to biomedical language modeling remains challenging, as labeled biomedical datasets are significantly underrepresented in popular data hubs. To address this challenge, we introduce BigBIO a community library of 126+ biomedical NLP datasets, currently covering 12 task categories and 10+ languages. BigBIO facilitates reproducible meta-dataset curation via programmatic access to datasets and their metadata, and is compatible with current platforms for prompt engineering and end-to-end few/zero shot language model evaluation. We discuss our process for task schema harmonization, data auditing, contribution guidelines, and outline two illustrative use cases: zero-shot evaluation of biomedical prompts and large-scale, multi-task learning. BigBIO is an ongoing community effort and is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/biomedical

Background: Health datasets from clinical sources do not reflect the breadth and diversity of disease in the real world, impacting research, medical education, and artificial intelligence (AI) tool development. Dermatology is a suitable area to develop and test a new and scalable method to create representative health datasets. Methods: We used Google Search advertisements to invite contributions to an open access dataset of images of dermatology conditions, demographic and symptom information. With informed contributor consent, we describe and release this dataset containing 10,408 images from 5,033 contributions from internet users in the United States over 8 months starting March 2023. The dataset includes dermatologist condition labels as well as estimated Fitzpatrick Skin Type (eFST) and Monk Skin Tone (eMST) labels for the images. Results: We received a median of 22 submissions/day (IQR 14-30). Female (66.72%) and younger (52% < age 40) contributors had a higher representation in the dataset compared to the US population, and 32.6% of contributors reported a non-White racial or ethnic identity. Over 97.5% of contributions were genuine images of skin conditions. Dermatologist confidence in assigning a differential diagnosis increased with the number of available variables, and showed a weaker correlation with image sharpness (Spearman's P values <0.001 and 0.01 respectively). Most contributions were short-duration (54% with onset < 7 days ago ) and 89% were allergic, infectious, or inflammatory conditions. eFST and eMST distributions reflected the geographical origin of the dataset. The dataset is available at github.com/google-research-datasets/scin . Conclusion: Search ads are effective at crowdsourcing images of health conditions. The SCIN dataset bridges important gaps in the availability of representative images of common skin conditions.

We introduce a novel Image Quality Assessment (IQA) dataset comprising 6073 UHD-1 (4K) images, annotated at a fixed width of 3840 pixels. Contrary to existing No-Reference (NR) IQA datasets, ours focuses on highly aesthetic photos of high technical quality, filling a gap in the literature. The images, carefully curated to exclude synthetic content, are sufficiently diverse to train general NR-IQA models. Importantly, the dataset is annotated with perceptual quality ratings obtained through a crowdsourcing study. Ten expert raters, comprising photographers and graphics artists, assessed each image at least twice in multiple sessions spanning several days, resulting in 20 highly reliable ratings per image. Annotators were rigorously selected based on several metrics, including self-consistency, to ensure their reliability. The dataset includes rich metadata with user and machine-generated tags from over 5,000 categories and popularity indicators such as favorites, likes, downloads, and views. With its unique characteristics, such as its focus on high-quality images, reliable crowdsourced annotations, and high annotation resolution, our dataset opens up new opportunities for advancing perceptual image quality assessment research and developing practical NR-IQA models that apply to modern photos. Our dataset is available at https://database.mmsp-kn.de/uhd-iqa-benchmark-database.html

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge to generate a response within a context with improved accuracy and reduced hallucinations. However, multi-modal RAG systems face unique challenges: (i) the retrieval process may select irrelevant entries to user query (e.g., images, documents), and (ii) vision-language models or multi-modal language models like GPT-4o may hallucinate when processing these entries to generate RAG output. In this paper, we aim to address the first challenge, i.e, improving the selection of relevant context from the knowledge-base in retrieval phase of the multi-modal RAG. Specifically, we leverage the relevancy score (RS) measure designed in our previous work for evaluating the RAG performance to select more relevant entries in retrieval process. The retrieval based on embeddings, say CLIP-based embedding, and cosine similarity usually perform poorly particularly for multi-modal data. We show that by using a more advanced relevancy measure, one can enhance the retrieval process by selecting more relevant pieces from the knowledge-base and eliminate the irrelevant pieces from the context by adaptively selecting up-to-k entries instead of fixed number of entries. Our evaluation using COCO dataset demonstrates significant enhancement in selecting relevant context and accuracy of the generated response.

This article aims to provide the information retrieval community with some reflections on recent advances in retrieval learning by analyzing the reproducibility of image-text retrieval models. Due to the increase of multimodal data over the last decade, image-text retrieval has steadily become a major research direction in the field of information retrieval. Numerous researchers train and evaluate image-text retrieval algorithms using benchmark datasets such as MS-COCO and Flickr30k. Research in the past has mostly focused on performance, with multiple state-of-the-art methodologies being suggested in a variety of ways. According to their assertions, these techniques provide improved modality interactions and hence more precise multimodal representations. In contrast to previous works, we focus on the reproducibility of the approaches and the examination of the elements that lead to improved performance by pretrained and nonpretrained models in retrieving images and text. To be more specific, we first examine the related reproducibility concerns and explain why our focus is on image-text retrieval tasks. Second, we systematically summarize the current paradigm of image-text retrieval models and the stated contributions of those approaches. Third, we analyze various aspects of the reproduction of pretrained and nonpretrained retrieval models. To complete this, we conducted ablation experiments and obtained some influencing factors that affect retrieval recall more than the improvement claimed in the original paper. Finally, we present some reflections and challenges that the retrieval community should consider in the future. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/WangFei-2019/Image-text-Retrieval.

Given a query consisting of a reference image and a relative caption, Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images visually similar to the reference one while incorporating the changes specified in the relative caption. The reliance of supervised methods on labor-intensive manually labeled datasets hinders their broad applicability. In this work, we introduce a new task, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR), that addresses CIR without the need for a labeled training dataset. We propose an approach named iSEARLE (improved zero-Shot composEd imAge Retrieval with textuaL invErsion) that involves mapping the visual information of the reference image into a pseudo-word token in CLIP token embedding space and combining it with the relative caption. To foster research on ZS-CIR, we present an open-domain benchmarking dataset named CIRCO (Composed Image Retrieval on Common Objects in context), the first CIR dataset where each query is labeled with multiple ground truths and a semantic categorization. The experimental results illustrate that iSEARLE obtains state-of-the-art performance on three different CIR datasets -- FashionIQ, CIRR, and the proposed CIRCO -- and two additional evaluation settings, namely domain conversion and object composition. The dataset, the code, and the model are publicly available at https://github.com/miccunifi/SEARLE.

We present CodeReef - an open platform to share all the components necessary to enable cross-platform MLOps (MLSysOps), i.e. automating the deployment of ML models across diverse systems in the most efficient way. We also introduce the CodeReef solution - a way to package and share models as non-virtualized, portable, customizable and reproducible archive files. Such ML packages include JSON meta description of models with all dependencies, Python APIs, CLI actions and portable workflows necessary to automatically build, benchmark, test and customize models across diverse platforms, AI frameworks, libraries, compilers and datasets. We demonstrate several CodeReef solutions to automatically build, run and measure object detection based on SSD-Mobilenets, TensorFlow and COCO dataset from the latest MLPerf inference benchmark across a wide range of platforms from Raspberry Pi, Android phones and IoT devices to data centers. Our long-term goal is to help researchers share their new techniques as production-ready packages along with research papers to participate in collaborative and reproducible benchmarking, compare the different ML/software/hardware stacks and select the most efficient ones on a Pareto frontier using online CodeReef dashboards.

This paper introduces a large-scale multimodal and multilingual dataset that aims to facilitate research on grounding words to images in their contextual usage in language. The dataset consists of images selected to unambiguously illustrate concepts expressed in sentences from movie subtitles. The dataset is a valuable resource as (i) the images are aligned to text fragments rather than whole sentences; (ii) multiple images are possible for a text fragment and a sentence; (iii) the sentences are free-form and real-world like; (iv) the parallel texts are multilingual. We set up a fill-in-the-blank game for humans to evaluate the quality of the automatic image selection process of our dataset. We show the utility of the dataset on two automatic tasks: (i) fill-in-the-blank; (ii) lexical translation. Results of the human evaluation and automatic models demonstrate that images can be a useful complement to the textual context. The dataset will benefit research on visual grounding of words especially in the context of free-form sentences, and can be obtained from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5034604 under a Creative Commons licence.

This paper introduces a novel dataset to help researchers evaluate their computer vision and audio models for accuracy across a diverse set of age, genders, apparent skin tones and ambient lighting conditions. Our dataset is composed of 3,011 subjects and contains over 45,000 videos, with an average of 15 videos per person. The videos were recorded in multiple U.S. states with a diverse set of adults in various age, gender and apparent skin tone groups. A key feature is that each subject agreed to participate for their likenesses to be used. Additionally, our age and gender annotations are provided by the subjects themselves. A group of trained annotators labeled the subjects' apparent skin tone using the Fitzpatrick skin type scale. Moreover, annotations for videos recorded in low ambient lighting are also provided. As an application to measure robustness of predictions across certain attributes, we provide a comprehensive study on the top five winners of the DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC). Experimental evaluation shows that the winning models are less performant on some specific groups of people, such as subjects with darker skin tones and thus may not generalize to all people. In addition, we also evaluate the state-of-the-art apparent age and gender classification methods. Our experiments provides a thorough analysis on these models in terms of fair treatment of people from various backgrounds.

Large language models (LLMs) trained on general domain corpora showed remarkable results on natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, previous research demonstrated LLMs trained using domain-focused corpora perform better on specialized tasks. Inspired by this pivotal insight, we developed INDUS, a comprehensive suite of LLMs tailored for the Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary sciences and astrophysics domains and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources. The suite of models include: (1) an encoder model trained using domain-specific vocabulary and corpora to address natural language understanding tasks, (2) a contrastive-learning-based general text embedding model trained using a diverse set of datasets drawn from multiple sources to address information retrieval tasks and (3) smaller versions of these models created using knowledge distillation techniques to address applications which have latency or resource constraints. We also created three new scientific benchmark datasets namely, CLIMATE-CHANGE-NER (entity-recognition), NASA-QA (extractive QA) and NASA-IR (IR) to accelerate research in these multi-disciplinary fields. Finally, we show that our models outperform both general-purpose encoders (RoBERTa) and existing domain-specific encoders (SciBERT) on these new tasks as well as existing benchmark tasks in the domains of interest.

Despite recent advances in multimodal pre-training for visual description, state-of-the-art models still produce captions containing errors, such as hallucinating objects not present in a scene. The existing prominent metric for object hallucination, CHAIR, is limited to a fixed set of MS COCO objects and synonyms. In this work, we propose a modernized open-vocabulary metric, ALOHa, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to measure object hallucinations. Specifically, we use an LLM to extract groundable objects from a candidate caption, measure their semantic similarity to reference objects from captions and object detections, and use Hungarian matching to produce a final hallucination score. We show that ALOHa correctly identifies 13.6% more hallucinated objects than CHAIR on HAT, a new gold-standard subset of MS COCO Captions annotated for hallucinations, and 30.8% more on nocaps, where objects extend beyond MS COCO categories. Our code is available at https://davidmchan.github.io/aloha/.

Object removal refers to the process of erasing designated objects from an image while preserving the overall appearance, and it is one area where image inpainting is widely used in real-world applications. The performance of an object remover is quantitatively evaluated by measuring the quality of object removal results, similar to how the performance of an image inpainter is gauged. Current works reporting quantitative performance evaluations utilize original images as references. In this letter, to validate the current evaluation methods cannot properly evaluate the performance of an object remover, we create a dataset with object removal ground truth and compare the evaluations made by the current methods using original images to those utilizing object removal ground truth images. The disparities between two evaluation sets validate that the current methods are not suitable for measuring the performance of an object remover. Additionally, we propose new evaluation methods tailored to gauge the performance of an object remover. The proposed methods evaluate the performance through class-wise object removal results and utilize images without the target class objects as a comparison set. We confirm that the proposed methods can make judgments consistent with human evaluators in the COCO dataset, and that they can produce measurements aligning with those using object removal ground truth in the self-acquired dataset.

In this work, we present an unsupervised method for enhancing an image captioning model (in our case, BLIP2) using reinforcement learning and vision-language models like CLIP and BLIP2-ITM as reward models. The RL-tuned model is able to generate longer and more comprehensive descriptions. Our model reaches impressive 0.90 R@1 CLIP Recall score on MS-COCO Carpathy Test Split. Weights are available at https://huggingface.co/sashakunitsyn/vlrm-blip2-opt-2.7b.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) models play a crucial role in various NLP tasks, including information extraction (IE) and text understanding. In academic writing, references to machine learning models and datasets are fundamental components of various computer science publications and necessitate accurate models for identification. Despite the advancements in NER, existing ground truth datasets do not treat fine-grained types like ML model and model architecture as separate entity types, and consequently, baseline models cannot recognize them as such. In this paper, we release a corpus of 100 manually annotated full-text scientific publications and a first baseline model for 10 entity types centered around ML models and datasets. In order to provide a nuanced understanding of how ML models and datasets are mentioned and utilized, our dataset also contains annotations for informal mentions like "our BERT-based model" or "an image CNN". You can find the ground truth dataset and code to replicate model training at https://data.gesis.org/gsap/gsap-ner.

We present a conceptually simple, flexible, and general framework for object instance segmentation. Our approach efficiently detects objects in an image while simultaneously generating a high-quality segmentation mask for each instance. The method, called Mask R-CNN, extends Faster R-CNN by adding a branch for predicting an object mask in parallel with the existing branch for bounding box recognition. Mask R-CNN is simple to train and adds only a small overhead to Faster R-CNN, running at 5 fps. Moreover, Mask R-CNN is easy to generalize to other tasks, e.g., allowing us to estimate human poses in the same framework. We show top results in all three tracks of the COCO suite of challenges, including instance segmentation, bounding-box object detection, and person keypoint detection. Without bells and whistles, Mask R-CNN outperforms all existing, single-model entries on every task, including the COCO 2016 challenge winners. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in instance-level recognition. Code has been made available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron

As language models grow ever larger, the need for large-scale high-quality text datasets has never been more pressing, especially in multilingual settings. The BigScience workshop, a 1-year international and multidisciplinary initiative, was formed with the goal of researching and training large language models as a values-driven undertaking, putting issues of ethics, harm, and governance in the foreground. This paper documents the data creation and curation efforts undertaken by BigScience to assemble the Responsible Open-science Open-collaboration Text Sources (ROOTS) corpus, a 1.6TB dataset spanning 59 languages that was used to train the 176-billion-parameter BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual (BLOOM) language model. We further release a large initial subset of the corpus and analyses thereof, and hope to empower large-scale monolingual and multilingual modeling projects with both the data and the processing tools, as well as stimulate research around this large multilingual corpus.

The absence of explicitly tailored, accessible annotated datasets for educational purposes presents a notable obstacle for NLP tasks in languages with limited resources.This study initially explores the feasibility of using machine translation (MT) to convert an existing dataset into a Tigrinya dataset in SQuAD format. As a result, we present TIGQA, an expert annotated educational dataset consisting of 2.68K question-answer pairs covering 122 diverse topics such as climate, water, and traffic. These pairs are from 537 context paragraphs in publicly accessible Tigrinya and Biology books. Through comprehensive analyses, we demonstrate that the TIGQA dataset requires skills beyond simple word matching, requiring both single-sentence and multiple-sentence inference abilities. We conduct experiments using state-of-the art MRC methods, marking the first exploration of such models on TIGQA. Additionally, we estimate human performance on the dataset and juxtapose it with the results obtained from pretrained models.The notable disparities between human performance and best model performance underscore the potential for further enhancements to TIGQA through continued research. Our dataset is freely accessible via the provided link to encourage the research community to address the challenges in the Tigrinya MRC.

This paper introduces the first public large-scale, long-span dataset with sea turtle photographs captured in the wild -- SeaTurtleID2022 (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/wildlifedatasets/seaturtleid2022). The dataset contains 8729 photographs of 438 unique individuals collected within 13 years, making it the longest-spanned dataset for animal re-identification. All photographs include various annotations, e.g., identity, encounter timestamp, and body parts segmentation masks. Instead of standard "random" splits, the dataset allows for two realistic and ecologically motivated splits: (i) a time-aware closed-set with training, validation, and test data from different days/years, and (ii) a time-aware open-set with new unknown individuals in test and validation sets. We show that time-aware splits are essential for benchmarking re-identification methods, as random splits lead to performance overestimation. Furthermore, a baseline instance segmentation and re-identification performance over various body parts is provided. Finally, an end-to-end system for sea turtle re-identification is proposed and evaluated. The proposed system based on Hybrid Task Cascade for head instance segmentation and ArcFace-trained feature-extractor achieved an accuracy of 86.8%.

This paper presents Yankari, a large-scale monolingual dataset for the Yoruba language, aimed at addressing the critical gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources for this important West African language. Despite being spoken by over 30 million people, Yoruba has been severely underrepresented in NLP research and applications. We detail our methodology for creating this dataset, which includes careful source selection, automated quality control, and rigorous data cleaning processes. The Yankari dataset comprises 51,407 documents from 13 diverse sources, totaling over 30 million tokens. Our approach focuses on ethical data collection practices, avoiding problematic sources and addressing issues prevalent in existing datasets. We provide thorough automated evaluations of the dataset, demonstrating its quality compared to existing resources. The Yankari dataset represents a significant advancement in Yoruba language resources, providing a foundation for developing more accurate NLP models, supporting comparative linguistic studies, and contributing to the digital accessibility of the Yoruba language.

This article motivates, describes, and presents the PBSCSR dataset for studying composer style recognition of piano sheet music. Our overarching goal was to create a dataset for studying composer style recognition that is "as accessible as MNIST and as challenging as ImageNet." To achieve this goal, we sample fixed-length bootleg score fragments from piano sheet music images on IMSLP. The dataset itself contains 40,000 62x64 bootleg score images for a 9-way classification task, 100,000 62x64 bootleg score images for a 100-way classification task, and 29,310 unlabeled variable-length bootleg score images for pretraining. The labeled data is presented in a form that mirrors MNIST images, in order to make it extremely easy to visualize, manipulate, and train models in an efficient manner. Additionally, we include relevant metadata to allow access to the underlying raw sheet music images and other related data on IMSLP. We describe several research tasks that could be studied with the dataset, including variations of composer style recognition in a few-shot or zero-shot setting. For tasks that have previously proposed models, we release code and baseline results for future works to compare against. We also discuss open research questions that the PBSCSR data is especially well suited to facilitate research on and areas of fruitful exploration in future work.

The body of research on classification of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery is increasing, yet there are still not many public benchmark datasets. This paper introduces two novel benchmark datasets for classifying and localizing solar panel arrays in Denmark: A human annotated dataset for classification and segmentation, as well as a classification dataset acquired using self-reported data from the Danish national building registry. We explore the performance of prior works on the new benchmark dataset, and present results after fine-tuning models using a similar approach as recent works. Furthermore, we train models of newer architectures and provide benchmark baselines to our datasets in several scenarios. We believe the release of these datasets may improve future research in both local and global geospatial domains for identifying and mapping of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery. The data is accessible at https://osf.io/aj539/.

We introduce MilkQA, a question answering dataset from the dairy domain dedicated to the study of consumer questions. The dataset contains 2,657 pairs of questions and answers, written in the Portuguese language and originally collected by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa). All questions were motivated by real situations and written by thousands of authors with very different backgrounds and levels of literacy, while answers were elaborated by specialists from Embrapa's customer service. Our dataset was filtered and anonymized by three human annotators. Consumer questions are a challenging kind of question that is usually employed as a form of seeking information. Although several question answering datasets are available, most of such resources are not suitable for research on answer selection models for consumer questions. We aim to fill this gap by making MilkQA publicly available. We study the behavior of four answer selection models on MilkQA: two baseline models and two convolutional neural network archictetures. Our results show that MilkQA poses real challenges to computational models, particularly due to linguistic characteristics of its questions and to their unusually longer lengths. Only one of the experimented models gives reasonable results, at the cost of high computational requirements.

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation is typically inspired by class activation maps, which serve as pseudo masks with class-discriminative regions highlighted. Although tremendous efforts have been made to recall precise and complete locations for each class, existing methods still commonly suffer from the unsolicited Out-of-Candidate (OC) error predictions that not belongs to the label candidates, which could be avoidable since the contradiction with image-level class tags is easy to be detected. In this paper, we develop a group ranking-based Out-of-Candidate Rectification (OCR) mechanism in a plug-and-play fashion. Firstly, we adaptively split the semantic categories into In-Candidate (IC) and OC groups for each OC pixel according to their prior annotation correlation and posterior prediction correlation. Then, we derive a differentiable rectification loss to force OC pixels to shift to the IC group. Incorporating our OCR with seminal baselines (e.g., AffinityNet, SEAM, MCTformer), we can achieve remarkable performance gains on both Pascal VOC (+3.2%, +3.3%, +0.8% mIoU) and MS COCO (+1.0%, +1.3%, +0.5% mIoU) datasets with negligible extra training overhead, which justifies the effectiveness and generality of our OCR.

Existing neural networks for computer vision tasks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks: adding imperceptible perturbations to the input images can fool these methods to make a false prediction on an image that was correctly predicted without the perturbation. Various defense methods have proposed image-to-image mapping methods, either including these perturbations in the training process or removing them in a preprocessing denoising step. In doing so, existing methods often ignore that the natural RGB images in today's datasets are not captured but, in fact, recovered from RAW color filter array captures that are subject to various degradations in the capture. In this work, we exploit this RAW data distribution as an empirical prior for adversarial defense. Specifically, we proposed a model-agnostic adversarial defensive method, which maps the input RGB images to Bayer RAW space and back to output RGB using a learned camera image signal processing (ISP) pipeline to eliminate potential adversarial patterns. The proposed method acts as an off-the-shelf preprocessing module and, unlike model-specific adversarial training methods, does not require adversarial images to train. As a result, the method generalizes to unseen tasks without additional retraining. Experiments on large-scale datasets (e.g., ImageNet, COCO) for different vision tasks (e.g., classification, semantic segmentation, object detection) validate that the method significantly outperforms existing methods across task domains.

The article presents a new multi-label comprehensive image dataset from flexible endoscopy, colonoscopy and capsule endoscopy, named ERS. The collection has been labeled according to the full medical specification of 'Minimum Standard Terminology 3.0' (MST 3.0), describing all possible findings in the gastrointestinal tract (104 possible labels), extended with an additional 19 labels useful in common machine learning applications. The dataset contains around 6000 precisely and 115,000 approximately labeled frames from endoscopy videos, 3600 precise and 22,600 approximate segmentation masks, and 1.23 million unlabeled frames from flexible and capsule endoscopy videos. The labeled data cover almost entirely the MST 3.0 standard. The data came from 1520 videos of 1135 patients. Additionally, this paper proposes and describes four exemplary experiments in gastrointestinal image classification task performed using the created dataset. The obtained results indicate the high usefulness and flexibility of the dataset in training and testing machine learning algorithms in the field of endoscopic data analysis.

This paper introduces a novel Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) framework for multi-modal, multi-task transfer learning with pre-trained language models. PEFT techniques such as LoRA, BitFit and IA3 have demonstrated comparable performance to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models for specific downstream tasks, all while demanding significantly fewer trainable parameters and reduced GPU memory consumption. However, in the context of multi-modal fine-tuning, the need for architectural modifications or full fine-tuning often becomes apparent. To address this we propose Context-PEFT, which learns different groups of adaptor parameters based on the token's domain. This approach enables LoRA-like weight injection without requiring additional architectural changes. Our method is evaluated on the COCO captioning task, where it outperforms full fine-tuning under similar data constraints while simultaneously offering a substantially more parameter-efficient and computationally economical solution.

We present SParC, a dataset for cross-domainSemanticParsing inContext that consists of 4,298 coherent question sequences (12k+ individual questions annotated with SQL queries). It is obtained from controlled user interactions with 200 complex databases over 138 domains. We provide an in-depth analysis of SParC and show that it introduces new challenges compared to existing datasets. SParC demonstrates complex contextual dependencies, (2) has greater semantic diversity, and (3) requires generalization to unseen domains due to its cross-domain nature and the unseen databases at test time. We experiment with two state-of-the-art text-to-SQL models adapted to the context-dependent, cross-domain setup. The best model obtains an exact match accuracy of 20.2% over all questions and less than10% over all interaction sequences, indicating that the cross-domain setting and the con-textual phenomena of the dataset present significant challenges for future research. The dataset, baselines, and leaderboard are released at https://yale-lily.github.io/sparc.

Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) utilizing extensive image-text paired data have demonstrated unprecedented image-text association capabilities, achieving remarkable results across various downstream tasks. A critical challenge is how to make use of existing large-scale pre-trained VLMs, which are trained on common objects, to perform the domain-specific transfer for accomplishing domain-related downstream tasks. A critical challenge is how to make use of existing large-scale pre-trained VLMs, which are trained on common objects, to perform the domain-specific transfer for accomplishing domain-related downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new framework that includes the Domain pre-trained Vision-Language Model (DVLM), bridging the gap between the General Vision-Language Model (GVLM) and domain-specific downstream tasks. Moreover, we present an image-text paired dataset in the field of remote sensing (RS), RS5M, which has 5 million RS images with English descriptions. The dataset is obtained from filtering publicly available image-text paired datasets and captioning label-only RS datasets with pre-trained VLM. These constitute the first large-scale RS image-text paired dataset. Additionally, we fine-tuned the CLIP model and tried several Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods on RS5M to implement the DVLM. Experimental results show that our proposed dataset is highly effective for various tasks, and our model GeoRSCLIP improves upon the baseline or previous state-of-the-art model by 3%sim20% in Zero-shot Classification (ZSC), 3%sim6% in Remote Sensing Cross-Modal Text-Image Retrieval (RSCTIR) and 4%sim5% in Semantic Localization (SeLo) tasks. Dataset and models have been released in: https://github.com/om-ai-lab/RS5M.

We present a simple, highly modularized network architecture for image classification. Our network is constructed by repeating a building block that aggregates a set of transformations with the same topology. Our simple design results in a homogeneous, multi-branch architecture that has only a few hyper-parameters to set. This strategy exposes a new dimension, which we call "cardinality" (the size of the set of transformations), as an essential factor in addition to the dimensions of depth and width. On the ImageNet-1K dataset, we empirically show that even under the restricted condition of maintaining complexity, increasing cardinality is able to improve classification accuracy. Moreover, increasing cardinality is more effective than going deeper or wider when we increase the capacity. Our models, named ResNeXt, are the foundations of our entry to the ILSVRC 2016 classification task in which we secured 2nd place. We further investigate ResNeXt on an ImageNet-5K set and the COCO detection set, also showing better results than its ResNet counterpart. The code and models are publicly available online.

We introduce CORE, a dataset for few-shot relation classification (RC) focused on company relations and business entities. CORE includes 4,708 instances of 12 relation types with corresponding textual evidence extracted from company Wikipedia pages. Company names and business entities pose a challenge for few-shot RC models due to the rich and diverse information associated with them. For example, a company name may represent the legal entity, products, people, or business divisions depending on the context. Therefore, deriving the relation type between entities is highly dependent on textual context. To evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art RC models on the CORE dataset, we conduct experiments in the few-shot domain adaptation setting. Our results reveal substantial performance gaps, confirming that models trained on different domains struggle to adapt to CORE. Interestingly, we find that models trained on CORE showcase improved out-of-domain performance, which highlights the importance of high-quality data for robust domain adaptation. Specifically, the information richness embedded in business entities allows models to focus on contextual nuances, reducing their reliance on superficial clues such as relation-specific verbs. In addition to the dataset, we provide relevant code snippets to facilitate reproducibility and encourage further research in the field.

In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale face dataset named VGGFace2. The dataset contains 3.31 million images of 9131 subjects, with an average of 362.6 images for each subject. Images are downloaded from Google Image Search and have large variations in pose, age, illumination, ethnicity and profession (e.g. actors, athletes, politicians). The dataset was collected with three goals in mind: (i) to have both a large number of identities and also a large number of images for each identity; (ii) to cover a large range of pose, age and ethnicity; and (iii) to minimize the label noise. We describe how the dataset was collected, in particular the automated and manual filtering stages to ensure a high accuracy for the images of each identity. To assess face recognition performance using the new dataset, we train ResNet-50 (with and without Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks) Convolutional Neural Networks on VGGFace2, on MS- Celeb-1M, and on their union, and show that training on VGGFace2 leads to improved recognition performance over pose and age. Finally, using the models trained on these datasets, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on all the IARPA Janus face recognition benchmarks, e.g. IJB-A, IJB-B and IJB-C, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. Datasets and models are publicly available.

Machine learning applications on extremely low-power devices, commonly referred to as tiny machine learning (TinyML), promises a smarter and more connected world. However, the advancement of current TinyML research is hindered by the limited size and quality of pertinent datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce Wake Vision, a large-scale, diverse dataset tailored for person detection -- the canonical task for TinyML visual sensing. Wake Vision comprises over 6 million images, which is a hundredfold increase compared to the previous standard, and has undergone thorough quality filtering. Using Wake Vision for training results in a 2.41\% increase in accuracy compared to the established benchmark. Alongside the dataset, we provide a collection of five detailed benchmark sets that assess model performance on specific segments of the test data, such as varying lighting conditions, distances from the camera, and demographic characteristics of subjects. These novel fine-grained benchmarks facilitate the evaluation of model quality in challenging real-world scenarios that are often ignored when focusing solely on overall accuracy. Through an evaluation of a MobileNetV2 TinyML model on the benchmarks, we show that the input resolution plays a more crucial role than the model width in detecting distant subjects and that the impact of quantization on model robustness is minimal, thanks to the dataset quality. These findings underscore the importance of a detailed evaluation to identify essential factors for model development. The dataset, benchmark suite, code, and models are publicly available under the CC-BY 4.0 license, enabling their use for commercial use cases.

While recent advancements in vision-language models have revolutionized multi-modal understanding, it remains unclear whether they possess the capabilities of comprehending the generated images. Compared to real data, synthetic images exhibit a higher degree of diversity in both content and style, for which there are significant difficulties for the models to fully apprehend. To this end, we present a large-scale dataset, JourneyDB, for multi-modal visual understanding in generative images. Our curated dataset covers 4 million diverse and high-quality generated images paired with the text prompts used to produce them. We further design 4 benchmarks to quantify the performance of generated image understanding in terms of both content and style interpretation. These benchmarks include prompt inversion, style retrieval, image captioning and visual question answering. Lastly, we assess the performance of current state-of-the-art multi-modal models when applied to JourneyDB, and provide an in-depth analysis of their strengths and limitations in generated content understanding. We hope the proposed dataset and benchmarks will facilitate the research in the field of generative content understanding. The dataset will be available on https://journeydb.github.io.

Gender biases are known to exist within large-scale visual datasets and can be reflected or even amplified in downstream models. Many prior works have proposed methods for mitigating gender biases, often by attempting to remove gender expression information from images. To understand the feasibility and practicality of these approaches, we investigate what gender artifacts exist within large-scale visual datasets. We define a gender artifact as a visual cue that is correlated with gender, focusing specifically on those cues that are learnable by a modern image classifier and have an interpretable human corollary. Through our analyses, we find that gender artifacts are ubiquitous in the COCO and OpenImages datasets, occurring everywhere from low-level information (e.g., the mean value of the color channels) to the higher-level composition of the image (e.g., pose and location of people). Given the prevalence of gender artifacts, we claim that attempts to remove gender artifacts from such datasets are largely infeasible. Instead, the responsibility lies with researchers and practitioners to be aware that the distribution of images within datasets is highly gendered and hence develop methods which are robust to these distributional shifts across groups.

Research in massively multilingual image captioning has been severely hampered by a lack of high-quality evaluation datasets. In this paper we present the Crossmodal-3600 dataset (XM3600 in short), a geographically diverse set of 3600 images annotated with human-generated reference captions in 36 languages. The images were selected from across the world, covering regions where the 36 languages are spoken, and annotated with captions that achieve consistency in terms of style across all languages, while avoiding annotation artifacts due to direct translation. We apply this benchmark to model selection for massively multilingual image captioning models, and show superior correlation results with human evaluations when using XM3600 as golden references for automatic metrics.

We present Bloom Library, a linguistically diverse set of multimodal and multilingual datasets for language modeling, image captioning, visual storytelling, and speech synthesis/recognition. These datasets represent either the most, or among the most, multilingual datasets for each of the included downstream tasks. In total, the initial release of the Bloom Library datasets covers 363 languages across 32 language families. We train downstream task models for various languages represented in the data, showing the viability of the data for future work in low-resource, multimodal NLP and establishing the first known baselines for these downstream tasks in certain languages (e.g., Bisu [bzi], with an estimated population of 700 users). Some of these first-of-their-kind baselines are comparable to state-of-the-art performance for higher-resourced languages. The Bloom Library datasets are released under Creative Commons licenses on the Hugging Face datasets hub to catalyze more linguistically diverse research in the included downstream tasks.

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.

Automatically describing the content of an image is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence that connects computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we present a generative model based on a deep recurrent architecture that combines recent advances in computer vision and machine translation and that can be used to generate natural sentences describing an image. The model is trained to maximize the likelihood of the target description sentence given the training image. Experiments on several datasets show the accuracy of the model and the fluency of the language it learns solely from image descriptions. Our model is often quite accurate, which we verify both qualitatively and quantitatively. For instance, while the current state-of-the-art BLEU-1 score (the higher the better) on the Pascal dataset is 25, our approach yields 59, to be compared to human performance around 69. We also show BLEU-1 score improvements on Flickr30k, from 56 to 66, and on SBU, from 19 to 28. Lastly, on the newly released COCO dataset, we achieve a BLEU-4 of 27.7, which is the current state-of-the-art.

Contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) using image-text pairs has achieved impressive results on image classification in both zero-shot and transfer learning settings. However, we show that directly applying such models to recognize image regions for object detection leads to poor performance due to a domain shift: CLIP was trained to match an image as a whole to a text description, without capturing the fine-grained alignment between image regions and text spans. To mitigate this issue, we propose a new method called RegionCLIP that significantly extends CLIP to learn region-level visual representations, thus enabling fine-grained alignment between image regions and textual concepts. Our method leverages a CLIP model to match image regions with template captions and then pretrains our model to align these region-text pairs in the feature space. When transferring our pretrained model to the open-vocabulary object detection tasks, our method significantly outperforms the state of the art by 3.8 AP50 and 2.2 AP for novel categories on COCO and LVIS datasets, respectively. Moreoever, the learned region representations support zero-shot inference for object detection, showing promising results on both COCO and LVIS datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RegionCLIP.

We introduce the Song Describer dataset (SDD), a new crowdsourced corpus of high-quality audio-caption pairs, designed for the evaluation of music-and-language models. The dataset consists of 1.1k human-written natural language descriptions of 706 music recordings, all publicly accessible and released under Creative Common licenses. To showcase the use of our dataset, we benchmark popular models on three key music-and-language tasks (music captioning, text-to-music generation and music-language retrieval). Our experiments highlight the importance of cross-dataset evaluation and offer insights into how researchers can use SDD to gain a broader understanding of model performance.

Due to the cost of developing and training deep learning models from scratch, machine learning engineers have begun to reuse pre-trained models (PTMs) and fine-tune them for downstream tasks. PTM registries known as "model hubs" support engineers in distributing and reusing deep learning models. PTM packages include pre-trained weights, documentation, model architectures, datasets, and metadata. Mining the information in PTM packages will enable the discovery of engineering phenomena and tools to support software engineers. However, accessing this information is difficult - there are many PTM registries, and both the registries and the individual packages may have rate limiting for accessing the data. We present an open-source dataset, PTMTorrent, to facilitate the evaluation and understanding of PTM packages. This paper describes the creation, structure, usage, and limitations of the dataset. The dataset includes a snapshot of 5 model hubs and a total of 15,913 PTM packages. These packages are represented in a uniform data schema for cross-hub mining. We describe prior uses of this data and suggest research opportunities for mining using our dataset. The PTMTorrent dataset (v1) is available at: https://app.globus.org/file-manager?origin_id=55e17a6e-9d8f-11ed-a2a2-8383522b48d9&origin_path=%2F~%2F. Our dataset generation tools are available on GitHub: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7570357.

In this paper we address issues with image retrieval benchmarking on standard and popular Oxford 5k and Paris 6k datasets. In particular, annotation errors, the size of the dataset, and the level of challenge are addressed: new annotation for both datasets is created with an extra attention to the reliability of the ground truth. Three new protocols of varying difficulty are introduced. The protocols allow fair comparison between different methods, including those using a dataset pre-processing stage. For each dataset, 15 new challenging queries are introduced. Finally, a new set of 1M hard, semi-automatically cleaned distractors is selected. An extensive comparison of the state-of-the-art methods is performed on the new benchmark. Different types of methods are evaluated, ranging from local-feature-based to modern CNN based methods. The best results are achieved by taking the best of the two worlds. Most importantly, image retrieval appears far from being solved.

High-performance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely heavily on data quality. This study introduces a novel dataset named Img-Diff, designed to enhance fine-grained image recognition in MLLMs by leveraging insights from contrastive learning and image difference captioning. By analyzing object differences between similar images, we challenge models to identify both matching and distinct components. We utilize the Stable-Diffusion-XL model and advanced image editing techniques to create pairs of similar images that highlight object replacements. Our methodology includes a Difference Area Generator for object differences identifying, followed by a Difference Captions Generator for detailed difference descriptions. The result is a relatively small but high-quality dataset of "object replacement" samples. We use the the proposed dataset to fine-tune state-of-the-art (SOTA) MLLMs such as MGM-7B, yielding comprehensive improvements of performance scores over SOTA models that trained with larger-scale datasets, in numerous image difference and Visual Question Answering tasks. For instance, our trained models notably surpass the SOTA models GPT-4V and Gemini on the MMVP benchmark. Besides, we investigate alternative methods for generating image difference data through "object removal" and conduct thorough evaluation to confirm the dataset's diversity, quality, and robustness, presenting several insights on synthesis of such contrastive dataset. To encourage further research and advance the field of multimodal data synthesis and enhancement of MLLMs' fundamental capabilities for image understanding, we release our codes and dataset at https://github.com/modelscope/data-juicer/tree/ImgDiff.

Point-level Supervised Instance Segmentation (PSIS) aims to enhance the applicability and scalability of instance segmentation by utilizing low-cost yet instance-informative annotations. Existing PSIS methods usually rely on positional information to distinguish objects, but predicting precise boundaries remains challenging due to the lack of contour annotations. Nevertheless, weakly supervised semantic segmentation methods are proficient in utilizing intra-class feature consistency to capture the boundary contours of the same semantic regions. In this paper, we design a Mutual Distillation Module (MDM) to leverage the complementary strengths of both instance position and semantic information and achieve accurate instance-level object perception. The MDM consists of Semantic to Instance (S2I) and Instance to Semantic (I2S). S2I is guided by the precise boundaries of semantic regions to learn the association between annotated points and instance contours. I2S leverages discriminative relationships between instances to facilitate the differentiation of various objects within the semantic map. Extensive experiments substantiate the efficacy of MDM in fostering the synergy between instance and semantic information, consequently improving the quality of instance-level object representations. Our method achieves 55.7 mAP_{50} and 17.6 mAP on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets, significantly outperforming recent PSIS methods and several box-supervised instance segmentation competitors.

Natural disasters, such as floods, tornadoes, or wildfires, are increasingly pervasive as the Earth undergoes global warming. It is difficult to predict when and where an incident will occur, so timely emergency response is critical to saving the lives of those endangered by destructive events. Fortunately, technology can play a role in these situations. Social media posts can be used as a low-latency data source to understand the progression and aftermath of a disaster, yet parsing this data is tedious without automated methods. Prior work has mostly focused on text-based filtering, yet image and video-based filtering remains largely unexplored. In this work, we present the Incidents1M Dataset, a large-scale multi-label dataset which contains 977,088 images, with 43 incident and 49 place categories. We provide details of the dataset construction, statistics and potential biases; introduce and train a model for incident detection; and perform image-filtering experiments on millions of images on Flickr and Twitter. We also present some applications on incident analysis to encourage and enable future work in computer vision for humanitarian aid. Code, data, and models are available at http://incidentsdataset.csail.mit.edu.

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

The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge is a benchmark in object category classification and detection on hundreds of object categories and millions of images. The challenge has been run annually from 2010 to present, attracting participation from more than fifty institutions. This paper describes the creation of this benchmark dataset and the advances in object recognition that have been possible as a result. We discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale ground truth annotation, highlight key breakthroughs in categorical object recognition, provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale image classification and object detection, and compare the state-of-the-art computer vision accuracy with human accuracy. We conclude with lessons learned in the five years of the challenge, and propose future directions and improvements.

Skin tone as a demographic bias and inconsistent human labeling poses challenges in dermatology AI. We take another angle to investigate color contrast's impact, beyond skin tones, on malignancy detection in skin disease datasets: We hypothesize that in addition to skin tones, the color difference between the lesion area and skin also plays a role in malignancy detection performance of dermatology AI models. To study this, we first propose a robust labeling method to quantify color contrast scores of each image and validate our method by showing small labeling variations. More importantly, applying our method to the only diverse-skin tone and pathologically-confirmed skin disease dataset DDI, yields DDI-CoCo Dataset, and we observe a performance gap between the high and low color difference groups. This disparity remains consistent across various state-of-the-art (SoTA) image classification models, which supports our hypothesis. Furthermore, we study the interaction between skin tone and color difference effects and suggest that color difference can be an additional reason behind model performance bias between skin tones. Our work provides a complementary angle to dermatology AI for improving skin disease detection.

Distribution shifts are a major source of failure of deployed machine learning models. However, evaluating a model's reliability under distribution shifts can be challenging, especially since it may be difficult to acquire counterfactual examples that exhibit a specified shift. In this work, we introduce dataset interfaces: a framework which allows users to scalably synthesize such counterfactual examples from a given dataset. Specifically, we represent each class from the input dataset as a custom token within the text space of a text-to-image diffusion model. By incorporating these tokens into natural language prompts, we can then generate instantiations of objects in that dataset under desired distribution shifts. We demonstrate how applying our framework to the ImageNet dataset enables us to study model behavior across a diverse array of shifts, including variations in background, lighting, and attributes of the objects themselves. Code available at https://github.com/MadryLab/dataset-interfaces.

We introduce a new challenge to test the STEM skills of neural models. The problems in the real world often require solutions, combining knowledge from STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Unlike existing datasets, our dataset requires the understanding of multimodal vision-language information of STEM. Our dataset features one of the largest and most comprehensive datasets for the challenge. It includes 448 skills and 1,073,146 questions spanning all STEM subjects. Compared to existing datasets that often focus on examining expert-level ability, our dataset includes fundamental skills and questions designed based on the K-12 curriculum. We also add state-of-the-art foundation models such as CLIP and GPT-3.5-Turbo to our benchmark. Results show that the recent model advances only help master a very limited number of lower grade-level skills (2.5% in the third grade) in our dataset. In fact, these models are still well below (averaging 54.7%) the performance of elementary students, not to mention near expert-level performance. To understand and increase the performance on our dataset, we teach the models on a training split of our dataset. Even though we observe improved performance, the model performance remains relatively low compared to average elementary students. To solve STEM problems, we will need novel algorithmic innovations from the community.

In the image classification task, the most common approach is to resize all images in a dataset to a unique shape, while reducing their precision to a size which facilitates experimentation at scale. This practice has benefits from a computational perspective, but it entails negative side-effects on performance due to loss of information and image deformation. In this work we introduce the MAMe dataset, an image classification dataset with remarkable high resolution and variable shape properties. The goal of MAMe is to provide a tool for studying the impact of such properties in image classification, while motivating research in the field. The MAMe dataset contains thousands of artworks from three different museums, and proposes a classification task consisting on differentiating between 29 mediums (i.e. materials and techniques) supervised by art experts. After reviewing the singularity of MAMe in the context of current image classification tasks, a thorough description of the task is provided, together with dataset statistics. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the impact of using high resolution images, variable shape inputs and both properties at the same time. Results illustrate the positive impact in performance when using high resolution images, while highlighting the lack of solutions to exploit variable shapes. An additional experiment exposes the distinctiveness between the MAMe dataset and the prototypical ImageNet dataset. Finally, the baselines are inspected using explainability methods and expert knowledge, to gain insights on the challenges that remain ahead.

While image retrieval and instance recognition techniques are progressing rapidly, there is a need for challenging datasets to accurately measure their performance -- while posing novel challenges that are relevant for practical applications. We introduce the Google Landmarks Dataset v2 (GLDv2), a new benchmark for large-scale, fine-grained instance recognition and image retrieval in the domain of human-made and natural landmarks. GLDv2 is the largest such dataset to date by a large margin, including over 5M images and 200k distinct instance labels. Its test set consists of 118k images with ground truth annotations for both the retrieval and recognition tasks. The ground truth construction involved over 800 hours of human annotator work. Our new dataset has several challenging properties inspired by real world applications that previous datasets did not consider: An extremely long-tailed class distribution, a large fraction of out-of-domain test photos and large intra-class variability. The dataset is sourced from Wikimedia Commons, the world's largest crowdsourced collection of landmark photos. We provide baseline results for both recognition and retrieval tasks based on state-of-the-art methods as well as competitive results from a public challenge. We further demonstrate the suitability of the dataset for transfer learning by showing that image embeddings trained on it achieve competitive retrieval performance on independent datasets. The dataset images, ground-truth and metric scoring code are available at https://github.com/cvdfoundation/google-landmark.

Obtaining text datasets with semantic annotations is an effortful process, yet crucial for supervised training in natural language processsing (NLP). In general, developing and applying new NLP pipelines in domain-specific contexts for tasks often requires custom designed datasets to address NLP tasks in supervised machine learning fashion. When operating in non-English languages for medical data processing, this exposes several minor and major, interconnected problems such as lack of task-matching datasets as well as task-specific pre-trained models. In our work we suggest to leverage pretrained language models for training data acquisition in order to retrieve sufficiently large datasets for training smaller and more efficient models for use-case specific tasks. To demonstrate the effectiveness of your approach, we create a custom dataset which we use to train a medical NER model for German texts, GPTNERMED, yet our method remains language-independent in principle. Our obtained dataset as well as our pre-trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GPTNERMED

Datasets are foundational to many breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. Many recent achievements in the space of natural language processing (NLP) can be attributed to the finetuning of pre-trained models on a diverse set of tasks that enables a large language model (LLM) to respond to instructions. Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) requires specifically constructed and annotated datasets. However, existing datasets are almost all in the English language. In this work, our primary goal is to bridge the language gap by building a human-curated instruction-following dataset spanning 65 languages. We worked with fluent speakers of languages from around the world to collect natural instances of instructions and completions. Furthermore, we create the most extensive multilingual collection to date, comprising 513 million instances through templating and translating existing datasets across 114 languages. In total, we contribute four key resources: we develop and open-source the Aya Annotation Platform, the Aya Dataset, the Aya Collection, and the Aya Evaluation Suite. The Aya initiative also serves as a valuable case study in participatory research, involving collaborators from 119 countries. We see this as a valuable framework for future research collaborations that aim to bridge gaps in resources.

Current visual question answering datasets do not consider the rich semantic information conveyed by text within an image. In this work, we present a new dataset, ST-VQA, that aims to highlight the importance of exploiting high-level semantic information present in images as textual cues in the VQA process. We use this dataset to define a series of tasks of increasing difficulty for which reading the scene text in the context provided by the visual information is necessary to reason and generate an appropriate answer. We propose a new evaluation metric for these tasks to account both for reasoning errors as well as shortcomings of the text recognition module. In addition we put forward a series of baseline methods, which provide further insight to the newly released dataset, and set the scene for further research.

Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We operationalize the task of recommending datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To facilitate this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present a superior bi-encoder retriever for text-based dataset recommendation. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.

The goal of this paper is to detect objects by exploiting their interrelationships. Contrary to existing methods, which learn objects and relations separately, our key idea is to learn the object-relation distribution jointly. We first propose a novel way of creating a graphical representation of an image from inter-object relation priors and initial class predictions, we call a context-likelihood graph. We then learn the joint distribution with an energy-based modeling technique which allows to sample and refine the context-likelihood graph iteratively for a given image. Our formulation of jointly learning the distribution enables us to generate a more accurate graph representation of an image which leads to a better object detection performance. We demonstrate the benefits of our context-likelihood graph formulation and the energy-based graph refinement via experiments on the Visual Genome and MS-COCO datasets where we achieve a consistent improvement over object detectors like DETR and Faster-RCNN, as well as alternative methods modeling object interrelationships separately. Our method is detector agnostic, end-to-end trainable, and especially beneficial for rare object classes.

Weird, unusual, and uncanny images pique the curiosity of observers because they challenge commonsense. For example, an image released during the 2022 world cup depicts the famous soccer stars Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo playing chess, which playfully violates our expectation that their competition should occur on the football field. Humans can easily recognize and interpret these unconventional images, but can AI models do the same? We introduce WHOOPS!, a new dataset and benchmark for visual commonsense. The dataset is comprised of purposefully commonsense-defying images created by designers using publicly-available image generation tools like Midjourney. We consider several tasks posed over the dataset. In addition to image captioning, cross-modal matching, and visual question answering, we introduce a difficult explanation generation task, where models must identify and explain why a given image is unusual. Our results show that state-of-the-art models such as GPT3 and BLIP2 still lag behind human performance on WHOOPS!. We hope our dataset will inspire the development of AI models with stronger visual commonsense reasoning abilities. Data, models and code are available at the project website: whoops-benchmark.github.io

Recent advancements in state-space models (SSMs) have showcased effective performance in modeling long-range dependencies with subquadratic complexity. However, pure SSM-based models still face challenges related to stability and achieving optimal performance on computer vision tasks. Our paper addresses the challenges of scaling SSM-based models for computer vision, particularly the instability and inefficiency of large model sizes. To address this, we introduce a Modulated Group Mamba layer which divides the input channels into four groups and applies our proposed SSM-based efficient Visual Single Selective Scanning (VSSS) block independently to each group, with each VSSS block scanning in one of the four spatial directions. The Modulated Group Mamba layer also wraps the four VSSS blocks into a channel modulation operator to improve cross-channel communication. Furthermore, we introduce a distillation-based training objective to stabilize the training of large models, leading to consistent performance gains. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the merits of the proposed contributions, leading to superior performance over existing methods for image classification on ImageNet-1K, object detection, instance segmentation on MS-COCO, and semantic segmentation on ADE20K. Our tiny variant with 23M parameters achieves state-of-the-art performance with a classification top-1 accuracy of 83.3% on ImageNet-1K, while being 26% efficient in terms of parameters, compared to the best existing Mamba design of same model size. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/Amshaker/GroupMamba.

We propose SegGen, a highly-effective training data generation method for image segmentation, which pushes the performance limits of state-of-the-art segmentation models to a significant extent. SegGen designs and integrates two data generation strategies: MaskSyn and ImgSyn. (i) MaskSyn synthesizes new mask-image pairs via our proposed text-to-mask generation model and mask-to-image generation model, greatly improving the diversity in segmentation masks for model supervision; (ii) ImgSyn synthesizes new images based on existing masks using the mask-to-image generation model, strongly improving image diversity for model inputs. On the highly competitive ADE20K and COCO benchmarks, our data generation method markedly improves the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation models in semantic segmentation, panoptic segmentation, and instance segmentation. Notably, in terms of the ADE20K mIoU, Mask2Former R50 is largely boosted from 47.2 to 49.9 (+2.7); Mask2Former Swin-L is also significantly increased from 56.1 to 57.4 (+1.3). These promising results strongly suggest the effectiveness of our SegGen even when abundant human-annotated training data is utilized. Moreover, training with our synthetic data makes the segmentation models more robust towards unseen domains. Project website: https://seggenerator.github.io

Studying how people interact with large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios is increasingly important due to their widespread use in various applications. In this paper, we introduce LMSYS-Chat-1M, a large-scale dataset containing one million real-world conversations with 25 state-of-the-art LLMs. This dataset is collected from 210K unique IP addresses in the wild on our Vicuna demo and Chatbot Arena website. We offer an overview of the dataset's content, including its curation process, basic statistics, and topic distribution, highlighting its diversity, originality, and scale. We demonstrate its versatility through four use cases: developing content moderation models that perform similarly to GPT-4, building a safety benchmark, training instruction-following models that perform similarly to Vicuna, and creating challenging benchmark questions. We believe that this dataset will serve as a valuable resource for understanding and advancing LLM capabilities. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmsys/lmsys-chat-1m.

In recent years, automatic generation of image descriptions (captions), that is, image captioning, has attracted a great deal of attention. In this paper, we particularly consider generating Japanese captions for images. Since most available caption datasets have been constructed for English language, there are few datasets for Japanese. To tackle this problem, we construct a large-scale Japanese image caption dataset based on images from MS-COCO, which is called STAIR Captions. STAIR Captions consists of 820,310 Japanese captions for 164,062 images. In the experiment, we show that a neural network trained using STAIR Captions can generate more natural and better Japanese captions, compared to those generated using English-Japanese machine translation after generating English captions.

This work introduces ILIAS, a new test dataset for Instance-Level Image retrieval At Scale. It is designed to evaluate the ability of current and future foundation models and retrieval techniques to recognize particular objects. The key benefits over existing datasets include large scale, domain diversity, accurate ground truth, and a performance that is far from saturated. ILIAS includes query and positive images for 1,000 object instances, manually collected to capture challenging conditions and diverse domains. Large-scale retrieval is conducted against 100 million distractor images from YFCC100M. To avoid false negatives without extra annotation effort, we include only query objects confirmed to have emerged after 2014, i.e. the compilation date of YFCC100M. An extensive benchmarking is performed with the following observations: i) models fine-tuned on specific domains, such as landmarks or products, excel in that domain but fail on ILIAS ii) learning a linear adaptation layer using multi-domain class supervision results in performance improvements, especially for vision-language models iii) local descriptors in retrieval re-ranking are still a key ingredient, especially in the presence of severe background clutter iv) the text-to-image performance of the vision-language foundation models is surprisingly close to the corresponding image-to-image case. website: https://vrg.fel.cvut.cz/ilias/

It is very challenging to curate a dataset for language-specific knowledge and common sense in order to evaluate natural language understanding capabilities of language models. Due to the limitation in the availability of annotators, most current multilingual datasets are created through translation, which cannot evaluate such language-specific aspects. Therefore, we propose Multilingual CommonsenseQA (mCSQA) based on the construction process of CSQA but leveraging language models for a more efficient construction, e.g., by asking LM to generate questions/answers, refine answers and verify QAs followed by reduced human efforts for verification. Constructed dataset is a benchmark for cross-lingual language-transfer capabilities of multilingual LMs, and experimental results showed high language-transfer capabilities for questions that LMs could easily solve, but lower transfer capabilities for questions requiring deep knowledge or commonsense. This highlights the necessity of language-specific datasets for evaluation and training. Finally, our method demonstrated that multilingual LMs could create QA including language-specific knowledge, significantly reducing the dataset creation cost compared to manual creation. The datasets are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/yusuke1997/mCSQA.

Scientific news reports serve as a bridge, adeptly translating complex research articles into reports that resonate with the broader public. The automated generation of such narratives enhances the accessibility of scholarly insights. In this paper, we present a new corpus to facilitate this paradigm development. Our corpus comprises a parallel compilation of academic publications and their corresponding scientific news reports across nine disciplines. To demonstrate the utility and reliability of our dataset, we conduct an extensive analysis, highlighting the divergences in readability and brevity between scientific news narratives and academic manuscripts. We benchmark our dataset employing state-of-the-art text generation models. The evaluation process involves both automatic and human evaluation, which lays the groundwork for future explorations into the automated generation of scientific news reports. The dataset and code related to this work are available at https://dongqi.me/projects/SciNews.

Empirically validating new 3D-printing related algorithms and implementations requires testing data representative of inputs encountered in the wild. An ideal benchmarking dataset should not only draw from the same distribution of shapes people print in terms of class (e.g., toys, mechanisms, jewelry), representation type (e.g., triangle soup meshes) and complexity (e.g., number of facets), but should also capture problems and artifacts endemic to 3D printing models (e.g., self-intersections, non-manifoldness). We observe that the contextual and geometric characteristics of 3D printing models differ significantly from those used for computer graphics applications, not to mention standard models (e.g., Stanford bunny, Armadillo, Fertility). We present a new dataset of 10,000 models collected from an online 3D printing model-sharing database. Via analysis of both geometric (e.g., triangle aspect ratios, manifoldness) and contextual (e.g., licenses, tags, classes) characteristics, we demonstrate that this dataset represents a more concise summary of real-world models used for 3D printing compared to existing datasets. To facilitate future research endeavors, we also present an online query interface to select subsets of the dataset according to project-specific characteristics. The complete dataset and per-model statistical data are freely available to the public.

The rise of transformers in vision tasks not only advances network backbone designs, but also starts a brand-new page to achieve end-to-end image recognition (e.g., object detection and panoptic segmentation). Originated from Natural Language Processing (NLP), transformer architectures, consisting of self-attention and cross-attention, effectively learn long-range interactions between elements in a sequence. However, we observe that most existing transformer-based vision models simply borrow the idea from NLP, neglecting the crucial difference between languages and images, particularly the extremely large sequence length of spatially flattened pixel features. This subsequently impedes the learning in cross-attention between pixel features and object queries. In this paper, we rethink the relationship between pixels and object queries and propose to reformulate the cross-attention learning as a clustering process. Inspired by the traditional k-means clustering algorithm, we develop a k-means Mask Xformer (kMaX-DeepLab) for segmentation tasks, which not only improves the state-of-the-art, but also enjoys a simple and elegant design. As a result, our kMaX-DeepLab achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on COCO val set with 58.0% PQ, Cityscapes val set with 68.4% PQ, 44.0% AP, and 83.5% mIoU, and ADE20K val set with 50.9% PQ and 55.2% mIoU without test-time augmentation or external dataset. We hope our work can shed some light on designing transformers tailored for vision tasks. TensorFlow code and models are available at https://github.com/google-research/deeplab2 A PyTorch re-implementation is also available at https://github.com/bytedance/kmax-deeplab

Despite progress in perceptual tasks such as image classification, computers still perform poorly on cognitive tasks such as image description and question answering. Cognition is core to tasks that involve not just recognizing, but reasoning about our visual world. However, models used to tackle the rich content in images for cognitive tasks are still being trained using the same datasets designed for perceptual tasks. To achieve success at cognitive tasks, models need to understand the interactions and relationships between objects in an image. When asked "What vehicle is the person riding?", computers will need to identify the objects in an image as well as the relationships riding(man, carriage) and pulling(horse, carriage) in order to answer correctly that "the person is riding a horse-drawn carriage". In this paper, we present the Visual Genome dataset to enable the modeling of such relationships. We collect dense annotations of objects, attributes, and relationships within each image to learn these models. Specifically, our dataset contains over 100K images where each image has an average of 21 objects, 18 attributes, and 18 pairwise relationships between objects. We canonicalize the objects, attributes, relationships, and noun phrases in region descriptions and questions answer pairs to WordNet synsets. Together, these annotations represent the densest and largest dataset of image descriptions, objects, attributes, relationships, and question answers.