Daily Papers

Following the gaze of other people and analyzing the target they are looking at can help us understand what they are thinking, and doing, and predict the actions that may follow. Existing methods for gaze following struggle to perform well in natural scenes with diverse objects, and focus on gaze points rather than objects, making it difficult to deliver clear semantics and accurate scope of the targets. To address this shortcoming, we propose a novel gaze target prediction solution named GazeSeg, that can fully utilize the spatial visual field of the person as guiding information and lead to a progressively coarse-to-fine gaze target segmentation and recognition process. Specifically, a prompt-based visual foundation model serves as the encoder, working in conjunction with three distinct decoding modules (e.g. FoV perception, heatmap generation, and segmentation) to form the framework for gaze target prediction. Then, with the head bounding box performed as an initial prompt, GazeSeg obtains the FoV map, heatmap, and segmentation map progressively, leading to a unified framework for multiple tasks (e.g. direction estimation, gaze target segmentation, and recognition). In particular, to facilitate this research, we construct and release a new dataset, comprising 72k images with pixel-level annotations and 270 categories of gaze targets, built upon the GazeFollow dataset. The quantitative evaluation shows that our approach achieves the Dice of 0.325 in gaze target segmentation and 71.7% top-5 recognition. Meanwhile, our approach also outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving 0.953 in AUC on the gaze-following task. The dataset and code will be released.

Gaze behaviors such as eye-contact or shared attention are important markers for diagnosing developmental disorders in children. While previous studies have looked at some of these elements, the analysis is usually performed on private datasets and is restricted to lab settings. Furthermore, all publicly available gaze target prediction benchmarks mostly contain instances of adults, which makes models trained on them less applicable to scenarios with young children. In this paper, we propose the first study for predicting the gaze target of children and interacting adults. To this end, we introduce the ChildPlay dataset: a curated collection of short video clips featuring children playing and interacting with adults in uncontrolled environments (e.g. kindergarten, therapy centers, preschools etc.), which we annotate with rich gaze information. We further propose a new model for gaze target prediction that is geometrically grounded by explicitly identifying the scene parts in the 3D field of view (3DFoV) of the person, leveraging recent geometry preserving depth inference methods. Our model achieves state of the art results on benchmark datasets and ChildPlay. Furthermore, results show that looking at faces prediction performance on children is much worse than on adults, and can be significantly improved by fine-tuning models using child gaze annotations. Our dataset and models will be made publicly available.

Gaze following aims to interpret human-scene interactions by predicting the person's focal point of gaze. Prevailing approaches often adopt a two-stage framework, whereby multi-modality information is extracted in the initial stage for gaze target prediction. Consequently, the efficacy of these methods highly depends on the precision of the preceding modality extraction. Others use a single-modality approach with complex decoders, increasing network computational load. Inspired by the remarkable success of pre-trained plain vision transformers (ViTs), we introduce a novel single-modality gaze following framework called ViTGaze. In contrast to previous methods, it creates a novel gaze following framework based mainly on powerful encoders (relative decoder parameters less than 1%). Our principal insight is that the inter-token interactions within self-attention can be transferred to interactions between humans and scenes. Leveraging this presumption, we formulate a framework consisting of a 4D interaction encoder and a 2D spatial guidance module to extract human-scene interaction information from self-attention maps. Furthermore, our investigation reveals that ViT with self-supervised pre-training has an enhanced ability to extract correlation information. Many experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. Our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among all single-modality methods (3.4% improvement in the area under curve (AUC) score, 5.1% improvement in the average precision (AP)) and very comparable performance against multi-modality methods with 59% number of parameters less.

Gaze following and social gaze prediction are fundamental tasks providing insights into human communication behaviors, intent, and social interactions. Most previous approaches addressed these tasks separately, either by designing highly specialized social gaze models that do not generalize to other social gaze tasks or by considering social gaze inference as an ad-hoc post-processing of the gaze following task. Furthermore, the vast majority of gaze following approaches have proposed static models that can handle only one person at a time, therefore failing to take advantage of social interactions and temporal dynamics. In this paper, we address these limitations and introduce a novel framework to jointly predict the gaze target and social gaze label for all people in the scene. The framework comprises of: (i) a temporal, transformer-based architecture that, in addition to image tokens, handles person-specific tokens capturing the gaze information related to each individual; (ii) a new dataset, VSGaze, that unifies annotation types across multiple gaze following and social gaze datasets. We show that our model trained on VSGaze can address all tasks jointly, and achieves state-of-the-art results for multi-person gaze following and social gaze prediction.

Visual search is important in our daily life. The efficient allocation of visual attention is critical to effectively complete visual search tasks. Prior research has predominantly modelled the spatial allocation of visual attention in images at the pixel level, e.g. using a saliency map. However, emerging evidence shows that visual attention is guided by objects rather than pixel intensities. This paper introduces the Object-level Attention Transformer (OAT), which predicts human scanpaths as they search for a target object within a cluttered scene of distractors. OAT uses an encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder captures information about the position and appearance of the objects within an image and about the target. The decoder predicts the gaze scanpath as a sequence of object fixations, by integrating output features from both the encoder and decoder. We also propose a new positional encoding that better reflects spatial relationships between objects. We evaluated OAT on the Amazon book cover dataset and a new dataset for visual search that we collected. OAT's predicted gaze scanpaths align more closely with human gaze patterns, compared to predictions by algorithms based on spatial attention on both established metrics and a novel behavioural-based metric. Our results demonstrate the generalization ability of OAT, as it accurately predicts human scanpaths for unseen layouts and target objects.

We address the problem of gaze target estimation, which aims to predict where a person is looking in a scene. Predicting a person's gaze target requires reasoning both about the person's appearance and the contents of the scene. Prior works have developed increasingly complex, hand-crafted pipelines for gaze target estimation that carefully fuse features from separate scene encoders, head encoders, and auxiliary models for signals like depth and pose. Motivated by the success of general-purpose feature extractors on a variety of visual tasks, we propose Gaze-LLE, a novel transformer framework that streamlines gaze target estimation by leveraging features from a frozen DINOv2 encoder. We extract a single feature representation for the scene, and apply a person-specific positional prompt to decode gaze with a lightweight module. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across several gaze benchmarks and provide extensive analysis to validate our design choices. Our code is available at: http://github.com/fkryan/gazelle .

One of the most fundamental and information-laden actions humans do is to look at objects. However, a survey of current works reveals that existing gaze-related datasets annotate only the pixel being looked at, and not the boundaries of a specific object of interest. This lack of object annotation presents an opportunity for further advancing gaze estimation research. To this end, we present a challenging new task called gaze object prediction, where the goal is to predict a bounding box for a person's gazed-at object. To train and evaluate gaze networks on this task, we present the Gaze On Objects (GOO) dataset. GOO is composed of a large set of synthetic images (GOO Synth) supplemented by a smaller subset of real images (GOO-Real) of people looking at objects in a retail environment. Our work establishes extensive baselines on GOO by re-implementing and evaluating selected state-of-the art models on the task of gaze following and domain adaptation. Code is available on github.

Gaze target detection aims to predict the image location where the person is looking and the probability that a gaze is out of the scene. Several works have tackled this task by regressing a gaze heatmap centered on the gaze location, however, they overlooked decoding the relationship between the people and the gazed objects. This paper proposes a Transformer-based architecture that automatically detects objects (including heads) in the scene to build associations between every head and the gazed-head/object, resulting in a comprehensive, explainable gaze analysis composed of: gaze target area, gaze pixel point, the class and the image location of the gazed-object. Upon evaluation of the in-the-wild benchmarks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on all metrics (up to 2.91% gain in AUC, 50% reduction in gaze distance, and 9% gain in out-of-frame average precision) for gaze target detection and 11-13% improvement in average precision for the classification and the localization of the gazed-objects. The code of the proposed method is available https://github.com/francescotonini/object-aware-gaze-target-detection

Human gaze is a crucial cue used in various applications such as human-robot interaction and virtual reality. Recently, convolution neural network (CNN) approaches have made notable progress in predicting gaze direction. However, estimating gaze in-the-wild is still a challenging problem due to the uniqueness of eye appearance, lightning conditions, and the diversity of head pose and gaze directions. In this paper, we propose a robust CNN-based model for predicting gaze in unconstrained settings. We propose to regress each gaze angle separately to improve the per-angel prediction accuracy, which will enhance the overall gaze performance. In addition, we use two identical losses, one for each angle, to improve network learning and increase its generalization. We evaluate our model with two popular datasets collected with unconstrained settings. Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy of 3.92{\deg} and 10.41{\deg} on MPIIGaze and Gaze360 datasets, respectively. We make our code open source at https://github.com/Ahmednull/L2CS-Net.

We present GazeGen, a user interaction system that generates visual content (images and videos) for locations indicated by the user's eye gaze. GazeGen allows intuitive manipulation of visual content by targeting regions of interest with gaze. Using advanced techniques in object detection and generative AI, GazeGen performs gaze-controlled image adding/deleting, repositioning, and surface material changes of image objects, and converts static images into videos. Central to GazeGen is the DFT Gaze (Distilled and Fine-Tuned Gaze) agent, an ultra-lightweight model with only 281K parameters, performing accurate real-time gaze predictions tailored to individual users' eyes on small edge devices. GazeGen is the first system to combine visual content generation with real-time gaze estimation, made possible exclusively by DFT Gaze. This real-time gaze estimation enables various visual content generation tasks, all controlled by the user's gaze. The input for DFT Gaze is the user's eye images, while the inputs for visual content generation are the user's view and the predicted gaze point from DFT Gaze. To achieve efficient gaze predictions, we derive the small model from a large model (10x larger) via novel knowledge distillation and personal adaptation techniques. We integrate knowledge distillation with a masked autoencoder, developing a compact yet powerful gaze estimation model. This model is further fine-tuned with Adapters, enabling highly accurate and personalized gaze predictions with minimal user input. DFT Gaze ensures low-latency and precise gaze tracking, supporting a wide range of gaze-driven tasks. We validate the performance of DFT Gaze on AEA and OpenEDS2020 benchmarks, demonstrating low angular gaze error and low latency on the edge device (Raspberry Pi 4). Furthermore, we describe applications of GazeGen, illustrating its versatility and effectiveness in various usage scenarios.

Gaze estimation has grown rapidly in accuracy in recent years. However, these models often fail to take advantage of different computer vision (CV) algorithms and techniques (such as small ResNet and Inception networks and ensemble models) that have been shown to improve results for other CV problems. Additionally, most current gaze estimation models require the use of either both eyes or an entire face, whereas real-world data may not always have both eyes in high resolution. Thus, we propose a gaze estimation model that implements the ResNet and Inception model architectures and makes predictions using only one eye image. Furthermore, we propose an ensemble calibration network that uses the predictions from several individual architectures for subject-specific predictions. With the use of lightweight architectures, we achieve high performance on the GazeCapture dataset with very low model parameter counts. When using two eyes as input, we achieve a prediction error of 1.591 cm on the test set without calibration and 1.439 cm with an ensemble calibration model. With just one eye as input, we still achieve an average prediction error of 2.312 cm on the test set without calibration and 1.951 cm with an ensemble calibration model. We also notice significantly lower errors on the right eye images in the test set, which could be important in the design of future gaze estimation-based tools.

While exploring visual scenes, humans' scanpaths are driven by their underlying attention processes. Understanding visual scanpaths is essential for various applications. Traditional scanpath models predict the where and when of gaze shifts without providing explanations, creating a gap in understanding the rationale behind fixations. To bridge this gap, we introduce GazeXplain, a novel study of visual scanpath prediction and explanation. This involves annotating natural-language explanations for fixations across eye-tracking datasets and proposing a general model with an attention-language decoder that jointly predicts scanpaths and generates explanations. It integrates a unique semantic alignment mechanism to enhance the consistency between fixations and explanations, alongside a cross-dataset co-training approach for generalization. These novelties present a comprehensive and adaptable solution for explainable human visual scanpath prediction. Extensive experiments on diverse eye-tracking datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GazeXplain in both scanpath prediction and explanation, offering valuable insights into human visual attention and cognitive processes.

Gaze estimation is a fundamental task in many applications of computer vision, human computer interaction and robotics. Many state-of-the-art methods are trained and tested on custom datasets, making comparison across methods challenging. Furthermore, existing gaze estimation datasets have limited head pose and gaze variations, and the evaluations are conducted using different protocols and metrics. In this paper, we propose a new gaze estimation dataset called ETH-XGaze, consisting of over one million high-resolution images of varying gaze under extreme head poses. We collect this dataset from 110 participants with a custom hardware setup including 18 digital SLR cameras and adjustable illumination conditions, and a calibrated system to record ground truth gaze targets. We show that our dataset can significantly improve the robustness of gaze estimation methods across different head poses and gaze angles. Additionally, we define a standardized experimental protocol and evaluation metric on ETH-XGaze, to better unify gaze estimation research going forward. The dataset and benchmark website are available at https://ait.ethz.ch/projects/2020/ETH-XGaze

Zero-shot image classification using auxiliary information, such as attributes describing discriminative object properties, requires time-consuming annotation by domain experts. We instead propose a method that relies on human gaze as auxiliary information, exploiting that even non-expert users have a natural ability to judge class membership. We present a data collection paradigm that involves a discrimination task to increase the information content obtained from gaze data. Our method extracts discriminative descriptors from the data and learns a compatibility function between image and gaze using three novel gaze embeddings: Gaze Histograms (GH), Gaze Features with Grid (GFG) and Gaze Features with Sequence (GFS). We introduce two new gaze-annotated datasets for fine-grained image classification and show that human gaze data is indeed class discriminative, provides a competitive alternative to expert-annotated attributes, and outperforms other baselines for zero-shot image classification.

Deep saliency prediction algorithms complement the object recognition features, they typically rely on additional information, such as scene context, semantic relationships, gaze direction, and object dissimilarity. However, none of these models consider the temporal nature of gaze shifts during image observation. We introduce a novel saliency prediction model that learns to output saliency maps in sequential time intervals by exploiting human temporal attention patterns. Our approach locally modulates the saliency predictions by combining the learned temporal maps. Our experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art models, including a multi-duration saliency model, on the SALICON benchmark. Our code will be publicly available on GitHub.

Developing gaze estimation models that generalize well to unseen domains and in-the-wild conditions remains a challenge with no known best solution. This is mostly due to the difficulty of acquiring ground truth data that cover the distribution of faces, head poses, and environments that exist in the real world. Most recent methods attempt to close the gap between specific source and target domains using domain adaptation. In this work, we propose to train general gaze estimation models which can be directly employed in novel environments without adaptation. To do so, we leverage the observation that head, body, and hand pose estimation benefit from revising them as dense 3D coordinate prediction, and similarly express gaze estimation as regression of dense 3D eye meshes. To close the gap between image domains, we create a large-scale dataset of diverse faces with gaze pseudo-annotations, which we extract based on the 3D geometry of the scene, and design a multi-view supervision framework to balance their effect during training. We test our method in the task of gaze generalization, in which we demonstrate improvement of up to 30% compared to state-of-the-art when no ground truth data are available, and up to 10% when they are. The project material are available for research purposes at https://github.com/Vagver/3DGazeNet.

Recent joint embedding-based self-supervised methods have surpassed standard supervised approaches on various image recognition tasks such as image classification. These self-supervised methods aim at maximizing agreement between features extracted from two differently transformed views of the same image, which results in learning an invariant representation with respect to appearance and geometric image transformations. However, the effectiveness of these approaches remains unclear in the context of gaze estimation, a structured regression task that requires equivariance under geometric transformations (e.g., rotations, horizontal flip). In this work, we propose SwAT, an equivariant version of the online clustering-based self-supervised approach SwAV, to learn more informative representations for gaze estimation. We demonstrate that SwAT, with ResNet-50 and supported with uncurated unlabeled face images, outperforms state-of-the-art gaze estimation methods and supervised baselines in various experiments. In particular, we achieve up to 57% and 25% improvements in cross-dataset and within-dataset evaluation tasks on existing benchmarks (ETH-XGaze, Gaze360, and MPIIFaceGaze).

Readers can have different goals with respect to the text they are reading. Can these goals be decoded from the pattern of their eye movements over the text? In this work, we examine for the first time whether it is possible to decode two types of reading goals that are common in daily life: information seeking and ordinary reading. Using large scale eye-tracking data, we apply to this task a wide range of state-of-the-art models for eye movements and text that cover different architectural and data representation strategies, and further introduce a new model ensemble. We systematically evaluate these models at three levels of generalization: new textual item, new participant, and the combination of both. We find that eye movements contain highly valuable signals for this task. We further perform an error analysis which builds on prior empirical findings on differences between ordinary reading and information seeking and leverages rich textual annotations. This analysis reveals key properties of textual items and participant eye movements that contribute to the difficulty of the task.

This paper proposes joint attention estimation in a single image. Different from related work in which only the gaze-related attributes of people are independently employed, (I) their locations and actions are also employed as contextual cues for weighting their attributes, and (ii) interactions among all of these attributes are explicitly modeled in our method. For the interaction modeling, we propose a novel Transformer-based attention network to encode joint attention as low-dimensional features. We introduce a specialized MLP head with positional embedding to the Transformer so that it predicts pixelwise confidence of joint attention for generating the confidence heatmap. This pixelwise prediction improves the heatmap accuracy by avoiding the ill-posed problem in which the high-dimensional heatmap is predicted from the low-dimensional features. The estimated joint attention is further improved by being integrated with general image-based attention estimation. Our method outperforms SOTA methods quantitatively in comparative experiments. Code: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/anonymized_codes-ECA4.

Contextual cues related to a person's pose and interactions with objects and other people in the scene can provide valuable information for gaze following. While existing methods have focused on dedicated cue extraction methods, in this work we investigate the zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for extracting a wide array of contextual cues to improve gaze following performance. We first evaluate various VLMs, prompting strategies, and in-context learning (ICL) techniques for zero-shot cue recognition performance. We then use these insights to extract contextual cues for gaze following, and investigate their impact when incorporated into a state of the art model for the task. Our analysis indicates that BLIP-2 is the overall top performing VLM and that ICL can improve performance. We also observe that VLMs are sensitive to the choice of the text prompt although ensembling over multiple text prompts can provide more robust performance. Additionally, we discover that using the entire image along with an ellipse drawn around the target person is the most effective strategy for visual prompting. For gaze following, incorporating the extracted cues results in better generalization performance, especially when considering a larger set of cues, highlighting the potential of this approach.

Accurate eye segmentation can improve eye-gaze estimation and support interactive computing based on visual attention; however, existing eye segmentation methods suffer from issues such as person-dependent accuracy, lack of robustness, and an inability to be run in real-time. Here, we present the RITnet model, which is a deep neural network that combines U-Net and DenseNet. RITnet is under 1 MB and achieves 95.3\% accuracy on the 2019 OpenEDS Semantic Segmentation challenge. Using a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, RITnet tracks at > 300Hz, enabling real-time gaze tracking applications. Pre-trained models and source code are available https://bitbucket.org/eye-ush/ritnet/.

Inspired by recent work in machine translation and object detection, we introduce an attention based model that automatically learns to describe the content of images. We describe how we can train this model in a deterministic manner using standard backpropagation techniques and stochastically by maximizing a variational lower bound. We also show through visualization how the model is able to automatically learn to fix its gaze on salient objects while generating the corresponding words in the output sequence. We validate the use of attention with state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets: Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS COCO.

Along with the recent development of deep neural networks, appearance-based gaze estimation has succeeded considerably when training and testing within the same domain. Compared to the within-domain task, the variance of different domains makes the cross-domain performance drop severely, preventing gaze estimation deployment in real-world applications. Among all the factors, ranges of head pose and gaze are believed to play a significant role in the final performance of gaze estimation, while collecting large ranges of data is expensive. This work proposes an effective model training pipeline consisting of a training data synthesis and a gaze estimation model for unsupervised domain adaptation. The proposed data synthesis leverages the single-image 3D reconstruction to expand the range of the head poses from the source domain without requiring a 3D facial shape dataset. To bridge the inevitable gap between synthetic and real images, we further propose an unsupervised domain adaptation method suitable for synthetic full-face data. We propose a disentangling autoencoder network to separate gaze-related features and introduce background augmentation consistency loss to utilize the characteristics of the synthetic source domain. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that the model only using monocular-reconstructed synthetic training data can perform comparably to real data with a large label range. Our proposed domain adaptation approach further improves the performance on multiple target domains. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/ut-vision/AdaptiveGaze.

This paper reviews the Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction at AIM 2024. The goal of the participants was to develop a method for predicting accurate saliency maps for the provided set of video sequences. Saliency maps are widely exploited in various applications, including video compression, quality assessment, visual perception studies, the advertising industry, etc. For this competition, a previously unused large-scale audio-visual mouse saliency (AViMoS) dataset of 1500 videos with more than 70 observers per video was collected using crowdsourced mouse tracking. The dataset collection methodology has been validated using conventional eye-tracking data and has shown high consistency. Over 30 teams registered in the challenge, and there are 7 teams that submitted the results in the final phase. The final phase solutions were tested and ranked by commonly used quality metrics on a private test subset. The results of this evaluation and the descriptions of the solutions are presented in this report. All data, including the private test subset, is made publicly available on the challenge homepage - https://challenges.videoprocessing.ai/challenges/video-saliency-prediction.html.

In a typical video conferencing setup, it is hard to maintain eye contact during a call since it requires looking into the camera rather than the display. We propose an eye contact correction model that restores the eye contact regardless of the relative position of the camera and display. Unlike previous solutions, our model redirects the gaze from an arbitrary direction to the center without requiring a redirection angle or camera/display/user geometry as inputs. We use a deep convolutional neural network that inputs a monocular image and produces a vector field and a brightness map to correct the gaze. We train this model in a bi-directional way on a large set of synthetically generated photorealistic images with perfect labels. The learned model is a robust eye contact corrector which also predicts the input gaze implicitly at no additional cost. Our system is primarily designed to improve the quality of video conferencing experience. Therefore, we use a set of control mechanisms to prevent creepy results and to ensure a smooth and natural video conferencing experience. The entire eye contact correction system runs end-to-end in real-time on a commodity CPU and does not require any dedicated hardware, making our solution feasible for a variety of devices.

In urban or crowded environments, humans rely on eye contact for fast and efficient communication with nearby people. Autonomous agents also need to detect eye contact to interact with pedestrians and safely navigate around them. In this paper, we focus on eye contact detection in the wild, i.e., real-world scenarios for autonomous vehicles with no control over the environment or the distance of pedestrians. We introduce a model that leverages semantic keypoints to detect eye contact and show that this high-level representation (i) achieves state-of-the-art results on the publicly-available dataset JAAD, and (ii) conveys better generalization properties than leveraging raw images in an end-to-end network. To study domain adaptation, we create LOOK: a large-scale dataset for eye contact detection in the wild, which focuses on diverse and unconstrained scenarios for real-world generalization. The source code and the LOOK dataset are publicly shared towards an open science mission.

Comprehending how humans process visual information in dynamic settings is crucial for psychology and designing user-centered interactions. While mobile eye-tracking systems combining egocentric video and gaze signals can offer valuable insights, manual analysis of these recordings is time-intensive. In this work, we present a novel human-centered learning algorithm designed for automated object recognition within mobile eye-tracking settings. Our approach seamlessly integrates an object detector with a spatial relation-aware inductive message-passing network (I-MPN), harnessing node profile information and capturing object correlations. Such mechanisms enable us to learn embedding functions capable of generalizing to new object angle views, facilitating rapid adaptation and efficient reasoning in dynamic contexts as users navigate their environment. Through experiments conducted on three distinct video sequences, our interactive-based method showcases significant performance improvements over fixed training/testing algorithms, even when trained on considerably smaller annotated samples collected through user feedback. Furthermore, we demonstrate exceptional efficiency in data annotation processes and surpass prior interactive methods that use complete object detectors, combine detectors with convolutional networks, or employ interactive video segmentation.

Cognitively inspired Natural Language Pro-cessing uses human-derived behavioral datalike eye-tracking data, which reflect the seman-tic representations of language in the humanbrain to augment the neural nets to solve arange of tasks spanning syntax and semanticswith the aim of teaching machines about lan-guage processing mechanisms. In this paper,we use the ZuCo 1.0 and ZuCo 2.0 dataset con-taining the eye-gaze features to explore differ-ent linguistic models to directly predict thesegaze features for each word with respect to itssentence. We tried different neural networkmodels with the words as inputs to predict thetargets. And after lots of experimentation andfeature engineering finally devised a novel ar-chitecture consisting of RoBERTa Token Clas-sifier with a dense layer on top for languagemodeling and a stand-alone model consistingof dense layers followed by a transformer layerfor the extra features we engineered. Finally,we took the mean of the outputs of both thesemodels to make the final predictions. We eval-uated the models using mean absolute error(MAE) and the R2 score for each target.

Robotic manipulation, owing to its multi-modal nature, often faces significant training ambiguity, necessitating explicit instructions to clearly delineate the manipulation details in tasks. In this work, we highlight that vision instruction is naturally more comprehensible to recent robotic policies than the commonly adopted text instruction, as these policies are born with some vision understanding ability like human infants. Building on this premise and drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we introduce the robotic imagery paradigm, which realizes large-scale robotic data pre-training without text annotations. Additionally, we propose the robotic gaze strategy that emulates the human eye gaze mechanism, thereby guiding subsequent actions and focusing the attention of the policy on the manipulated object. Leveraging these innovations, we develop VIRT, a fully Transformer-based policy. We design comprehensive tasks using both a physical robot and simulated environments to assess the efficacy of VIRT. The results indicate that VIRT can complete very competitive tasks like ``opening the lid of a tightly sealed bottle'', and the proposed techniques boost the success rates of the baseline policy on diverse challenging tasks from nearly 0% to more than 65%.

Egocentric gaze anticipation serves as a key building block for the emerging capability of Augmented Reality. Notably, gaze behavior is driven by both visual cues and audio signals during daily activities. Motivated by this observation, we introduce the first model that leverages both the video and audio modalities for egocentric gaze anticipation. Specifically, we propose a Contrastive Spatial-Temporal Separable (CSTS) fusion approach that adopts two modules to separately capture audio-visual correlations in spatial and temporal dimensions, and applies a contrastive loss on the re-weighted audio-visual features from fusion modules for representation learning. We conduct extensive ablation studies and thorough analysis using two egocentric video datasets: Ego4D and Aria, to validate our model design. We demonstrate the audio improves the performance by +2.5% and +2.4% on the two datasets. Our model also outperforms the prior state-of-the-art methods by at least +1.9% and +1.6%. Moreover, we provide visualizations to show the gaze anticipation results and provide additional insights into audio-visual representation learning. The code and data split are available on our website (https://bolinlai.github.io/CSTS-EgoGazeAnticipation/).

The prediction of saliency areas in images has been traditionally addressed with hand crafted features based on neuroscience principles. This paper however addresses the problem with a completely data-driven approach by training a convolutional network. The learning process is formulated as a minimization of a loss function that measures the Euclidean distance of the predicted saliency map with the provided ground truth. The recent publication of large datasets of saliency prediction has provided enough data to train a not very deep architecture which is both fast and accurate. The convolutional network in this paper, named JuntingNet, won the LSUN 2015 challenge on saliency prediction with a superior performance in all considered metrics.

Very recently, a variety of vision transformer architectures for dense prediction tasks have been proposed and they show that the design of spatial attention is critical to their success in these tasks. In this work, we revisit the design of the spatial attention and demonstrate that a carefully-devised yet simple spatial attention mechanism performs favourably against the state-of-the-art schemes. As a result, we propose two vision transformer architectures, namely, Twins-PCPVT and Twins-SVT. Our proposed architectures are highly-efficient and easy to implement, only involving matrix multiplications that are highly optimized in modern deep learning frameworks. More importantly, the proposed architectures achieve excellent performance on a wide range of visual tasks, including image level classification as well as dense detection and segmentation. The simplicity and strong performance suggest that our proposed architectures may serve as stronger backbones for many vision tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/Twins .

We introduce a novel Dual Input Stream Transformer (DIST) for the challenging problem of assigning fixation points from eye-tracking data collected during passage reading to the line of text that the reader was actually focused on. This post-processing step is crucial for analysis of the reading data due to the presence of noise in the form of vertical drift. We evaluate DIST against nine classical approaches on a comprehensive suite of nine diverse datasets, and demonstrate DIST's superiority. By combining multiple instances of the DIST model in an ensemble we achieve an average accuracy of 98.5\% across all datasets. Our approach presents a significant step towards addressing the bottleneck of manual line assignment in reading research. Through extensive model analysis and ablation studies, we identify key factors that contribute to DIST's success, including the incorporation of line overlap features and the use of a second input stream. Through evaluation on a set of diverse datasets we demonstrate that DIST is robust to various experimental setups, making it a safe first choice for practitioners in the field.

Existing visual tracking methods typically take an image patch as the reference of the target to perform tracking. However, a single image patch cannot provide a complete and precise concept of the target object as images are limited in their ability to abstract and can be ambiguous, which makes it difficult to track targets with drastic variations. In this paper, we propose the CiteTracker to enhance target modeling and inference in visual tracking by connecting images and text. Specifically, we develop a text generation module to convert the target image patch into a descriptive text containing its class and attribute information, providing a comprehensive reference point for the target. In addition, a dynamic description module is designed to adapt to target variations for more effective target representation. We then associate the target description and the search image using an attention-based correlation module to generate the correlated features for target state reference. Extensive experiments on five diverse datasets are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm and the favorable performance against the state-of-the-art methods demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed tracking method.

Predicting salient regions in natural images requires the detection of objects that are present in a scene. To develop robust representations for this challenging task, high-level visual features at multiple spatial scales must be extracted and augmented with contextual information. However, existing models aimed at explaining human fixation maps do not incorporate such a mechanism explicitly. Here we propose an approach based on a convolutional neural network pre-trained on a large-scale image classification task. The architecture forms an encoder-decoder structure and includes a module with multiple convolutional layers at different dilation rates to capture multi-scale features in parallel. Moreover, we combine the resulting representations with global scene information for accurately predicting visual saliency. Our model achieves competitive and consistent results across multiple evaluation metrics on two public saliency benchmarks and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the suggested approach on five datasets and selected examples. Compared to state of the art approaches, the network is based on a lightweight image classification backbone and hence presents a suitable choice for applications with limited computational resources, such as (virtual) robotic systems, to estimate human fixations across complex natural scenes.

This paper proposes a new framework to detect, segment, and estimate the localization of the eyes from a periocular Near-Infra-Red iris image under alcohol consumption. The purpose of the system is to measure the fitness for duty. Fitness systems allow us to determine whether a person is physically or psychologically able to perform their tasks. Our framework is based on an object detector trained from scratch to detect both eyes from a single image. Then, two efficient networks were used for semantic segmentation; a Criss-Cross attention network and DenseNet10, with only 122,514 and 210,732 parameters, respectively. These networks can find the pupil, iris, and sclera. In the end, the binary output eye mask is used for pupil and iris diameter estimation with high precision. Five state-of-the-art algorithms were used for this purpose. A mixed proposal reached the best results. A second contribution is establishing an alcohol behavior curve to detect the alcohol presence utilizing a stream of images captured from an iris instance. Also, a manually labeled database with more than 20k images was created. Our best method obtains a mean Intersection-over-Union of 94.54% with DenseNet10 with only 210,732 parameters and an error of only 1-pixel on average.

Gaze estimation methods estimate gaze from facial appearance with a single camera. However, due to the limited view of a single camera, the captured facial appearance cannot provide complete facial information and thus complicate the gaze estimation problem. Recently, camera devices are rapidly updated. Dual cameras are affordable for users and have been integrated in many devices. This development suggests that we can further improve gaze estimation performance with dual-view gaze estimation. In this paper, we propose a dual-view gaze estimation network (DV-Gaze). DV-Gaze estimates dual-view gaze directions from a pair of images. We first propose a dual-view interactive convolution (DIC) block in DV-Gaze. DIC blocks exchange dual-view information during convolution in multiple feature scales. It fuses dual-view features along epipolar lines and compensates for the original feature with the fused feature. We further propose a dual-view transformer to estimate gaze from dual-view features. Camera poses are encoded to indicate the position information in the transformer. We also consider the geometric relation between dual-view gaze directions and propose a dual-view gaze consistency loss for DV-Gaze. DV-Gaze achieves state-of-the-art performance on ETH-XGaze and EVE datasets. Our experiments also prove the potential of dual-view gaze estimation. We release codes in https://github.com/yihuacheng/DVGaze.

We propose a novel method to estimate a driver's points-of-gaze using a pair of ordinary cameras mounted on the windshield and dashboard of a car. This is a challenging problem due to the dynamics of traffic environments with 3D scenes of unknown depths. This problem is further complicated by the volatile distance between the driver and the camera system. To tackle these challenges, we develop a novel convolutional network that simultaneously analyzes the image of the scene and the image of the driver's face. This network has a camera calibration module that can compute an embedding vector that represents the spatial configuration between the driver and the camera system. This calibration module improves the overall network's performance, which can be jointly trained end to end. We also address the lack of annotated data for training and evaluation by introducing a large-scale driving dataset with point-of-gaze annotations. This is an in situ dataset of real driving sessions in an urban city, containing synchronized images of the driving scene as well as the face and gaze of the driver. Experiments on this dataset show that the proposed method outperforms various baseline methods, having the mean prediction error of 29.69 pixels, which is relatively small compared to the 1280{times}720 resolution of the scene camera.

In this paper, we present a novel methodology we call MDS-ViTNet (Multi Decoder Saliency by Vision Transformer Network) for enhancing visual saliency prediction or eye-tracking. This approach holds significant potential for diverse fields, including marketing, medicine, robotics, and retail. We propose a network architecture that leverages the Vision Transformer, moving beyond the conventional ImageNet backbone. The framework adopts an encoder-decoder structure, with the encoder utilizing a Swin transformer to efficiently embed most important features. This process involves a Transfer Learning method, wherein layers from the Vision Transformer are converted by the Encoder Transformer and seamlessly integrated into a CNN Decoder. This methodology ensures minimal information loss from the original input image. The decoder employs a multi-decoding technique, utilizing dual decoders to generate two distinct attention maps. These maps are subsequently combined into a singular output via an additional CNN model. Our trained model MDS-ViTNet achieves state-of-the-art results across several benchmarks. Committed to fostering further collaboration, we intend to make our code, models, and datasets accessible to the public.

As object detection techniques continue to evolve, understanding their relationships with complementary visual tasks becomes crucial for optimising model architectures and computational resources. This paper investigates the correlations between object detection accuracy and two fundamental visual tasks: depth prediction and visual saliency prediction. Through comprehensive experiments using state-of-the-art models (DeepGaze IIE, Depth Anything, DPT-Large, and Itti's model) on COCO and Pascal VOC datasets, we find that visual saliency shows consistently stronger correlations with object detection accuracy (mArho up to 0.459 on Pascal VOC) compared to depth prediction (mArho up to 0.283). Our analysis reveals significant variations in these correlations across object categories, with larger objects showing correlation values up to three times higher than smaller objects. These findings suggest incorporating visual saliency features into object detection architectures could be more beneficial than depth information, particularly for specific object categories. The observed category-specific variations also provide insights for targeted feature engineering and dataset design improvements, potentially leading to more efficient and accurate object detection systems.

We present Attention Mesh, a lightweight architecture for 3D face mesh prediction that uses attention to semantically meaningful regions. Our neural network is designed for real-time on-device inference and runs at over 50 FPS on a Pixel 2 phone. Our solution enables applications like AR makeup, eye tracking and AR puppeteering that rely on highly accurate landmarks for eye and lips regions. Our main contribution is a unified network architecture that achieves the same accuracy on facial landmarks as a multi-stage cascaded approach, while being 30 percent faster.

Attention mechanisms are a central property of cognitive systems allowing them to selectively deploy cognitive resources in a flexible manner. Attention has been long studied in the neurosciences and there are numerous phenomenological models that try to capture its core properties. Recently attentional mechanisms have become a dominating architectural choice of machine learning and are the central innovation of Transformers. The dominant intuition and formalism underlying their development has drawn on ideas of keys and queries in database management systems. In this work, we propose an alternative Bayesian foundation for attentional mechanisms and show how this unifies different attentional architectures in machine learning. This formulation allows to to identify commonality across different attention ML architectures as well as suggest a bridge to those developed in neuroscience. We hope this work will guide more sophisticated intuitions into the key properties of attention architectures and suggest new ones.

In this paper, we present the solution of our team HFUT-VUT for the MultiMediate Grand Challenge 2023 at ACM Multimedia 2023. The solution covers three sub-challenges: bodily behavior recognition, eye contact detection, and next speaker prediction. We select Swin Transformer as the baseline and exploit data augmentation strategies to address the above three tasks. Specifically, we crop the raw video to remove the noise from other parts. At the same time, we utilize data augmentation to improve the generalization of the model. As a result, our solution achieves the best results of 0.6262 for bodily behavior recognition in terms of mean average precision and the accuracy of 0.7771 for eye contact detection on the corresponding test set. In addition, our approach also achieves comparable results of 0.5281 for the next speaker prediction in terms of unweighted average recall.

Many papers have shown that attention heads work in conjunction with each other to perform complex tasks. It's frequently assumed that communication between attention heads is via the addition of specific features to token residuals. In this work we seek to isolate and identify the features used to effect communication and coordination among attention heads in GPT-2 small. Our key leverage on the problem is to show that these features are very often sparsely coded in the singular vectors of attention head matrices. We characterize the dimensionality and occurrence of these signals across the attention heads in GPT-2 small when used for the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task. The sparse encoding of signals, as provided by attention head singular vectors, allows for efficient separation of signals from the residual background and straightforward identification of communication paths between attention heads. We explore the effectiveness of this approach by tracing portions of the circuits used in the IOI task. Our traces reveal considerable detail not present in previous studies, shedding light on the nature of redundant paths present in GPT-2. And our traces go beyond previous work by identifying features used to communicate between attention heads when performing IOI.

Attention Model has now become an important concept in neural networks that has been researched within diverse application domains. This survey provides a structured and comprehensive overview of the developments in modeling attention. In particular, we propose a taxonomy which groups existing techniques into coherent categories. We review salient neural architectures in which attention has been incorporated, and discuss applications in which modeling attention has shown a significant impact. We also describe how attention has been used to improve the interpretability of neural networks. Finally, we discuss some future research directions in attention. We hope this survey will provide a succinct introduction to attention models and guide practitioners while developing approaches for their applications.

This study addresses the issue observed in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), where excessive attention on a few image tokens, referred to as blind tokens, leads to hallucinatory responses in tasks requiring fine-grained understanding of visual objects. We found that tokens receiving lower attention weights often hold essential information for identifying nuanced object details -- ranging from merely recognizing object existence to identifying their attributes (color, position, etc.) and understanding their relationships. To counteract the over-emphasis on blind tokens and to accurately respond to user queries, we introduce a technique called Attentional Vision Calibration (AVC). During the decoding phase, AVC identifies blind tokens by analyzing the image-related attention distribution. It then dynamically adjusts the logits for the next token prediction by contrasting the logits conditioned on the original visual tokens with those conditioned on the blind tokens. This effectively lowers the dependency on blind tokens and promotes a more balanced consideration of all tokens. We validate AVC on benchmarks such as POPE, MME, and AMBER, where it consistently outperforms existing decoding techniques in mitigating object hallucinations in LVLMs.

Visually linking matching cues is a crucial ability in daily life, such as identifying the same person in multiple photos based on their cues, even without knowing who they are. Despite the extensive knowledge that vision-language models (VLMs) possess, it remains largely unexplored whether they are capable of performing this fundamental task. To address this, we introduce VLM^2-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess whether VLMs can Visually Link Matching cues, with 9 subtasks and over 3,000 test cases. Comprehensive evaluation across eight open-source VLMs and GPT-4o, along with further analysis of various language-side and vision-side prompting methods, leads to a total of eight key findings. We identify critical challenges in models' ability to link visual cues, highlighting a significant performance gap where even GPT-4o lags 34.80% behind humans. Based on these insights, we advocate for (i) enhancing core visual capabilities to improve adaptability and reduce reliance on prior knowledge, (ii) establishing clearer principles for integrating language-based reasoning in vision-centric tasks to prevent unnecessary biases, and (iii) shifting vision-text training paradigms toward fostering models' ability to independently structure and infer relationships among visual cues.

Grounded situation recognition is the task of predicting the main activity, entities playing certain roles within the activity, and bounding-box groundings of the entities in the given image. To effectively deal with this challenging task, we introduce a novel approach where the two processes for activity classification and entity estimation are interactive and complementary. To implement this idea, we propose Collaborative Glance-Gaze TransFormer (CoFormer) that consists of two modules: Glance transformer for activity classification and Gaze transformer for entity estimation. Glance transformer predicts the main activity with the help of Gaze transformer that analyzes entities and their relations, while Gaze transformer estimates the grounded entities by focusing only on the entities relevant to the activity predicted by Glance transformer. Our CoFormer achieves the state of the art in all evaluation metrics on the SWiG dataset. Training code and model weights are available at https://github.com/jhcho99/CoFormer.

Vision Transformers (ViT) have shown their competitive advantages performance-wise compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) though they often come with high computational costs. To this end, previous methods explore different attention patterns by limiting a fixed number of spatially nearby tokens to accelerate the ViT's multi-head self-attention (MHSA) operations. However, such structured attention patterns limit the token-to-token connections to their spatial relevance, which disregards learned semantic connections from a full attention mask. In this work, we propose a novel approach to learn instance-dependent attention patterns, by devising a lightweight connectivity predictor module to estimate the connectivity score of each pair of tokens. Intuitively, two tokens have high connectivity scores if the features are considered relevant either spatially or semantically. As each token only attends to a small number of other tokens, the binarized connectivity masks are often very sparse by nature and therefore provide the opportunity to accelerate the network via sparse computations. Equipped with the learned unstructured attention pattern, sparse attention ViT (Sparsifiner) produces a superior Pareto-optimal trade-off between FLOPs and top-1 accuracy on ImageNet compared to token sparsity. Our method reduces 48% to 69% FLOPs of MHSA while the accuracy drop is within 0.4%. We also show that combining attention and token sparsity reduces ViT FLOPs by over 60%.

In this technical report, we describe the Guided-Attention mechanism based solution for the short-term anticipation (STA) challenge for the EGO4D challenge. It combines the object detections, and the spatiotemporal features extracted from video clips, enhancing the motion and contextual information, and further decoding the object-centric and motion-centric information to address the problem of STA in egocentric videos. For the challenge, we build our model on top of StillFast with Guided Attention applied on fast network. Our model obtains better performance on the validation set and also achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the challenge test set for EGO4D Short-Term Object Interaction Anticipation Challenge.

Predicting future dynamics is crucial for applications like autonomous driving and robotics, where understanding the environment is key. Existing pixel-level methods are computationally expensive and often focus on irrelevant details. To address these challenges, we introduce DINO-Foresight, a novel framework that operates in the semantic feature space of pretrained Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Our approach trains a masked feature transformer in a self-supervised manner to predict the evolution of VFM features over time. By forecasting these features, we can apply off-the-shelf, task-specific heads for various scene understanding tasks. In this framework, VFM features are treated as a latent space, to which different heads attach to perform specific tasks for future-frame analysis. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms existing methods, demonstrating its robustness and scalability. Additionally, we highlight how intermediate transformer representations in DINO-Foresight improve downstream task performance, offering a promising path for the self-supervised enhancement of VFM features. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/Sta8is/DINO-Foresight .

In this work, we upgrade the multi-head attention mechanism, the core of the Transformer model, to improve efficiency while maintaining or surpassing the previous accuracy level. We show that multi-head attention can be expressed in the summation form. Drawing on the insight that not all attention heads hold equal significance, we propose Mixture-of-Head attention (MoH), a new architecture that treats attention heads as experts in the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism. MoH has two significant advantages: First, MoH enables each token to select the appropriate attention heads, enhancing inference efficiency without compromising accuracy or increasing the number of parameters. Second, MoH replaces the standard summation in multi-head attention with a weighted summation, introducing flexibility to the attention mechanism and unlocking extra performance potential. Extensive experiments on ViT, DiT, and LLMs demonstrate that MoH outperforms multi-head attention by using only 50%-90% of the attention heads. Moreover, we demonstrate that pre-trained multi-head attention models, such as LLaMA3-8B, can be further continue-tuned into our MoH models. Notably, MoH-LLaMA3-8B achieves an average accuracy of 64.0% across 14 benchmarks, outperforming LLaMA3-8B by 2.4% by utilizing only 75% of the attention heads. We believe the proposed MoH is a promising alternative to multi-head attention and provides a strong foundation for developing advanced and efficient attention-based models.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have made substantial progress in integrating large language models (LLMs) with visual inputs, enabling advanced multimodal reasoning. Despite their success, a persistent challenge is hallucination-where generated text fails to accurately reflect visual content-undermining both accuracy and reliability. Existing methods focus on alignment training or decoding refinements but primarily address symptoms at the generation stage without probing the underlying causes. In this work, we investigate the internal mechanisms driving hallucination in LVLMs, with an emphasis on the multi-head attention module. Specifically, we introduce Vision-aware Head Divergence (VHD), a metric that quantifies the sensitivity of attention head outputs to visual context. Based on this, our findings reveal the presence of vision-aware attention heads that are more attuned to visual information; however, the model's overreliance on its prior language patterns is closely related to hallucinations. Building on these insights, we propose Vision-aware Head Reinforcement (VHR), a training-free approach to mitigate hallucination by enhancing the role of vision-aware attention heads. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in mitigating hallucinations, while maintaining high efficiency with negligible additional time overhead.

Imagining the future trajectory is the key for robots to make sound planning and successfully reach their goals. Therefore, text-conditioned video prediction (TVP) is an essential task to facilitate general robot policy learning. To tackle this task and empower robots with the ability to foresee the future, we propose a sample and computation-efficient model, named Seer, by inflating the pretrained text-to-image (T2I) stable diffusion models along the temporal axis. We enhance the U-Net and language conditioning model by incorporating computation-efficient spatial-temporal attention. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Frame Sequential Text Decomposer module that dissects a sentence's global instruction into temporally aligned sub-instructions, ensuring precise integration into each frame of generation. Our framework allows us to effectively leverage the extensive prior knowledge embedded in pretrained T2I models across the frames. With the adaptable-designed architecture, Seer makes it possible to generate high-fidelity, coherent, and instruction-aligned video frames by fine-tuning a few layers on a small amount of data. The experimental results on Something Something V2 (SSv2), Bridgedata and EpicKitchens-100 datasets demonstrate our superior video prediction performance with around 480-GPU hours versus CogVideo with over 12,480-GPU hours: achieving the 31% FVD improvement compared to the current SOTA model on SSv2 and 83.7% average preference in the human evaluation.

We introduce three new attention mechanisms that outperform standard multi-head attention in terms of efficiency and learning capabilities, thereby improving the performance and broader deployability of Transformer models. Our first contribution is Optimised Attention, which performs similarly to standard attention, but has 3/4 as many parameters and one matrix multiplication fewer per head. Next, we introduce Efficient Attention, which performs on par with standard attention with only 1/2 as many parameters as many parameters and two matrix multiplications fewer per head and is up to twice as fast as standard attention. Lastly, we introduce Super Attention, which surpasses standard attention by a significant margin in both vision and natural language processing tasks while having fewer parameters and matrix multiplications. In addition to providing rigorous mathematical comparisons, we evaluate the presented attention mechanisms on MNIST, CIFAR100, IMDB Movie Reviews, and Amazon Reviews datasets.

Vision transformer (ViT) expands the success of transformer models from sequential data to images. The model decomposes an image into many smaller patches and arranges them into a sequence. Multi-head self-attentions are then applied to the sequence to learn the attention between patches. Despite many successful interpretations of transformers on sequential data, little effort has been devoted to the interpretation of ViTs, and many questions remain unanswered. For example, among the numerous attention heads, which one is more important? How strong are individual patches attending to their spatial neighbors in different heads? What attention patterns have individual heads learned? In this work, we answer these questions through a visual analytics approach. Specifically, we first identify what heads are more important in ViTs by introducing multiple pruning-based metrics. Then, we profile the spatial distribution of attention strengths between patches inside individual heads, as well as the trend of attention strengths across attention layers. Third, using an autoencoder-based learning solution, we summarize all possible attention patterns that individual heads could learn. Examining the attention strengths and patterns of the important heads, we answer why they are important. Through concrete case studies with experienced deep learning experts on multiple ViTs, we validate the effectiveness of our solution that deepens the understanding of ViTs from head importance, head attention strength, and head attention pattern.

We conjecture that hidden state vectors corresponding to individual input tokens encode information sufficient to accurately predict several tokens ahead. More concretely, in this paper we ask: Given a hidden (internal) representation of a single token at position t in an input, can we reliably anticipate the tokens that will appear at positions geq t + 2? To test this, we measure linear approximation and causal intervention methods in GPT-J-6B to evaluate the degree to which individual hidden states in the network contain signal rich enough to predict future hidden states and, ultimately, token outputs. We find that, at some layers, we can approximate a model's output with more than 48% accuracy with respect to its prediction of subsequent tokens through a single hidden state. Finally we present a "Future Lens" visualization that uses these methods to create a new view of transformer states.

Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied to natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, attention weights are often claimed to confer interpretability, purportedly useful both for providing insights to practitioners and for explaining why a model makes its decisions to stakeholders. We call the latter use of attention mechanisms into question by demonstrating a simple method for training models to produce deceptive attention masks. Our method diminishes the total weight assigned to designated impermissible tokens, even when the models can be shown to nevertheless rely on these features to drive predictions. Across multiple models and tasks, our approach manipulates attention weights while paying surprisingly little cost in accuracy. Through a human study, we show that our manipulated attention-based explanations deceive people into thinking that predictions from a model biased against gender minorities do not rely on the gender. Consequently, our results cast doubt on attention's reliability as a tool for auditing algorithms in the context of fairness and accountability.

Benefiting from the capability of building inter-dependencies among channels or spatial locations, attention mechanisms have been extensively studied and broadly used in a variety of computer vision tasks recently. In this paper, we investigate light-weight but effective attention mechanisms and present triplet attention, a novel method for computing attention weights by capturing cross-dimension interaction using a three-branch structure. For an input tensor, triplet attention builds inter-dimensional dependencies by the rotation operation followed by residual transformations and encodes inter-channel and spatial information with negligible computational overhead. Our method is simple as well as efficient and can be easily plugged into classic backbone networks as an add-on module. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on various challenging tasks including image classification on ImageNet-1k and object detection on MSCOCO and PASCAL VOC datasets. Furthermore, we provide extensive in-sight into the performance of triplet attention by visually inspecting the GradCAM and GradCAM++ results. The empirical evaluation of our method supports our intuition on the importance of capturing dependencies across dimensions when computing attention weights. Code for this paper can be publicly accessed at https://github.com/LandskapeAI/triplet-attention

In this paper, we propose a simple and strong framework for Tracking Any Point with TRansformers (TAPTR). Based on the observation that point tracking bears a great resemblance to object detection and tracking, we borrow designs from DETR-like algorithms to address the task of TAP. In the proposed framework, in each video frame, each tracking point is represented as a point query, which consists of a positional part and a content part. As in DETR, each query (its position and content feature) is naturally updated layer by layer. Its visibility is predicted by its updated content feature. Queries belonging to the same tracking point can exchange information through self-attention along the temporal dimension. As all such operations are well-designed in DETR-like algorithms, the model is conceptually very simple. We also adopt some useful designs such as cost volume from optical flow models and develop simple designs to provide long temporal information while mitigating the feature drifting issue. Our framework demonstrates strong performance with state-of-the-art performance on various TAP datasets with faster inference speed.

Short-term action anticipation (STA) in first-person videos is a challenging task that involves understanding the next active object interactions and predicting future actions. Existing action anticipation methods have primarily focused on utilizing features extracted from video clips, but often overlooked the importance of objects and their interactions. To this end, we propose a novel approach that applies a guided attention mechanism between the objects, and the spatiotemporal features extracted from video clips, enhancing the motion and contextual information, and further decoding the object-centric and motion-centric information to address the problem of STA in egocentric videos. Our method, GANO (Guided Attention for Next active Objects) is a multi-modal, end-to-end, single transformer-based network. The experimental results performed on the largest egocentric dataset demonstrate that GANO outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods for the prediction of the next active object label, its bounding box location, the corresponding future action, and the time to contact the object. The ablation study shows the positive contribution of the guided attention mechanism compared to other fusion methods. Moreover, it is possible to improve the next active object location and class label prediction results of GANO by just appending the learnable object tokens with the region of interest embeddings.

In this paper, we present TAPTRv2, a Transformer-based approach built upon TAPTR for solving the Tracking Any Point (TAP) task. TAPTR borrows designs from DEtection TRansformer (DETR) and formulates each tracking point as a point query, making it possible to leverage well-studied operations in DETR-like algorithms. TAPTRv2 improves TAPTR by addressing a critical issue regarding its reliance on cost-volume,which contaminates the point query\'s content feature and negatively impacts both visibility prediction and cost-volume computation. In TAPTRv2, we propose a novel attention-based position update (APU) operation and use key-aware deformable attention to realize. For each query, this operation uses key-aware attention weights to combine their corresponding deformable sampling positions to predict a new query position. This design is based on the observation that local attention is essentially the same as cost-volume, both of which are computed by dot-production between a query and its surrounding features. By introducing this new operation, TAPTRv2 not only removes the extra burden of cost-volume computation, but also leads to a substantial performance improvement. TAPTRv2 surpasses TAPTR and achieves state-of-the-art performance on many challenging datasets, demonstrating the superiority

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance on numerous downstream tasks. However, due to their inherent representation biases originating from different training paradigms, VFMs exhibit advantages and disadvantages across distinct vision tasks. Although amalgamating the strengths of multiple VFMs for downstream tasks is an intuitive strategy, effectively exploiting these biases remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel and versatile "Swiss Army Knife" (SAK) solution, which adaptively distills knowledge from a committee of VFMs to enhance multi-task learning. Unlike existing methods that use a single backbone for knowledge transfer, our approach preserves the unique representation bias of each teacher by collaborating the lightweight Teacher-Specific Adapter Path modules with the Teacher-Agnostic Stem. Through dynamic selection and combination of representations with Mixture-of-Representations Routers, our SAK is capable of synergizing the complementary strengths of multiple VFMs. Extensive experiments show that our SAK remarkably outperforms prior state of the arts in multi-task learning by 10% on the NYUD-v2 benchmark, while also providing a flexible and robust framework that can readily accommodate more advanced model designs.

Dogs have a unique evolutionary relationship with humans and serve many important roles e.g. search and rescue, blind assistance, emotional support. However, few datasets exist to categorize visual features and objects available to dogs, as well as how dogs direct their visual attention within their environment. We collect and study a dataset with over 11,698 gazes to categorize the objects available to be gazed at by 11 dogs in everyday outdoor environments i.e. a walk around a college campus and urban area. We explore the availability of these object categories and the visual attention of dogs over these categories using a head mounted eye tracking apparatus. A small portion (approx. 600 images or < 20% of total dataset) of the collected data is used to fine tune a MaskRCNN for the novel image domain to segment objects present in the scene, enabling further statistical analysis on the visual gaze tendencies of dogs. The MaskRCNN, with eye tracking apparatus, serves as an end to end model for automatically classifying the visual fixations of dogs. The fine tuned MaskRCNN performs far better than chance. There are few individual differences between the 11 dogs and we observe greater visual fixations on buses, plants, pavement, and construction equipment. This work takes a step towards understanding visual behavior of dogs and their interaction with the physical world.

The general domain of video segmentation is currently fragmented into different tasks spanning multiple benchmarks. Despite rapid progress in the state-of-the-art, current methods are overwhelmingly task-specific and cannot conceptually generalize to other tasks. Inspired by recent approaches with multi-task capability, we propose TarViS: a novel, unified network architecture that can be applied to any task that requires segmenting a set of arbitrarily defined 'targets' in video. Our approach is flexible with respect to how tasks define these targets, since it models the latter as abstract 'queries' which are then used to predict pixel-precise target masks. A single TarViS model can be trained jointly on a collection of datasets spanning different tasks, and can hot-swap between tasks during inference without any task-specific retraining. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we apply TarViS to four different tasks, namely Video Instance Segmentation (VIS), Video Panoptic Segmentation (VPS), Video Object Segmentation (VOS) and Point Exemplar-guided Tracking (PET). Our unified, jointly trained model achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5/7 benchmarks spanning these four tasks, and competitive performance on the remaining two. Code and model weights are available at: https://github.com/Ali2500/TarViS

An image, especially with high-resolution, typically consists of numerous visual elements, ranging from dominant large objects to fine-grained detailed objects. When perceiving such images, multimodal large language models~(MLLMs) face limitations due to the restricted input resolution of the pretrained vision encoder and the cluttered, dense context of the image, resulting in a focus on primary objects while easily overlooking detailed ones. In this paper, we propose Zoom Eye, a tree search algorithm designed to navigate the hierarchical and visual nature of images to capture relevant information. Zoom Eye conceptualizes an image as a tree, with each children node representing a zoomed sub-patch of the parent node and the root represents the overall image. Moreover, Zoom Eye is model-agnostic and training-free, so it enables any MLLMs to simulate human zooming actions by searching along the image tree from root to leaf nodes, seeking out pertinent information, and accurately responding to related queries. We experiment on a series of elaborate high-resolution benchmarks and the results demonstrate that Zoom Eye not only consistently improves the performance of a series base MLLMs with large margin~(e.g., LLaVA-v1.5-7B increases by 34.57\% on V^* Bench and 17.88\% on HR-Bench), but also enables small 7B MLLMs to outperform strong large models such as GPT-4o. Our code is available at https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ZoomEye{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/ZoomEye}.

We propose FocusCLIP, integrating subject-level guidance--a specialized mechanism for target-specific supervision--into the CLIP framework for improved zero-shot transfer on human-centric tasks. Our novel contributions enhance CLIP on both the vision and text sides. On the vision side, we incorporate ROI heatmaps emulating human visual attention mechanisms to emphasize subject-relevant image regions. On the text side, we introduce human pose descriptions to provide rich contextual information. For human-centric tasks, FocusCLIP is trained with images from the MPII Human Pose dataset. The proposed approach surpassed CLIP by an average of 8.61% across five previously unseen datasets covering three human-centric tasks. FocusCLIP achieved an average accuracy of 33.65% compared to 25.04% by CLIP. We observed a 3.98% improvement in activity recognition, a 14.78% improvement in age classification, and a 7.06% improvement in emotion recognition. Moreover, using our proposed single-shot LLM prompting strategy, we release a high-quality MPII Pose Descriptions dataset to encourage further research in multimodal learning for human-centric tasks. Furthermore, we also demonstrate the effectiveness of our subject-level supervision on non-human-centric tasks. FocusCLIP shows a 2.47% improvement over CLIP in zero-shot bird classification using the CUB dataset. Our findings emphasize the potential of integrating subject-level guidance with general pretraining methods for enhanced downstream performance.

CLIP has achieved impressive zero-shot performance after pre-training on a large-scale dataset consisting of paired image-text data. Previous works have utilized CLIP by incorporating manually designed visual prompts like colored circles and blur masks into the images to guide the model's attention, showing enhanced zero-shot performance in downstream tasks. Although these methods have achieved promising results, they inevitably alter the original information of the images, which can lead to failure in specific tasks. We propose a train-free method Foveal-Attention CLIP (FALIP), which adjusts the CLIP's attention by inserting foveal attention masks into the multi-head self-attention module. We demonstrate FALIP effectively boosts CLIP zero-shot performance in tasks such as referring expressions comprehension, image classification, and 3D point cloud recognition. Experimental results further show that FALIP outperforms existing methods on most metrics and can augment current methods to enhance their performance.

Forecasting future events based on evidence of current conditions is an innate skill of human beings, and key for predicting the outcome of any decision making. In artificial vision for example, we would like to predict the next human action before it happens, without observing the future video frames associated to it. Computer vision models for action anticipation are expected to collect the subtle evidence in the preamble of the target actions. In prior studies recurrence modeling often leads to better performance, the strong temporal inference is assumed to be a key element for reasonable prediction. To this end, we propose a unified recurrence modeling for video action anticipation via message passing framework. The information flow in space-time can be described by the interaction between vertices and edges, and the changes of vertices for each incoming frame reflects the underlying dynamics. Our model leverages self-attention as the building blocks for each of the message passing functions. In addition, we introduce different edge learning strategies that can be end-to-end optimized to gain better flexibility for the connectivity between vertices. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous works on the large-scale EPIC-Kitchen dataset.

Traditional computer vision generally solves each single task independently by a dedicated model with the task instruction implicitly designed in the model architecture, arising two limitations: (1) it leads to task-specific models, which require multiple models for different tasks and restrict the potential synergies from diverse tasks; (2) it leads to a pre-defined and fixed model interface that has limited interactivity and adaptability in following user' task instructions. To address them, Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) has been intensively studied recently, which finetunes a large vision model with language as task instructions, aiming to learn from a wide range of vision tasks described by language instructions a general-purpose multimodal model that can follow arbitrary instructions and thus solve arbitrary tasks specified by the user. This work aims to provide a systematic review of visual instruction tuning, covering (1) the background that presents computer vision task paradigms and the development of VIT; (2) the foundations of VIT that introduce commonly used network architectures, visual instruction tuning frameworks and objectives, and evaluation setups and tasks; (3) the commonly used datasets in visual instruction tuning and evaluation; (4) the review of existing VIT methods that categorizes them with a taxonomy according to both the studied vision task and the method design and highlights the major contributions, strengths, and shortcomings of them; (5) the comparison and discussion of VIT methods over various instruction-following benchmarks; (6) several challenges, open directions and possible future works in visual instruction tuning research.

Visual search is a ubiquitous and often challenging daily task, exemplified by looking for the car keys at home or a friend in a crowd. An intriguing property of some classical search tasks is an asymmetry such that finding a target A among distractors B can be easier than finding B among A. To elucidate the mechanisms responsible for asymmetry in visual search, we propose a computational model that takes a target and a search image as inputs and produces a sequence of eye movements until the target is found. The model integrates eccentricity-dependent visual recognition with target-dependent top-down cues. We compared the model against human behavior in six paradigmatic search tasks that show asymmetry in humans. Without prior exposure to the stimuli or task-specific training, the model provides a plausible mechanism for search asymmetry. We hypothesized that the polarity of search asymmetry arises from experience with the natural environment. We tested this hypothesis by training the model on augmented versions of ImageNet where the biases of natural images were either removed or reversed. The polarity of search asymmetry disappeared or was altered depending on the training protocol. This study highlights how classical perceptual properties can emerge in neural network models, without the need for task-specific training, but rather as a consequence of the statistical properties of the developmental diet fed to the model. All source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/kreimanlab/VisualSearchAsymmetry.

Estimating the head pose of a person is a crucial problem that has a large amount of applications such as aiding in gaze estimation, modeling attention, fitting 3D models to video and performing face alignment. Traditionally head pose is computed by estimating some keypoints from the target face and solving the 2D to 3D correspondence problem with a mean human head model. We argue that this is a fragile method because it relies entirely on landmark detection performance, the extraneous head model and an ad-hoc fitting step. We present an elegant and robust way to determine pose by training a multi-loss convolutional neural network on 300W-LP, a large synthetically expanded dataset, to predict intrinsic Euler angles (yaw, pitch and roll) directly from image intensities through joint binned pose classification and regression. We present empirical tests on common in-the-wild pose benchmark datasets which show state-of-the-art results. Additionally we test our method on a dataset usually used for pose estimation using depth and start to close the gap with state-of-the-art depth pose methods. We open-source our training and testing code as well as release our pre-trained models.

Feature selection is the problem of selecting a subset of features for a machine learning model that maximizes model quality subject to a budget constraint. For neural networks, prior methods, including those based on ell_1 regularization, attention, and other techniques, typically select the entire feature subset in one evaluation round, ignoring the residual value of features during selection, i.e., the marginal contribution of a feature given that other features have already been selected. We propose a feature selection algorithm called Sequential Attention that achieves state-of-the-art empirical results for neural networks. This algorithm is based on an efficient one-pass implementation of greedy forward selection and uses attention weights at each step as a proxy for feature importance. We give theoretical insights into our algorithm for linear regression by showing that an adaptation to this setting is equivalent to the classical Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm, and thus inherits all of its provable guarantees. Our theoretical and empirical analyses offer new explanations towards the effectiveness of attention and its connections to overparameterization, which may be of independent interest.

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant popularity in recent years and have proliferated into many applications. However, their behavior under different learning paradigms is not well explored. We compare ViTs trained through different methods of supervision, and show that they learn a diverse range of behaviors in terms of their attention, representations, and downstream performance. We also discover ViT behaviors that are consistent across supervision, including the emergence of Offset Local Attention Heads. These are self-attention heads that attend to a token adjacent to the current token with a fixed directional offset, a phenomenon that to the best of our knowledge has not been highlighted in any prior work. Our analysis shows that ViTs are highly flexible and learn to process local and global information in different orders depending on their training method. We find that contrastive self-supervised methods learn features that are competitive with explicitly supervised features, and they can even be superior for part-level tasks. We also find that the representations of reconstruction-based models show non-trivial similarity to contrastive self-supervised models. Project website (https://www.cs.umd.edu/~sakshams/vit_analysis) and code (https://www.github.com/mwalmer-umd/vit_analysis) are publicly available.

We provide a probabilistic interpretation of attention and show that the standard dot-product attention in transformers is a special case of Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) inference. The proposed approach suggests the use of Expectation Maximization algorithms for online adaptation of key and value model parameters. This approach is useful for cases in which external agents, e.g., annotators, provide inference-time information about the correct values of some tokens, e.g, the semantic category of some pixels, and we need for this new information to propagate to other tokens in a principled manner. We illustrate the approach on an interactive semantic segmentation task in which annotators and models collaborate online to improve annotation efficiency. Using standard benchmarks, we observe that key adaptation boosts model performance (sim10% mIoU) in the low feedback regime and value propagation improves model responsiveness in the high feedback regime. A PyTorch layer implementation of our probabilistic attention model will be made publicly available here: https://github.com/apple/ml-probabilistic-attention.

Object modeling has become a core part of recent tracking frameworks. Current popular tackers use Transformer attention to extract the template feature separately or interactively with the search region. However, separate template learning lacks communication between the template and search regions, which brings difficulty in extracting discriminative target-oriented features. On the other hand, interactive template learning produces hybrid template features, which may introduce potential distractors to the template via the cluttered search regions. To enjoy the merits of both methods, we propose a robust object modeling framework for visual tracking (ROMTrack), which simultaneously models the inherent template and the hybrid template features. As a result, harmful distractors can be suppressed by combining the inherent features of target objects with search regions' guidance. Target-related features can also be extracted using the hybrid template, thus resulting in a more robust object modeling framework. To further enhance robustness, we present novel variation tokens to depict the ever-changing appearance of target objects. Variation tokens are adaptable to object deformation and appearance variations, which can boost overall performance with negligible computation. Experiments show that our ROMTrack sets a new state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks.

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are central to our interaction with digital devices. Recently, growing efforts have been made to build models for various GUI understanding tasks. However, these efforts largely overlook an important GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points, which we name the Screen Point-and-Read (SPR) task. This task is predominantly handled by rigid accessible screen reading tools, in great need of new models driven by advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In this paper, we propose a Tree-of-Lens (ToL) agent, utilizing a novel ToL grounding mechanism, to address the SPR task. Based on the input point coordinate and the corresponding GUI screenshot, our ToL agent constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree. Based on the tree, our ToL agent not only comprehends the content of the indicated area but also articulates the layout and spatial relationships between elements. Such layout information is crucial for accurately interpreting information on the screen, distinguishing our ToL agent from other screen reading tools. We also thoroughly evaluate the ToL agent against other baselines on a newly proposed SPR benchmark, which includes GUIs from mobile, web, and operating systems. Last but not least, we test the ToL agent on mobile GUI navigation tasks, demonstrating its utility in identifying incorrect actions along the path of agent execution trajectories. Code and data: screen-point-and-read.github.io

This paper introduces ViNet-S, a 36MB model based on the ViNet architecture with a U-Net design, featuring a lightweight decoder that significantly reduces model size and parameters without compromising performance. Additionally, ViNet-A (148MB) incorporates spatio-temporal action localization (STAL) features, differing from traditional video saliency models that use action classification backbones. Our studies show that an ensemble of ViNet-S and ViNet-A, by averaging predicted saliency maps, achieves state-of-the-art performance on three visual-only and six audio-visual saliency datasets, outperforming transformer-based models in both parameter efficiency and real-time performance, with ViNet-S reaching over 1000fps.

Early action prediction deals with inferring the ongoing action from partially-observed videos, typically at the outset of the video. We propose a bottleneck-based attention model that captures the evolution of the action, through progressive sampling over fine-to-coarse scales. Our proposed Temporal Progressive (TemPr) model is composed of multiple attention towers, one for each scale. The predicted action label is based on the collective agreement considering confidences of these towers. Extensive experiments over four video datasets showcase state-of-the-art performance on the task of Early Action Prediction across a range of encoder architectures. We demonstrate the effectiveness and consistency of TemPr through detailed ablations.

Accurately perceiving instances and predicting their future motion are key tasks for autonomous vehicles, enabling them to navigate safely in complex urban traffic. While bird's-eye view (BEV) representations are commonplace in perception for autonomous driving, their potential in a motion prediction setting is less explored. Existing approaches for BEV instance prediction from surround cameras rely on a multi-task auto-regressive setup coupled with complex post-processing to predict future instances in a spatio-temporally consistent manner. In this paper, we depart from this paradigm and propose an efficient novel end-to-end framework named POWERBEV, which differs in several design choices aimed at reducing the inherent redundancy in previous methods. First, rather than predicting the future in an auto-regressive fashion, POWERBEV uses a parallel, multi-scale module built from lightweight 2D convolutional networks. Second, we show that segmentation and centripetal backward flow are sufficient for prediction, simplifying previous multi-task objectives by eliminating redundant output modalities. Building on this output representation, we propose a simple, flow warping-based post-processing approach which produces more stable instance associations across time. Through this lightweight yet powerful design, POWERBEV outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on the NuScenes Dataset and poses an alternative paradigm for BEV instance prediction. We made our code publicly available at: https://github.com/EdwardLeeLPZ/PowerBEV.

The ability to predict future visual observations conditioned on past observations and motor commands can enable embodied agents to plan solutions to a variety of tasks in complex environments. This work shows that we can create good video prediction models by pre-training transformers via masked visual modeling. Our approach, named MaskViT, is based on two simple design decisions. First, for memory and training efficiency, we use two types of window attention: spatial and spatiotemporal. Second, during training, we mask a variable percentage of tokens instead of a fixed mask ratio. For inference, MaskViT generates all tokens via iterative refinement where we incrementally decrease the masking ratio following a mask scheduling function. On several datasets we demonstrate that MaskViT outperforms prior works in video prediction, is parameter efficient, and can generate high-resolution videos (256x256). Further, we demonstrate the benefits of inference speedup (up to 512x) due to iterative decoding by using MaskViT for planning on a real robot. Our work suggests that we can endow embodied agents with powerful predictive models by leveraging the general framework of masked visual modeling with minimal domain knowledge.

Recent approaches to multi-task learning (MTL) have focused on modelling connections between tasks at the decoder level. This leads to a tight coupling between tasks, which need retraining if a new task is inserted or removed. We argue that MTL is a stepping stone towards universal feature learning (UFL), which is the ability to learn generic features that can be applied to new tasks without retraining. We propose Medusa to realize this goal, designing task heads with dual attention mechanisms. The shared feature attention masks relevant backbone features for each task, allowing it to learn a generic representation. Meanwhile, a novel Multi-Scale Attention head allows the network to better combine per-task features from different scales when making the final prediction. We show the effectiveness of Medusa in UFL (+13.18% improvement), while maintaining MTL performance and being 25% more efficient than previous approaches.

This paper introduces AIM, a collection of vision models pre-trained with an autoregressive objective. These models are inspired by their textual counterparts, i.e., Large Language Models (LLMs), and exhibit similar scaling properties. Specifically, we highlight two key findings: (1) the performance of the visual features scale with both the model capacity and the quantity of data, (2) the value of the objective function correlates with the performance of the model on downstream tasks. We illustrate the practical implication of these findings by pre-training a 7 billion parameter AIM on 2 billion images, that achieves 84.0% on ImageNet-1k with a frozen trunk. Interestingly, even at this scale, we observe no sign of saturation in performance, suggesting that AIM potentially represents a new frontier for training large-scale vision models. The pre-training of AIM is similar to the pre-training of LLMs, and does not require any image-specific strategy to stabilize the training at scale.

Effectively representing medical images, especially retinal images, presents a considerable challenge due to variations in appearance, size, and contextual information of pathological signs called lesions. Precise discrimination of these lesions is crucial for diagnosing vision-threatening issues such as diabetic retinopathy. While visual attention-based neural networks have been introduced to learn spatial context and channel correlations from retinal images, they often fall short in capturing localized lesion context. Addressing this limitation, we propose a novel attention mechanism called Guided Context Gating, an unique approach that integrates Context Formulation, Channel Correlation, and Guided Gating to learn global context, spatial correlations, and localized lesion context. Our qualitative evaluation against existing attention mechanisms emphasize the superiority of Guided Context Gating in terms of explainability. Notably, experiments on the Zenodo-DR-7 dataset reveal a substantial 2.63% accuracy boost over advanced attention mechanisms & an impressive 6.53% improvement over the state-of-the-art Vision Transformer for assessing the severity grade of retinopathy, even with imbalanced and limited training samples for each class.

The complex nature of combining localization and classification in object detection has resulted in the flourished development of methods. Previous works tried to improve the performance in various object detection heads but failed to present a unified view. In this paper, we present a novel dynamic head framework to unify object detection heads with attentions. By coherently combining multiple self-attention mechanisms between feature levels for scale-awareness, among spatial locations for spatial-awareness, and within output channels for task-awareness, the proposed approach significantly improves the representation ability of object detection heads without any computational overhead. Further experiments demonstrate that the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed dynamic head on the COCO benchmark. With a standard ResNeXt-101-DCN backbone, we largely improve the performance over popular object detectors and achieve a new state-of-the-art at 54.0 AP. Furthermore, with latest transformer backbone and extra data, we can push current best COCO result to a new record at 60.6 AP. The code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/DynamicHead.

We introduce WebGames, a comprehensive benchmark suite designed to evaluate general-purpose web-browsing AI agents through a collection of 50+ interactive challenges. These challenges are specifically crafted to be straightforward for humans while systematically testing the limitations of current AI systems across fundamental browser interactions, advanced input processing, cognitive tasks, workflow automation, and interactive entertainment. Our framework eliminates external dependencies through a hermetic testing environment, ensuring reproducible evaluation with verifiable ground-truth solutions. We evaluate leading vision-language models including GPT-4o, Claude Computer-Use, Gemini-1.5-Pro, and Qwen2-VL against human performance. Results reveal a substantial capability gap, with the best AI system achieving only 43.1% success rate compared to human performance of 95.7%, highlighting fundamental limitations in current AI systems' ability to handle common web interaction patterns that humans find intuitive. The benchmark is publicly available at webgames.convergence.ai, offering a lightweight, client-side implementation that facilitates rapid evaluation cycles. Through its modular architecture and standardized challenge specifications, WebGames provides a robust foundation for measuring progress in development of more capable web-browsing agents.

We propose MM-REACT, a system paradigm that integrates ChatGPT with a pool of vision experts to achieve multimodal reasoning and action. In this paper, we define and explore a comprehensive list of advanced vision tasks that are intriguing to solve, but may exceed the capabilities of existing vision and vision-language models. To achieve such advanced visual intelligence, MM-REACT introduces a textual prompt design that can represent text descriptions, textualized spatial coordinates, and aligned file names for dense visual signals such as images and videos. MM-REACT's prompt design allows language models to accept, associate, and process multimodal information, thereby facilitating the synergetic combination of ChatGPT and various vision experts. Zero-shot experiments demonstrate MM-REACT's effectiveness in addressing the specified capabilities of interests and its wide application in different scenarios that require advanced visual understanding. Furthermore, we discuss and compare MM-REACT's system paradigm with an alternative approach that extends language models for multimodal scenarios through joint finetuning. Code, demo, video, and visualization are available at https://multimodal-react.github.io/

Recent studies have presented compelling evidence that large language models (LLMs) can equip embodied agents with the self-driven capability to interact with the world, which marks an initial step toward versatile robotics. However, these efforts tend to overlook the visual richness of open worlds, rendering the entire interactive process akin to "a blindfolded text-based game." Consequently, LLM-based agents frequently encounter challenges in intuitively comprehending their surroundings and producing responses that are easy to understand. In this paper, we propose Steve-Eye, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model designed to address this limitation. Steve-Eye integrates the LLM with a visual encoder which enables it to process visual-text inputs and generate multimodal feedback. In addition, we use a semi-automatic strategy to collect an extensive dataset comprising 850K open-world instruction pairs, empowering our model to encompass three essential functions for an agent: multimodal perception, foundational knowledge base, and skill prediction and planning. Lastly, we develop three open-world evaluation benchmarks, then carry out extensive experiments from a wide range of perspectives to validate our model's capability to strategically act and plan. Codes and datasets will be released.

Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However, recent findings indicate that LMMs have an extraordinary tendency to consistently allocate high attention weights to specific visual tokens, even when these tokens are irrelevant to the corresponding text. In this study, we investigate the property behind the appearance of these irrelevant visual tokens and examine their characteristics. Our findings show that this behavior arises due to the massive activation of certain hidden state dimensions, which resembles the attention sink found in language models. Hence, we refer to this phenomenon as the visual attention sink. In particular, our analysis reveals that removing the irrelevant visual sink tokens does not impact model performance, despite receiving high attention weights. Consequently, we recycle the attention to these tokens as surplus resources, redistributing the attention budget to enhance focus on the image. To achieve this, we introduce Visual Attention Redistribution (VAR), a method that redistributes attention in image-centric heads, which we identify as innately focusing on visual information. VAR can be seamlessly applied across different LMMs to improve performance on a wide range of tasks, including general vision-language tasks, visual hallucination tasks, and vision-centric tasks, all without the need for additional training, models, or inference steps. Experimental results demonstrate that VAR enables LMMs to process visual information more effectively by adjusting their internal attention mechanisms, offering a new direction to enhancing the multimodal capabilities of LMMs.

We present a novel usage of Transformers to make image classification interpretable. Unlike mainstream classifiers that wait until the last fully-connected layer to incorporate class information to make predictions, we investigate a proactive approach, asking each class to search for itself in an image. We realize this idea via a Transformer encoder-decoder inspired by DEtection TRansformer (DETR). We learn ``class-specific'' queries (one for each class) as input to the decoder, enabling each class to localize its patterns in an image via cross-attention. We name our approach INterpretable TRansformer (INTR), which is fairly easy to implement and exhibits several compelling properties. We show that INTR intrinsically encourages each class to attend distinctively; the cross-attention weights thus provide a faithful interpretation of the prediction. Interestingly, via ``multi-head'' cross-attention, INTR could identify different ``attributes'' of a class, making it particularly suitable for fine-grained classification and analysis, which we demonstrate on eight datasets. Our code and pre-trained model are publicly accessible at https://github.com/Imageomics/INTR.

Will a Visual Language Model (VLM)-based bot warn us about slipping if it detects a wet floor? Recent VLMs have demonstrated impressive capabilities, yet their ability to infer outcomes and causes remains underexplored. To address this, we introduce NL-Eye, a benchmark designed to assess VLMs' visual abductive reasoning skills. NL-Eye adapts the abductive Natural Language Inference (NLI) task to the visual domain, requiring models to evaluate the plausibility of hypothesis images based on a premise image and explain their decisions. NL-Eye consists of 350 carefully curated triplet examples (1,050 images) spanning diverse reasoning categories: physical, functional, logical, emotional, cultural, and social. The data curation process involved two steps - writing textual descriptions and generating images using text-to-image models, both requiring substantial human involvement to ensure high-quality and challenging scenes. Our experiments show that VLMs struggle significantly on NL-Eye, often performing at random baseline levels, while humans excel in both plausibility prediction and explanation quality. This demonstrates a deficiency in the abductive reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs. NL-Eye represents a crucial step toward developing VLMs capable of robust multimodal reasoning for real-world applications, including accident-prevention bots and generated video verification.

We introduce Blink, a new benchmark for multimodal language models (LLMs) that focuses on core visual perception abilities not found in other evaluations. Most of the Blink tasks can be solved by humans "within a blink" (e.g., relative depth estimation, visual correspondence, forensics detection, and multi-view reasoning). However, we find these perception-demanding tasks cast significant challenges for current multimodal LLMs because they resist mediation through natural language. Blink reformats 14 classic computer vision tasks into 3,807 multiple-choice questions, paired with single or multiple images and visual prompting. While humans get 95.70% accuracy on average, Blink is surprisingly challenging for existing multimodal LLMs: even the best-performing GPT-4V and Gemini achieve accuracies of 51.26% and 45.72%, only 13.17% and 7.63% higher than random guessing, indicating that such perception abilities have not "emerged" yet in recent multimodal LLMs. Our analysis also highlights that specialist CV models could solve these problems much better, suggesting potential pathways for future improvements. We believe Blink will stimulate the community to help multimodal LLMs catch up with human-level visual perception.

RGB video object tracking is a fundamental task in computer vision. Its effectiveness can be improved using depth information, particularly for handling motion-blurred target. However, depth information is often missing in commonly used tracking benchmarks. In this work, we propose a new framework that leverages monocular depth estimation to counter the challenges of tracking targets that are out of view or affected by motion blur in RGB video sequences. Specifically, our work introduces following contributions. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a depth attention mechanism and to formulate a simple framework that allows seamlessly integration of depth information with state of the art tracking algorithms, without RGB-D cameras, elevating accuracy and robustness. We provide extensive experiments on six challenging tracking benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that our approach provides consistent gains over several strong baselines and achieves new SOTA performance. We believe that our method will open up new possibilities for more sophisticated VOT solutions in real-world scenarios. Our code and models are publicly released: https://github.com/LiuYuML/Depth-Attention.

Humans view the world through many sensory channels, e.g., the long-wavelength light channel, viewed by the left eye, or the high-frequency vibrations channel, heard by the right ear. Each view is noisy and incomplete, but important factors, such as physics, geometry, and semantics, tend to be shared between all views (e.g., a "dog" can be seen, heard, and felt). We investigate the classic hypothesis that a powerful representation is one that models view-invariant factors. We study this hypothesis under the framework of multiview contrastive learning, where we learn a representation that aims to maximize mutual information between different views of the same scene but is otherwise compact. Our approach scales to any number of views, and is view-agnostic. We analyze key properties of the approach that make it work, finding that the contrastive loss outperforms a popular alternative based on cross-view prediction, and that the more views we learn from, the better the resulting representation captures underlying scene semantics. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on image and video unsupervised learning benchmarks. Code is released at: http://github.com/HobbitLong/CMC/.

Humans possess the remarkable ability to foresee the future to a certain extent based on present observations, a skill we term as foresight minds. However, this capability remains largely under explored within existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), hindering their capacity to learn the fundamental principles of how things operate and the intentions behind the observed subjects. To address this issue, we introduce the integration of future modeling into the existing learning frameworks of MLLMs. By utilizing the subject trajectory, a highly structured representation of a consecutive frame sequence, as a learning objective, we aim to bridge the gap between the past and the future. We propose two innovative methods to empower MLLMs with foresight minds, Foresight Pre-Training (FPT) and Foresight Instruction-Tuning (FIT), which are inspired by the modern learning paradigm of LLMs. Specifically, FPT jointly training various tasks centered on trajectories, enabling MLLMs to learn how to attend and predict entire trajectories from a given initial observation. Then, FIT requires MLLMs to first predict trajectories of related objects and then reason about potential future events based on them. Aided by FPT and FIT, we build a novel and unified MLLM named Merlin that supports multi-images input and analysis about potential actions of multiple objects for the future reasoning. Experimental results show Merlin powerful foresight minds with impressive performance on both future reasoning and visual comprehension tasks.

Saliency methods seek to explain the predictions of a model by producing an importance map across each input sample. A popular class of such methods is based on backpropagating a signal and analyzing the resulting gradient. Despite much research on such methods, relatively little work has been done to clarify the differences between such methods as well as the desiderata of these techniques. Thus, there is a need for rigorously understanding the relationships between different methods as well as their failure modes. In this work, we conduct a thorough analysis of backpropagation-based saliency methods and propose a single framework under which several such methods can be unified. As a result of our study, we make three additional contributions. First, we use our framework to propose NormGrad, a novel saliency method based on the spatial contribution of gradients of convolutional weights. Second, we combine saliency maps at different layers to test the ability of saliency methods to extract complementary information at different network levels (e.g.~trading off spatial resolution and distinctiveness) and we explain why some methods fail at specific layers (e.g., Grad-CAM anywhere besides the last convolutional layer). Third, we introduce a class-sensitivity metric and a meta-learning inspired paradigm applicable to any saliency method for improving sensitivity to the output class being explained.

Human fashion understanding is one crucial computer vision task since it has comprehensive information for real-world applications. This focus on joint human fashion segmentation and attribute recognition. Contrary to the previous works that separately model each task as a multi-head prediction problem, our insight is to bridge these two tasks with one unified model via vision transformer modeling to benefit each task. In particular, we introduce the object query for segmentation and the attribute query for attribute prediction. Both queries and their corresponding features can be linked via mask prediction. Then we adopt a two-stream query learning framework to learn the decoupled query representations.We design a novel Multi-Layer Rendering module for attribute stream to explore more fine-grained features. The decoder design shares the same spirit as DETR. Thus we name the proposed method Fahsionformer. Extensive experiments on three human fashion datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our approach. In particular, our method with the same backbone achieve relative 10\% improvements than previous works in case of a joint metric (AP^{text{mask}_{IoU+F_1}) for both segmentation and attribute recognition}. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first unified end-to-end vision transformer framework for human fashion analysis. We hope this simple yet effective method can serve as a new flexible baseline for fashion analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/xushilin1/FashionFormer.

Multi-task visual learning is a critical aspect of computer vision. Current research, however, predominantly concentrates on the multi-task dense prediction setting, which overlooks the intrinsic 3D world and its multi-view consistent structures, and lacks the capability for versatile imagination. In response to these limitations, we present a novel problem setting -- multi-task view synthesis (MTVS), which reinterprets multi-task prediction as a set of novel-view synthesis tasks for multiple scene properties, including RGB. To tackle the MTVS problem, we propose MuvieNeRF, a framework that incorporates both multi-task and cross-view knowledge to simultaneously synthesize multiple scene properties. MuvieNeRF integrates two key modules, the Cross-Task Attention (CTA) and Cross-View Attention (CVA) modules, enabling the efficient use of information across multiple views and tasks. Extensive evaluation on both synthetic and realistic benchmarks demonstrates that MuvieNeRF is capable of simultaneously synthesizing different scene properties with promising visual quality, even outperforming conventional discriminative models in various settings. Notably, we show that MuvieNeRF exhibits universal applicability across a range of NeRF backbones. Our code is available at https://github.com/zsh2000/MuvieNeRF.

Attention layers -- which map a sequence of inputs to a sequence of outputs -- are core building blocks of the Transformer architecture which has achieved significant breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. This paper presents a rigorous theoretical study on the learning and generalization of a single multi-head attention layer, with a sequence of key vectors and a separate query vector as input. We consider the random feature setting where the attention layer has a large number of heads, with randomly sampled frozen query and key matrices, and trainable value matrices. We show that such a random-feature attention layer can express a broad class of target functions that are permutation invariant to the key vectors. We further provide quantitative excess risk bounds for learning these target functions from finite samples, using random feature attention with finitely many heads. Our results feature several implications unique to the attention structure compared with existing random features theory for neural networks, such as (1) Advantages in the sample complexity over standard two-layer random-feature networks; (2) Concrete and natural classes of functions that can be learned efficiently by a random-feature attention layer; and (3) The effect of the sampling distribution of the query-key weight matrix (the product of the query and key matrix), where Gaussian random weights with a non-zero mean result in better sample complexities over the zero-mean counterpart for learning certain natural target functions. Experiments on simulated data corroborate our theoretical findings and further illustrate the interplay between the sample size and the complexity of the target function.

Pixel-wise regression is probably the most common problem in fine-grained computer vision tasks, such as estimating keypoint heatmaps and segmentation masks. These regression problems are very challenging particularly because they require, at low computation overheads, modeling long-range dependencies on high-resolution inputs/outputs to estimate the highly nonlinear pixel-wise semantics. While attention mechanisms in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks(DCNNs) has become popular for boosting long-range dependencies, element-specific attention, such as Nonlocal blocks, is highly complex and noise-sensitive to learn, and most of simplified attention hybrids try to reach the best compromise among multiple types of tasks. In this paper, we present the Polarized Self-Attention(PSA) block that incorporates two critical designs towards high-quality pixel-wise regression: (1) Polarized filtering: keeping high internal resolution in both channel and spatial attention computation while completely collapsing input tensors along their counterpart dimensions. (2) Enhancement: composing non-linearity that directly fits the output distribution of typical fine-grained regression, such as the 2D Gaussian distribution (keypoint heatmaps), or the 2D Binormial distribution (binary segmentation masks). PSA appears to have exhausted the representation capacity within its channel-only and spatial-only branches, such that there is only marginal metric differences between its sequential and parallel layouts. Experimental results show that PSA boosts standard baselines by 2-4 points, and boosts state-of-the-arts by 1-2 points on 2D pose estimation and semantic segmentation benchmarks.

Tracking any given object(s) spatially and temporally is a common purpose in Visual Object Tracking (VOT) and Video Object Segmentation (VOS). Joint tracking and segmentation have been attempted in some studies but they often lack full compatibility of both box and mask in initialization and prediction, and mainly focus on single-object scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Multi-object Mask-box Integrated framework for unified Tracking and Segmentation, dubbed MITS. Firstly, the unified identification module is proposed to support both box and mask reference for initialization, where detailed object information is inferred from boxes or directly retained from masks. Additionally, a novel pinpoint box predictor is proposed for accurate multi-object box prediction, facilitating target-oriented representation learning. All target objects are processed simultaneously from encoding to propagation and decoding, as a unified pipeline for VOT and VOS. Experimental results show MITS achieves state-of-the-art performance on both VOT and VOS benchmarks. Notably, MITS surpasses the best prior VOT competitor by around 6% on the GOT-10k test set, and significantly improves the performance of box initialization on VOS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/yoxu515/MITS.

Training-free diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in generating multi-subject consistent images within open-domain scenarios. The key idea of these methods is to incorporate reference subject information within the attention layer. However, existing methods still obtain suboptimal performance when handling numerous subjects. This paper reveals the two primary issues contributing to this deficiency. Firstly, there is undesired interference among different subjects within the target image. Secondly, tokens tend to reference nearby tokens, which reduces the effectiveness of the attention mechanism when there is a significant positional difference between subjects in reference and target images. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free diffusion model with Isolation and Reposition Attention, named IR-Diffusion. Specifically, Isolation Attention ensures that multiple subjects in the target image do not reference each other, effectively eliminating the subject fusion. On the other hand, Reposition Attention involves scaling and repositioning subjects in both reference and target images to the same position within the images. This ensures that subjects in the target image can better reference those in the reference image, thereby maintaining better consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly enhance multi-subject consistency, outperforming all existing methods in open-domain scenarios.

Top-performing landmark estimation algorithms are based on exploiting the excellent ability of large convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to represent local appearance. However, it is well known that they can only learn weak spatial relationships. To address this problem, we propose a model based on the combination of a CNN with a cascade of Graph Attention Network regressors. To this end, we introduce an encoding that jointly represents the appearance and location of facial landmarks and an attention mechanism to weigh the information according to its reliability. This is combined with a multi-task approach to initialize the location of graph nodes and a coarse-to-fine landmark description scheme. Our experiments confirm that the proposed model learns a global representation of the structure of the face, achieving top performance in popular benchmarks on head pose and landmark estimation. The improvement provided by our model is most significant in situations involving large changes in the local appearance of landmarks.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) aims to navigate to the target location by following a given instruction. Unlike existing methods focused on predicting a more accurate action at each step in navigation, in this paper, we make the first attempt to tackle a long-ignored problem in VLN: narrowing the gap between Success Rate (SR) and Oracle Success Rate (OSR). We observe a consistently large gap (up to 9%) on four state-of-the-art VLN methods across two benchmark datasets: R2R and REVERIE. The high OSR indicates the robot agent passes the target location, while the low SR suggests the agent actually fails to stop at the target location at last. Instead of predicting actions directly, we propose to mine the target location from a trajectory given by off-the-shelf VLN models. Specially, we design a multi-module transformer-based model for learning compact discriminative trajectory viewpoint representation, which is used to predict the confidence of being a target location as described in the instruction. The proposed method is evaluated on three widely-adopted datasets: R2R, REVERIE and NDH, and shows promising results, demonstrating the potential for more future research.

Recent studies have demonstrated the exceptional potentials of leveraging human preference datasets to refine text-to-image generative models, enhancing the alignment between generated images and textual prompts. Despite these advances, current human preference datasets are either prohibitively expensive to construct or suffer from a lack of diversity in preference dimensions, resulting in limited applicability for instruction tuning in open-source text-to-image generative models and hinder further exploration. To address these challenges and promote the alignment of generative models through instruction tuning, we leverage multimodal large language models to create VisionPrefer, a high-quality and fine-grained preference dataset that captures multiple preference aspects. We aggregate feedback from AI annotators across four aspects: prompt-following, aesthetic, fidelity, and harmlessness to construct VisionPrefer. To validate the effectiveness of VisionPrefer, we train a reward model VP-Score over VisionPrefer to guide the training of text-to-image generative models and the preference prediction accuracy of VP-Score is comparable to human annotators. Furthermore, we use two reinforcement learning methods to supervised fine-tune generative models to evaluate the performance of VisionPrefer, and extensive experimental results demonstrate that VisionPrefer significantly improves text-image alignment in compositional image generation across diverse aspects, e.g., aesthetic, and generalizes better than previous human-preference metrics across various image distributions. Moreover, VisionPrefer indicates that the integration of AI-generated synthetic data as a supervisory signal is a promising avenue for achieving improved alignment with human preferences in vision generative models.

Attention-based mechanisms are widely used in machine learning, most prominently in transformers. However, hyperparameters such as the rank of the attention matrices and the number of heads are scaled nearly the same way in all realizations of this architecture, without theoretical justification. In this work we show that there are dramatic trade-offs between the rank and number of heads of the attention mechanism. Specifically, we present a simple and natural target function that can be represented using a single full-rank attention head for any context length, but that cannot be approximated by low-rank attention unless the number of heads is exponential in the embedding dimension, even for short context lengths. Moreover, we prove that, for short context lengths, adding depth allows the target to be approximated by low-rank attention. For long contexts, we conjecture that full-rank attention is necessary. Finally, we present experiments with off-the-shelf transformers that validate our theoretical findings.

Embodied AI models often employ off the shelf vision backbones like CLIP to encode their visual observations. Although such general purpose representations encode rich syntactic and semantic information about the scene, much of this information is often irrelevant to the specific task at hand. This introduces noise within the learning process and distracts the agent's focus from task-relevant visual cues. Inspired by selective attention in humans-the process through which people filter their perception based on their experiences, knowledge, and the task at hand-we introduce a parameter-efficient approach to filter visual stimuli for embodied AI. Our approach induces a task-conditioned bottleneck using a small learnable codebook module. This codebook is trained jointly to optimize task reward and acts as a task-conditioned selective filter over the visual observation. Our experiments showcase state-of-the-art performance for object goal navigation and object displacement across 5 benchmarks, ProcTHOR, ArchitecTHOR, RoboTHOR, AI2-iTHOR, and ManipulaTHOR. The filtered representations produced by the codebook are also able generalize better and converge faster when adapted to other simulation environments such as Habitat. Our qualitative analyses show that agents explore their environments more effectively and their representations retain task-relevant information like target object recognition while ignoring superfluous information about other objects. Code and pretrained models are available at our project website: https://embodied-codebook.github.io.

In this paper, we introduce a framework ARBEx, a novel attentive feature extraction framework driven by Vision Transformer with reliability balancing to cope against poor class distributions, bias, and uncertainty in the facial expression learning (FEL) task. We reinforce several data pre-processing and refinement methods along with a window-based cross-attention ViT to squeeze the best of the data. We also employ learnable anchor points in the embedding space with label distributions and multi-head self-attention mechanism to optimize performance against weak predictions with reliability balancing, which is a strategy that leverages anchor points, attention scores, and confidence values to enhance the resilience of label predictions. To ensure correct label classification and improve the models' discriminative power, we introduce anchor loss, which encourages large margins between anchor points. Additionally, the multi-head self-attention mechanism, which is also trainable, plays an integral role in identifying accurate labels. This approach provides critical elements for improving the reliability of predictions and has a substantial positive effect on final prediction capabilities. Our adaptive model can be integrated with any deep neural network to forestall challenges in various recognition tasks. Our strategy outperforms current state-of-the-art methodologies, according to extensive experiments conducted in a variety of contexts.

This study explores the challenges of integrating human visual cue-based dehazing into object detection, given the selective nature of human perception. While human vision adapts dynamically to environmental conditions, computational dehazing does not always enhance detection uniformly. We propose a multi-stage framework where a lightweight detector identifies regions of interest (RoIs), which are then enhanced via spatial attention-based dehazing before final detection by a heavier model. Though effective in foggy conditions, this approach unexpectedly degrades the performance on clear images. We analyze this phenomenon, investigate possible causes, and offer insights for designing hybrid pipelines that balance enhancement and detection. Our findings highlight the need for selective preprocessing and challenge assumptions about universal benefits from cascading transformations.

We present DeepSeek-VL, an open-source Vision-Language (VL) Model designed for real-world vision and language understanding applications. Our approach is structured around three key dimensions: We strive to ensure our data is diverse, scalable, and extensively covers real-world scenarios including web screenshots, PDFs, OCR, charts, and knowledge-based content, aiming for a comprehensive representation of practical contexts. Further, we create a use case taxonomy from real user scenarios and construct an instruction tuning dataset accordingly. The fine-tuning with this dataset substantially improves the model's user experience in practical applications. Considering efficiency and the demands of most real-world scenarios, DeepSeek-VL incorporates a hybrid vision encoder that efficiently processes high-resolution images (1024 x 1024), while maintaining a relatively low computational overhead. This design choice ensures the model's ability to capture critical semantic and detailed information across various visual tasks. We posit that a proficient Vision-Language Model should, foremost, possess strong language abilities. To ensure the preservation of LLM capabilities during pretraining, we investigate an effective VL pretraining strategy by integrating LLM training from the beginning and carefully managing the competitive dynamics observed between vision and language modalities. The DeepSeek-VL family (both 1.3B and 7B models) showcases superior user experiences as a vision-language chatbot in real-world applications, achieving state-of-the-art or competitive performance across a wide range of visual-language benchmarks at the same model size while maintaining robust performance on language-centric benchmarks. We have made both 1.3B and 7B models publicly accessible to foster innovations based on this foundation model.

Saliency methods can aid understanding of deep neural networks. Recent years have witnessed many improvements to saliency methods, as well as new ways for evaluating them. In this paper, we 1) present a novel region-based attribution method, XRAI, that builds upon integrated gradients (Sundararajan et al. 2017), 2) introduce evaluation methods for empirically assessing the quality of image-based saliency maps (Performance Information Curves (PICs)), and 3) contribute an axiom-based sanity check for attribution methods. Through empirical experiments and example results, we show that XRAI produces better results than other saliency methods for common models and the ImageNet dataset.

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving force behind many recent state-of-the-art NLP models such as Transformer-based MT models and BERT. These models apply multiple attention mechanisms in parallel, with each attention "head" potentially focusing on different parts of the input, which makes it possible to express sophisticated functions beyond the simple weighted average. In this paper we make the surprising observation that even if models have been trained using multiple heads, in practice, a large percentage of attention heads can be removed at test time without significantly impacting performance. In fact, some layers can even be reduced to a single head. We further examine greedy algorithms for pruning down models, and the potential speed, memory efficiency, and accuracy improvements obtainable therefrom. Finally, we analyze the results with respect to which parts of the model are more reliant on having multiple heads, and provide precursory evidence that training dynamics play a role in the gains provided by multi-head attention.

Neighborhood attention reduces the cost of self attention by restricting each token's attention span to its nearest neighbors. This restriction, parameterized by a window size and dilation factor, draws a spectrum of possible attention patterns between linear projection and self attention. Neighborhood attention, and more generally sliding window attention patterns, have long been bounded by infrastructure, particularly in higher-rank spaces (2-D and 3-D), calling for the development of custom kernels, which have been limited in either functionality, or performance, if not both. In this work, we first show that neighborhood attention can be represented as a batched GEMM problem, similar to standard attention, and implement it for 1-D and 2-D neighborhood attention. These kernels on average provide 895% and 272% improvement in full precision latency compared to existing naive kernels for 1-D and 2-D neighborhood attention respectively. We find certain inherent inefficiencies in all unfused neighborhood attention kernels that bound their performance and lower-precision scalability. We also developed fused neighborhood attention; an adaptation of fused dot-product attention kernels that allow fine-grained control over attention across different spatial axes. Known for reducing the quadratic time complexity of self attention to a linear complexity, neighborhood attention can now enjoy a reduced and constant memory footprint, and record-breaking half precision latency. We observe that our fused kernels successfully circumvent some of the unavoidable inefficiencies in unfused implementations. While our unfused GEMM-based kernels only improve half precision performance compared to naive kernels by an average of 496% and 113% in 1-D and 2-D problems respectively, our fused kernels improve naive kernels by an average of 1607% and 581% in 1-D and 2-D problems respectively.

Despite significant advancements in vision-language models (VLMs), there lacks effective approaches to enhance response quality by scaling inference-time computation. This capability is known to be a core step towards the self-improving models in recent large language model studies. In this paper, we present Vision Value Model (VisVM) that can guide VLM inference-time search to generate responses with better visual comprehension. Specifically, VisVM not only evaluates the generated sentence quality in the current search step, but also anticipates the quality of subsequent sentences that may result from the current step, thus providing a long-term value. In this way, VisVM steers VLMs away from generating sentences prone to hallucinations or insufficient detail, thereby producing higher quality responses. Experimental results demonstrate that VisVM-guided search significantly enhances VLMs' ability to generate descriptive captions with richer visual details and fewer hallucinations, compared with greedy decoding and search methods with other visual reward signals. Furthermore, we find that self-training the model with the VisVM-guided captions improve VLM's performance across a wide range of multimodal benchmarks, indicating the potential for developing self-improving VLMs. Our value model and code are available at https://github.com/si0wang/VisVM.

Assessing long-form responses generated by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) is challenging. It not only requires checking whether the VLM follows the given instruction but also verifying whether the text output is properly grounded on the given image. Inspired by the recent approach of evaluating LMs with LMs, in this work, we propose to evaluate VLMs with VLMs. For this purpose, we present a new feedback dataset called the Perception Collection, encompassing 15K customized score rubrics that users might care about during assessment. Using the Perception Collection, we train Prometheus-Vision, the first open-source VLM evaluator model that can understand the user-defined score criteria during evaluation. Prometheus-Vision shows the highest Pearson correlation with human evaluators and GPT-4V among open-source models, showing its effectiveness for transparent and accessible evaluation of VLMs. We open-source our code, dataset, and model at https://github.com/kaistAI/prometheus-vision

We propose the Multi-Head Gaussian Adaptive Attention Mechanism (GAAM), a novel probabilistic attention framework, and the Gaussian Adaptive Transformer (GAT), designed to enhance information aggregation across multiple modalities, including Speech, Text and Vision. GAAM integrates learnable mean and variance into its attention mechanism, implemented in a Multi-Headed framework enabling it to collectively model any Probability Distribution for dynamic recalibration of feature significance. This method demonstrates significant improvements, especially with highly non-stationary data, surpassing the state-of-the-art attention techniques in model performance (up to approximately +20% in accuracy) by identifying key elements within the feature space. GAAM's compatibility with dot-product-based attention models and relatively low number of parameters showcases its adaptability and potential to boost existing attention frameworks. Empirically, GAAM exhibits superior adaptability and efficacy across a diverse range of tasks, including emotion recognition in speech, image classification, and text classification, thereby establishing its robustness and versatility in handling multi-modal data. Furthermore, we introduce the Importance Factor (IF), a new learning-based metric that enhances the explainability of models trained with GAAM-based methods. Overall, GAAM represents an advancement towards development of better performing and more explainable attention models across multiple modalities.

Crowd counting has achieved significant progress by training regressors to predict instance positions. In heavily crowded scenarios, however, regressors are challenged by uncontrollable annotation variance, which causes density map bias and context information inaccuracy. In this study, we propose mutual prompt learning (mPrompt), which leverages a regressor and a segmenter as guidance for each other, solving bias and inaccuracy caused by annotation variance while distinguishing foreground from background. In specific, mPrompt leverages point annotations to tune the segmenter and predict pseudo head masks in a way of point prompt learning. It then uses the predicted segmentation masks, which serve as spatial constraint, to rectify biased point annotations as context prompt learning. mPrompt defines a way of mutual information maximization from prompt learning, mitigating the impact of annotation variance while improving model accuracy. Experiments show that mPrompt significantly reduces the Mean Average Error (MAE), demonstrating the potential to be general framework for down-stream vision tasks.

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.

In the field of autonomous driving, there have been many excellent perception models for object detection, semantic segmentation, and other tasks, but how can we effectively use the perception models for vehicle planning? Traditional autonomous vehicle trajectory prediction methods not only need to obey traffic rules to avoid collisions, but also need to follow the prescribed route to reach the destination. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based trajectory prediction network for end-to-end autonomous driving without rules called Target-point Attention Transformer network (TAT). We use the attention mechanism to realize the interaction between the predicted trajectory and the perception features as well as target-points. We demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing conditional imitation learning and GRU-based methods, significantly reducing the occurrence of accidents and improving route completion. We evaluate our approach in complex closed loop driving scenarios in cities using the CARLA simulator and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

We introduce a benchmark to directly evaluate the alignment between human observers and vision models on a 3D shape inference task. We leverage an experimental design from the cognitive sciences which requires zero-shot visual inferences about object shape: given a set of images, participants identify which contain the same/different objects, despite considerable viewpoint variation. We draw from a diverse range of images that include common objects (e.g., chairs) as well as abstract shapes (i.e., procedurally generated `nonsense' objects). After constructing over 2000 unique image sets, we administer these tasks to human participants, collecting 35K trials of behavioral data from over 500 participants. This includes explicit choice behaviors as well as intermediate measures, such as reaction time and gaze data. We then evaluate the performance of common vision models (e.g., DINOv2, MAE, CLIP). We find that humans outperform all models by a wide margin. Using a multi-scale evaluation approach, we identify underlying similarities and differences between models and humans: while human-model performance is correlated, humans allocate more time/processing on challenging trials. All images, data, and code can be accessed via our project page.

Visual Instruction Tuning typically requires a large amount of vision-language training data. This data often containing redundant information that increases computational costs without proportional performance gains. In this work, we introduce ICONS, a gradient-driven Influence CONsensus approach for vision-language data Selection that selects a compact training dataset for efficient multi-task training. The key element of our approach is cross-task influence consensus, which uses majority voting across task-specific influence matrices to identify samples that are consistently valuable across multiple tasks, allowing us to effectively prioritize data that optimizes for overall performance. Experiments show that models trained on our selected data (20% of LLaVA-665K) achieve 98.6% of the relative performance obtained using the full dataset. Additionally, we release this subset, LLaVA-ICONS-133K, a compact yet highly informative subset of LLaVA-665K visual instruction tuning data, preserving high impact training data for efficient vision-language model development.

This tutorial note summarizes the presentation on ``Large Multimodal Models: Towards Building and Surpassing Multimodal GPT-4'', a part of CVPR 2023 tutorial on ``Recent Advances in Vision Foundation Models''. The tutorial consists of three parts. We first introduce the background on recent GPT-like large models for vision-and-language modeling to motivate the research in instruction-tuned large multimodal models (LMMs). As a pre-requisite, we describe the basics of instruction-tuning in large language models, which is further extended to the multimodal space. Lastly, we illustrate how to build the minimum prototype of multimodal GPT-4 like models with the open-source resource, and review the recently emerged topics.

Learning a discriminative model to distinguish a target from its surrounding distractors is essential to generic visual object tracking. Dynamic target representation adaptation against distractors is challenging due to the limited discriminative capabilities of prevailing trackers. We present a new visual Prompting mechanism for generic Visual Object Tracking (PiVOT) to address this issue. PiVOT proposes a prompt generation network with the pre-trained foundation model CLIP to automatically generate and refine visual prompts, enabling the transfer of foundation model knowledge for tracking. While CLIP offers broad category-level knowledge, the tracker, trained on instance-specific data, excels at recognizing unique object instances. Thus, PiVOT first compiles a visual prompt highlighting potential target locations. To transfer the knowledge of CLIP to the tracker, PiVOT leverages CLIP to refine the visual prompt based on the similarities between candidate objects and the reference templates across potential targets. Once the visual prompt is refined, it can better highlight potential target locations, thereby reducing irrelevant prompt information. With the proposed prompting mechanism, the tracker can generate improved instance-aware feature maps through the guidance of the visual prompt, thus effectively reducing distractors. The proposed method does not involve CLIP during training, thereby keeping the same training complexity and preserving the generalization capability of the pretrained foundation model. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks indicate that PiVOT, using the proposed prompting method can suppress distracting objects and enhance the tracker.

In this paper, we realize automatic visual recognition and direction estimation of pointing. We introduce the first neural pointing understanding method based on two key contributions. The first is the introduction of a first-of-its-kind large-scale dataset for pointing recognition and direction estimation, which we refer to as the DP Dataset. DP Dataset consists of more than 2 million frames of over 33 people pointing in various styles annotated for each frame with pointing timings and 3D directions. The second is DeePoint, a novel deep network model for joint recognition and 3D direction estimation of pointing. DeePoint is a Transformer-based network which fully leverages the spatio-temporal coordination of the body parts, not just the hands. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of DeePoint. We believe DP Dataset and DeePoint will serve as a sound foundation for visual human intention understanding.

Though tremendous strides have been made in uncontrolled face detection, accurate and efficient face localisation in the wild remains an open challenge. This paper presents a robust single-stage face detector, named RetinaFace, which performs pixel-wise face localisation on various scales of faces by taking advantages of joint extra-supervised and self-supervised multi-task learning. Specifically, We make contributions in the following five aspects: (1) We manually annotate five facial landmarks on the WIDER FACE dataset and observe significant improvement in hard face detection with the assistance of this extra supervision signal. (2) We further add a self-supervised mesh decoder branch for predicting a pixel-wise 3D shape face information in parallel with the existing supervised branches. (3) On the WIDER FACE hard test set, RetinaFace outperforms the state of the art average precision (AP) by 1.1% (achieving AP equal to 91.4%). (4) On the IJB-C test set, RetinaFace enables state of the art methods (ArcFace) to improve their results in face verification (TAR=89.59% for FAR=1e-6). (5) By employing light-weight backbone networks, RetinaFace can run real-time on a single CPU core for a VGA-resolution image. Extra annotations and code have been made available at: https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/RetinaFace.

In this work, we propose a Multi-Window Masked Autoencoder (MW-MAE) fitted with a novel Multi-Window Multi-Head Attention (MW-MHA) module that facilitates the modelling of local-global interactions in every decoder transformer block through attention heads of several distinct local and global windows. Empirical results on ten downstream audio tasks show that MW-MAEs consistently outperform standard MAEs in overall performance and learn better general-purpose audio representations, along with demonstrating considerably better scaling characteristics. Investigating attention distances and entropies reveals that MW-MAE encoders learn heads with broader local and global attention. Analyzing attention head feature representations through Projection Weighted Canonical Correlation Analysis (PWCCA) shows that attention heads with the same window sizes across the decoder layers of the MW-MAE learn correlated feature representations which enables each block to independently capture local and global information, leading to a decoupled decoder feature hierarchy. Code for feature extraction and downstream experiments along with pre-trained models will be released publically.

The class activation mapping, or CAM, has been the cornerstone of feature attribution methods for multiple vision tasks. Its simplicity and effectiveness have led to wide applications in the explanation of visual predictions and weakly-supervised localization tasks. However, CAM has its own shortcomings. The computation of attribution maps relies on ad-hoc calibration steps that are not part of the training computational graph, making it difficult for us to understand the real meaning of the attribution values. In this paper, we improve CAM by explicitly incorporating a latent variable encoding the location of the cue for recognition in the formulation, thereby subsuming the attribution map into the training computational graph. The resulting model, class activation latent mapping, or CALM, is trained with the expectation-maximization algorithm. Our experiments show that CALM identifies discriminative attributes for image classifiers more accurately than CAM and other visual attribution baselines. CALM also shows performance improvements over prior arts on the weakly-supervised object localization benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/calm.

Cross Attention is a popular method for retrieving information from a set of context tokens for making predictions. At inference time, for each prediction, Cross Attention scans the full set of O(N) tokens. In practice, however, often only a small subset of tokens are required for good performance. Methods such as Perceiver IO are cheap at inference as they distill the information to a smaller-sized set of latent tokens L < N on which cross attention is then applied, resulting in only O(L) complexity. However, in practice, as the number of input tokens and the amount of information to distill increases, the number of latent tokens needed also increases significantly. In this work, we propose Tree Cross Attention (TCA) - a module based on Cross Attention that only retrieves information from a logarithmic O(log(N)) number of tokens for performing inference. TCA organizes the data in a tree structure and performs a tree search at inference time to retrieve the relevant tokens for prediction. Leveraging TCA, we introduce ReTreever, a flexible architecture for token-efficient inference. We show empirically that Tree Cross Attention (TCA) performs comparable to Cross Attention across various classification and uncertainty regression tasks while being significantly more token-efficient. Furthermore, we compare ReTreever against Perceiver IO, showing significant gains while using the same number of tokens for inference.

Mobile UI understanding is important for enabling various interaction tasks such as UI automation and accessibility. Previous mobile UI modeling often depends on the view hierarchy information of a screen, which directly provides the structural data of the UI, with the hope to bypass challenging tasks of visual modeling from screen pixels. However, view hierarchies are not always available, and are often corrupted with missing object descriptions or misaligned structure information. As a result, despite the use of view hierarchies could offer short-term gains, it may ultimately hinder the applicability and performance of the model. In this paper, we propose Spotlight, a vision-only approach for mobile UI understanding. Specifically, we enhance a vision-language model that only takes the screenshot of the UI and a region of interest on the screen -- the focus -- as the input. This general architecture of Spotlight is easily scalable and capable of performing a range of UI modeling tasks. Our experiments show that our model establishes SoTA results on several representative UI tasks and outperforms previous methods that use both screenshots and view hierarchies as inputs. Furthermore, we explore multi-task learning and few-shot prompting capacities of the proposed models, demonstrating promising results in the multi-task learning direction.

With the immense growth of dataset sizes and computing resources in recent years, so-called foundation models have become popular in NLP and vision tasks. In this work, we propose to explore foundation models for the task of keypoint detection on 3D shapes. A unique characteristic of keypoint detection is that it requires semantic and geometric awareness while demanding high localization accuracy. To address this problem, we propose, first, to back-project features from large pre-trained 2D vision models onto 3D shapes and employ them for this task. We show that we obtain robust 3D features that contain rich semantic information and analyze multiple candidate features stemming from different 2D foundation models. Second, we employ a keypoint candidate optimization module which aims to match the average observed distribution of keypoints on the shape and is guided by the back-projected features. The resulting approach achieves a new state of the art for few-shot keypoint detection on the KeyPointNet dataset, almost doubling the performance of the previous best methods.

Action localization networks are often structured as a feature encoder sub-network and a localization sub-network, where the feature encoder learns to transform an input video to features that are useful for the localization sub-network to generate reliable action proposals. While some of the encoded features may be more useful for generating action proposals, prior action localization approaches do not include any attention mechanism that enables the localization sub-network to attend more to the more important features. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mechanism, the Class Semantics-based Attention (CSA), that learns from the temporal distribution of semantics of action classes present in an input video to find the importance scores of the encoded features, which are used to provide attention to the more useful encoded features. We demonstrate on two popular action detection datasets that incorporating our novel attention mechanism provides considerable performance gains on competitive action detection models (e.g., around 6.2% improvement over BMN action detection baseline to obtain 47.5% mAP on the THUMOS-14 dataset), and a new state-of-the-art of 36.25% mAP on the ActivityNet v1.3 dataset. Further, the CSA localization model family which includes BMN-CSA, was part of the second-placed submission at the 2021 ActivityNet action localization challenge. Our attention mechanism outperforms prior self-attention modules such as the squeeze-and-excitation in action detection task. We also observe that our attention mechanism is complementary to such self-attention modules in that performance improvements are seen when both are used together.

Research on 3D Vision-Language Models (3D-VLMs) is gaining increasing attention, which is crucial for developing embodied AI within 3D scenes, such as visual navigation and embodied question answering. Due to the high density of visual features, especially in large 3D scenes, accurately locating task-relevant visual information is challenging. Existing works attempt to segment all objects and consider their features as scene representations. However, these task-agnostic object features include much redundant information and missing details for the task-relevant area. To tackle these problems, we propose LSceneLLM, an adaptive framework that automatically identifies task-relevant areas by leveraging LLM's visual preference for different tasks, followed by a plug-and-play scene magnifier module to capture fine-grained details in focused areas. Specifically, a dense token selector examines the attention map of LLM to identify visual preferences for the instruction input. It then magnifies fine-grained details of the focusing area. An adaptive self-attention module is leveraged to fuse the coarse-grained and selected fine-grained visual information. To comprehensively evaluate the large scene understanding ability of 3D-VLMs, we further introduce a cross-room understanding benchmark, XR-Scene, which contains a series of large scene understanding tasks including XR-QA, XR-EmbodiedPlanning, and XR-SceneCaption. Experiments show that our method surpasses existing methods on both large scene understanding and existing scene understanding benchmarks. Plunging our scene magnifier module into the existing 3D-VLMs also brings significant improvement.

Transformer-based visual trackers have demonstrated significant progress owing to their superior modeling capabilities. However, existing trackers are hampered by low speed, limiting their applicability on devices with limited computational power. To alleviate this problem, we propose HiT, a new family of efficient tracking models that can run at high speed on different devices while retaining high performance. The central idea of HiT is the Bridge Module, which bridges the gap between modern lightweight transformers and the tracking framework. The Bridge Module incorporates the high-level information of deep features into the shallow large-resolution features. In this way, it produces better features for the tracking head. We also propose a novel dual-image position encoding technique that simultaneously encodes the position information of both the search region and template images. The HiT model achieves promising speed with competitive performance. For instance, it runs at 61 frames per second (fps) on the Nvidia Jetson AGX edge device. Furthermore, HiT attains 64.6% AUC on the LaSOT benchmark, surpassing all previous efficient trackers.

Large-scale pre-trained vision models are becoming increasingly prevalent, offering expressive and generalizable visual representations that benefit various downstream tasks. Recent studies on the emergent properties of these models have revealed their high-level geometric understanding, in particular in the context of depth perception. However, it remains unclear how depth perception arises in these models without explicit depth supervision provided during pre-training. To investigate this, we examine whether the monocular depth cues, similar to those used by the human visual system, emerge in these models. We introduce a new benchmark, DepthCues, designed to evaluate depth cue understanding, and present findings across 20 diverse and representative pre-trained vision models. Our analysis shows that human-like depth cues emerge in more recent larger models. We also explore enhancing depth perception in large vision models by fine-tuning on DepthCues, and find that even without dense depth supervision, this improves depth estimation. To support further research, our benchmark and evaluation code will be made publicly available for studying depth perception in vision models.

We design a family of image classification architectures that optimize the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency in a high-speed regime. Our work exploits recent findings in attention-based architectures, which are competitive on highly parallel processing hardware. We revisit principles from the extensive literature on convolutional neural networks to apply them to transformers, in particular activation maps with decreasing resolutions. We also introduce the attention bias, a new way to integrate positional information in vision transformers. As a result, we propose LeVIT: a hybrid neural network for fast inference image classification. We consider different measures of efficiency on different hardware platforms, so as to best reflect a wide range of application scenarios. Our extensive experiments empirically validate our technical choices and show they are suitable to most architectures. Overall, LeViT significantly outperforms existing convnets and vision transformers with respect to the speed/accuracy tradeoff. For example, at 80% ImageNet top-1 accuracy, LeViT is 5 times faster than EfficientNet on CPU. We release the code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LeViT

In self-supervised visual representation learning, a feature extractor is trained on a "pretext task" for which labels can be generated cheaply, without human annotation. A central challenge in this approach is that the feature extractor quickly learns to exploit low-level visual features such as color aberrations or watermarks and then fails to learn useful semantic representations. Much work has gone into identifying such "shortcut" features and hand-designing schemes to reduce their effect. Here, we propose a general framework for mitigating the effect shortcut features. Our key assumption is that those features which are the first to be exploited for solving the pretext task may also be the most vulnerable to an adversary trained to make the task harder. We show that this assumption holds across common pretext tasks and datasets by training a "lens" network to make small image changes that maximally reduce performance in the pretext task. Representations learned with the modified images outperform those learned without in all tested cases. Additionally, the modifications made by the lens reveal how the choice of pretext task and dataset affects the features learned by self-supervision.

Visual recognition has been dominated by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for years. Though recently the prevailing vision transformers (ViTs) have shown great potential of self-attention based models in ImageNet classification, their performance is still inferior to that of the latest SOTA CNNs if no extra data are provided. In this work, we try to close the performance gap and demonstrate that attention-based models are indeed able to outperform CNNs. We find a major factor limiting the performance of ViTs for ImageNet classification is their low efficacy in encoding fine-level features into the token representations. To resolve this, we introduce a novel outlook attention and present a simple and general architecture, termed Vision Outlooker (VOLO). Unlike self-attention that focuses on global dependency modeling at a coarse level, the outlook attention efficiently encodes finer-level features and contexts into tokens, which is shown to be critically beneficial to recognition performance but largely ignored by the self-attention. Experiments show that our VOLO achieves 87.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K classification, which is the first model exceeding 87% accuracy on this competitive benchmark, without using any extra training data In addition, the pre-trained VOLO transfers well to downstream tasks, such as semantic segmentation. We achieve 84.3% mIoU score on the cityscapes validation set and 54.3% on the ADE20K validation set. Code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/volo.

In recent years, concept-based approaches have emerged as some of the most promising explainability methods to help us interpret the decisions of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). These methods seek to discover intelligible visual 'concepts' buried within the complex patterns of ANN activations in two key steps: (1) concept extraction followed by (2) importance estimation. While these two steps are shared across methods, they all differ in their specific implementations. Here, we introduce a unifying theoretical framework that comprehensively defines and clarifies these two steps. This framework offers several advantages as it allows us: (i) to propose new evaluation metrics for comparing different concept extraction approaches; (ii) to leverage modern attribution methods and evaluation metrics to extend and systematically evaluate state-of-the-art concept-based approaches and importance estimation techniques; (iii) to derive theoretical guarantees regarding the optimality of such methods. We further leverage our framework to try to tackle a crucial question in explainability: how to efficiently identify clusters of data points that are classified based on a similar shared strategy. To illustrate these findings and to highlight the main strategies of a model, we introduce a visual representation called the strategic cluster graph. Finally, we present https://serre-lab.github.io/Lens, a dedicated website that offers a complete compilation of these visualizations for all classes of the ImageNet dataset.

Starting with early successes in computer vision tasks, deep learning based techniques have since overtaken state of the art approaches in a multitude of domains. However, it has been demonstrated time and again that these techniques fail to capture semantic context and logical constraints, instead often relying on spurious correlations to arrive at the answer. Since application of deep learning techniques to critical scenarios are dependent on adherence to domain specific constraints, several attempts have been made to address this issue. One limitation holding back a thorough exploration of this area, is a lack of suitable datasets which feature a rich set of rules. In order to address this, we present the ChessVision Dataset, consisting of 200,000+ images of annotated chess games in progress, requiring recreation of the game state from its corresponding image. This is accompanied by a curated set of rules which constrains the set of predictions to "reasonable" game states, and are designed to probe key semantic abilities like localization and enumeration. Alongside standard metrics, additional metrics to measure performance with regards to logical consistency is presented. We analyze several popular and state of the art vision models on this task, and show that, although their performance on standard metrics are laudable, they produce a plethora of incoherent results, indicating that this dataset presents a significant challenge for future works.

We hypothesize that a user's visual history with images reflecting their daily life, offers valuable insights into their interests and preferences, and can be leveraged for personalization. Among the many challenges to achieve this goal, the foremost is the diversity and noises in the visual history, containing images not necessarily related to a recommendation task, not necessarily reflecting the user's interest, or even not necessarily preference-relevant. Existing recommendation systems either rely on task-specific user interaction logs, such as online shopping history for shopping recommendations, or focus on text signals. We propose a novel approach, VisualLens, that extracts, filters, and refines image representations, and leverages these signals for personalization. We created two new benchmarks with task-agnostic visual histories, and show that our method improves over state-of-the-art recommendations by 5-10% on Hit@3, and improves over GPT-4o by 2-5%. Our approach paves the way for personalized recommendations in scenarios where traditional methods fail.

Human trajectory prediction is typically posed as a zero-shot generalization problem: a predictor is learnt on a dataset of human motion in training scenes, and then deployed on unseen test scenes. While this paradigm has yielded tremendous progress, it fundamentally assumes that trends in human behavior within the deployment scene are constant over time. As such, current prediction models are unable to adapt to scene-specific transient human behaviors, such as crowds temporarily gathering to see buskers, pedestrians hurrying through the rain and avoiding puddles, or a protest breaking out. We formalize the problem of scene-specific adaptive trajectory prediction and propose a new adaptation approach inspired by prompt tuning called latent corridors. By augmenting the input of any pre-trained human trajectory predictor with learnable image prompts, the predictor can improve in the deployment scene by inferring trends from extremely small amounts of new data (e.g., 2 humans observed for 30 seconds). With less than 0.1% additional model parameters, we see up to 23.9% ADE improvement in MOTSynth simulated data and 16.4% ADE in MOT and Wildtrack real pedestrian data. Qualitatively, we observe that latent corridors imbue predictors with an awareness of scene geometry and scene-specific human behaviors that non-adaptive predictors struggle to capture. The project website can be found at https://neerja.me/atp_latent_corridors/.

Generative Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) like LLaVA and Qwen-VL excel at a wide variety of vision-language (VL) tasks such as image captioning or visual question answering. Despite strong performance, LMMs are not directly suited for foundational discriminative vision-language tasks (i.e., tasks requiring discrete label predictions) such as image classification and multiple-choice VQA. One key challenge in utilizing LMMs for discriminative tasks is the extraction of useful features from generative models. To overcome this issue, we propose an approach for finding features in the model's latent space to more effectively leverage LMMs for discriminative tasks. Toward this end, we present Sparse Attention Vectors (SAVs) -- a finetuning-free method that leverages sparse attention head activations (fewer than 1\% of the heads) in LMMs as strong features for VL tasks. With only few-shot examples, SAVs demonstrate state-of-the-art performance compared to a variety of few-shot and finetuned baselines on a collection of discriminative tasks. Our experiments also imply that SAVs can scale in performance with additional examples and generalize to similar tasks, establishing SAVs as both effective and robust multimodal feature representations.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have witnessed significant progress on visual understanding tasks. However, they often prioritize language knowledge over image information on visual reasoning tasks, incurring performance degradation. To tackle this issue, we first identify the drawbacks of existing solutions (i.e., insufficient and irrelevant visual descriptions, and limited multi-modal capacities). We then decompose visual reasoning process into two stages: visual perception (i.e., eyesight) and textual reasoning (i.e., wisdom), and introduce a novel visual reasoning framework named ProReason. This framework features multi-run proactive perception and decoupled vision-reasoning capabilities. Briefly, given a multi-modal question, ProReason iterates proactive information collection and reasoning until the answer can be concluded with necessary and sufficient visual descriptions. Notably, the disassociation of capabilities allows seamless integration of existing large language models (LLMs) to compensate for the reasoning deficits of LVLMs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ProReason outperforms both existing multi-step reasoning frameworks and passive peer methods on a wide range of benchmarks for both open-source and closed-source models. In addition, with the assistance of LLMs, ProReason achieves a performance improvement of up to 15% on MMMU benchmark. Our insights into existing solutions and the decoupled perspective for feasible integration of LLMs illuminate future research on visual reasoning techniques, especially LLM-assisted ones.

Different types of user interfaces differ significantly in the number of elements and how they are displayed. To examine how such differences affect the way users look at UIs, we collected and analyzed a large eye-tracking-based dataset, UEyes (62 participants, 1,980 UI screenshots, near 20K eye movement sequences), covering four major UI types: webpage, desktop UI, mobile UI, and poster. Furthermore, we analyze and discuss the differences in important factors, such as color, location, and gaze direction across UI types, individual viewing strategies and potential future directions. This position paper is a derivative of our recent paper with a particular focus on the UEyes dataset.

The favorable performance of Vision Transformers (ViTs) is often attributed to the multi-head self-attention (MSA). The MSA enables global interactions at each layer of a ViT model, which is a contrasting feature against Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that gradually increase the range of interaction across multiple layers. We study the role of the density of the attention. Our preliminary analyses suggest that the spatial interactions of attention maps are close to dense interactions rather than sparse ones. This is a curious phenomenon, as dense attention maps are harder for the model to learn due to steeper softmax gradients around them. We interpret this as a strong preference for ViT models to include dense interaction. We thus manually insert the uniform attention to each layer of ViT models to supply the much needed dense interactions. We call this method Context Broadcasting, CB. We observe that the inclusion of CB reduces the degree of density in the original attention maps and increases both the capacity and generalizability of the ViT models. CB incurs negligible costs: 1 line in your model code, no additional parameters, and minimal extra operations.

The problem of predicting driver attention from the driving perspective is gaining increasing research focus due to its remarkable significance for autonomous driving and assisted driving systems. The driving experience is extremely important for safe driving,a skilled driver is able to effortlessly predict oncoming danger (before it becomes salient) based on the driving experience and quickly pay attention to the corresponding zones.However, the nonobjective driving experience is difficult to model, so a mechanism simulating the driver experience accumulation procedure is absent in existing methods, and the current methods usually follow the technique line of saliency prediction methods to predict driver attention. In this paper, we propose a FeedBack Loop Network (FBLNet), which attempts to model the driving experience accumulation procedure. By over-and-over iterations, FBLNet generates the incremental knowledge that carries rich historically-accumulative and long-term temporal information. The incremental knowledge in our model is like the driving experience of humans. Under the guidance of the incremental knowledge, our model fuses the CNN feature and Transformer feature that are extracted from the input image to predict driver attention. Our model exhibits a solid advantage over existing methods, achieving an outstanding performance improvement on two driver attention benchmark datasets.

Graph Attention Networks (GATs) are one of the most popular GNN architectures and are considered as the state-of-the-art architecture for representation learning with graphs. In GAT, every node attends to its neighbors given its own representation as the query. However, in this paper we show that GAT computes a very limited kind of attention: the ranking of the attention scores is unconditioned on the query node. We formally define this restricted kind of attention as static attention and distinguish it from a strictly more expressive dynamic attention. Because GATs use a static attention mechanism, there are simple graph problems that GAT cannot express: in a controlled problem, we show that static attention hinders GAT from even fitting the training data. To remove this limitation, we introduce a simple fix by modifying the order of operations and propose GATv2: a dynamic graph attention variant that is strictly more expressive than GAT. We perform an extensive evaluation and show that GATv2 outperforms GAT across 11 OGB and other benchmarks while we match their parametric costs. Our code is available at https://github.com/tech-srl/how_attentive_are_gats . GATv2 is available as part of the PyTorch Geometric library, the Deep Graph Library, and the TensorFlow GNN library.

Pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, working with manually designed prompts have demonstrated great capacity of transfer learning. Recently, learnable prompts achieve state-of-the-art performance, which however are prone to overfit to seen classes, failing to generalize to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Prompt Tuning (KAPT) framework for vision-language models. Our approach takes inspiration from human intelligence in which external knowledge is usually incorporated into recognizing novel categories of objects. Specifically, we design two complementary types of knowledge-aware prompts for the text encoder to leverage the distinctive characteristics of category-related external knowledge. The discrete prompt extracts the key information from descriptions of an object category, and the learned continuous prompt captures overall contexts. We further design an adaptation head for the visual encoder to aggregate salient attentive visual cues, which establishes discriminative and task-aware visual representations. We conduct extensive experiments on 11 widely-used benchmark datasets and the results verify the effectiveness in few-shot image classification, especially in generalizing to unseen categories. Compared with the state-of-the-art CoCoOp method, KAPT exhibits favorable performance and achieves an absolute gain of 3.22% on new classes and 2.57% in terms of harmonic mean.

For a long time, the most common paradigm in Multi-Object Tracking was tracking-by-detection (TbD), where objects are first detected and then associated over video frames. For association, most models resourced to motion and appearance cues, e.g., re-identification networks. Recent approaches based on attention propose to learn the cues in a data-driven manner, showing impressive results. In this paper, we ask ourselves whether simple good old TbD methods are also capable of achieving the performance of end-to-end models. To this end, we propose two key ingredients that allow a standard re-identification network to excel at appearance-based tracking. We extensively analyse its failure cases, and show that a combination of our appearance features with a simple motion model leads to strong tracking results. Our tracker generalizes to four public datasets, namely MOT17, MOT20, BDD100k, and DanceTrack, achieving state-of-the-art performance. https://github.com/dvl-tum/GHOST.

What is the best paradigm to recognize objects -- discriminative inference (fast but potentially prone to shortcut learning) or using a generative model (slow but potentially more robust)? We build on recent advances in generative modeling that turn text-to-image models into classifiers. This allows us to study their behavior and to compare them against discriminative models and human psychophysical data. We report four intriguing emergent properties of generative classifiers: they show a record-breaking human-like shape bias (99% for Imagen), near human-level out-of-distribution accuracy, state-of-the-art alignment with human classification errors, and they understand certain perceptual illusions. Our results indicate that while the current dominant paradigm for modeling human object recognition is discriminative inference, zero-shot generative models approximate human object recognition data surprisingly well.

Although attention mechanisms have been applied to a variety of deep learning models and have been shown to improve the prediction performance, it has been reported to be vulnerable to perturbations to the mechanism. To overcome the vulnerability to perturbations in the mechanism, we are inspired by adversarial training (AT), which is a powerful regularization technique for enhancing the robustness of the models. In this paper, we propose a general training technique for natural language processing tasks, including AT for attention (Attention AT) and more interpretable AT for attention (Attention iAT). The proposed techniques improved the prediction performance and the model interpretability by exploiting the mechanisms with AT. In particular, Attention iAT boosts those advantages by introducing adversarial perturbation, which enhances the difference in the attention of the sentences. Evaluation experiments with ten open datasets revealed that AT for attention mechanisms, especially Attention iAT, demonstrated (1) the best performance in nine out of ten tasks and (2) more interpretable attention (i.e., the resulting attention correlated more strongly with gradient-based word importance) for all tasks. Additionally, the proposed techniques are (3) much less dependent on perturbation size in AT. Our code is available at https://github.com/shunk031/attention-meets-perturbation

We present Palm, a solution to the Long-Term Action Anticipation (LTA) task utilizing vision-language and large language models. Given an input video with annotated action periods, the LTA task aims to predict possible future actions. We hypothesize that an optimal solution should capture the interdependency between past and future actions, and be able to infer future actions based on the structure and dependency encoded in the past actions. Large language models have demonstrated remarkable commonsense-based reasoning ability. Inspired by that, Palm chains an image captioning model and a large language model. It predicts future actions based on frame descriptions and action labels extracted from the input videos. Our method outperforms other participants in the EGO4D LTA challenge and achieves the best performance in terms of action prediction. Our code is available at https://github.com/DanDoge/Palm

Early exiting has become a promising approach to improving the inference efficiency of deep networks. By structuring models with multiple classifiers (exits), predictions for ``easy'' samples can be generated at earlier exits, negating the need for executing deeper layers. Current multi-exit networks typically implement linear classifiers at intermediate layers, compelling low-level features to encapsulate high-level semantics. This sub-optimal design invariably undermines the performance of later exits. In this paper, we propose Dynamic Perceiver (Dyn-Perceiver) to decouple the feature extraction procedure and the early classification task with a novel dual-branch architecture. A feature branch serves to extract image features, while a classification branch processes a latent code assigned for classification tasks. Bi-directional cross-attention layers are established to progressively fuse the information of both branches. Early exits are placed exclusively within the classification branch, thus eliminating the need for linear separability in low-level features. Dyn-Perceiver constitutes a versatile and adaptable framework that can be built upon various architectures. Experiments on image classification, action recognition, and object detection demonstrate that our method significantly improves the inference efficiency of different backbones, outperforming numerous competitive approaches across a broad range of computational budgets. Evaluation on both CPU and GPU platforms substantiate the superior practical efficiency of Dyn-Perceiver. Code is available at https://www.github.com/LeapLabTHU/Dynamic_Perceiver.

Motivated by the factorization inherent in the original fast multipole method and the improved fast Gauss transform we introduce a factorable form of attention that operates efficiently in high dimensions. This approach reduces the computational and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in transformers from O(N^2) to O(N). In comparison to previous attempts, our work presents a linearly scaled attention mechanism that maintains the full representation of the attention matrix without compromising on sparsification and incorporates the all-to-all relationship between tokens. We explore the properties of our new attention metric and conduct tests in various standard settings. Results indicate that our attention mechanism has a robust performance and holds significant promise for diverse applications where self-attention is used.

Location determination finds wide applications in daily life. Instead of existing efforts devoted to localizing tourist photos captured by perspective cameras, in this article, we focus on devising person positioning solutions using overhead fisheye cameras. Such solutions are advantageous in large field of view (FOV), low cost, anti-occlusion, and unaggressive work mode (without the necessity of cameras carried by persons). However, related studies are quite scarce, due to the paucity of data. To stimulate research in this exciting area, we present LOAF, the first large-scale overhead fisheye dataset for person detection and localization. LOAF is built with many essential features, e.g., i) the data cover abundant diversities in scenes, human pose, density, and location; ii) it contains currently the largest number of annotated pedestrian, i.e., 457K bounding boxes with groundtruth location information; iii) the body-boxes are labeled as radius-aligned so as to fully address the positioning challenge. To approach localization, we build a fisheye person detection network, which exploits the fisheye distortions by a rotation-equivariant training strategy and predict radius-aligned human boxes end-to-end. Then, the actual locations of the detected persons are calculated by a numerical solution on the fisheye model and camera altitude data. Extensive experiments on LOAF validate the superiority of our fisheye detector w.r.t. previous methods, and show that our whole fisheye positioning solution is able to locate all persons in FOV with an accuracy of 0.5 m, within 0.1 s.

Dramatic progress has been witnessed in basic vision tasks involving low-level perception, such as object recognition, detection, and tracking. Unfortunately, there is still an enormous performance gap between artificial vision systems and human intelligence in terms of higher-level vision problems, especially ones involving reasoning. Earlier attempts in equipping machines with high-level reasoning have hovered around Visual Question Answering (VQA), one typical task associating vision and language understanding. In this work, we propose a new dataset, built in the context of Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and aimed at lifting machine intelligence by associating vision with structural, relational, and analogical reasoning in a hierarchical representation. Unlike previous works in measuring abstract reasoning using RPM, we establish a semantic link between vision and reasoning by providing structure representation. This addition enables a new type of abstract reasoning by jointly operating on the structure representation. Machine reasoning ability using modern computer vision is evaluated in this newly proposed dataset. Additionally, we also provide human performance as a reference. Finally, we show consistent improvement across all models by incorporating a simple neural module that combines visual understanding and structure reasoning.

Conditional diffusion models have shown remarkable success in visual content generation, producing high-quality samples across various domains, largely due to classifier-free guidance (CFG). Recent attempts to extend guidance to unconditional models have relied on heuristic techniques, resulting in suboptimal generation quality and unintended effects. In this work, we propose Smoothed Energy Guidance (SEG), a novel training- and condition-free approach that leverages the energy-based perspective of the self-attention mechanism to enhance image generation. By defining the energy of self-attention, we introduce a method to reduce the curvature of the energy landscape of attention and use the output as the unconditional prediction. Practically, we control the curvature of the energy landscape by adjusting the Gaussian kernel parameter while keeping the guidance scale parameter fixed. Additionally, we present a query blurring method that is equivalent to blurring the entire attention weights without incurring quadratic complexity in the number of tokens. In our experiments, SEG achieves a Pareto improvement in both quality and the reduction of side effects. The code is available at https://github.com/SusungHong/SEG-SDXL.

Controllable person image generation aims to generate a person image conditioned on reference images, allowing precise control over the person's appearance or pose. However, prior methods often distort fine-grained textural details from the reference image, despite achieving high overall image quality. We attribute these distortions to inadequate attention to corresponding regions in the reference image. To address this, we thereby propose learning flow fields in attention (Leffa), which explicitly guides the target query to attend to the correct reference key in the attention layer during training. Specifically, it is realized via a regularization loss on top of the attention map within a diffusion-based baseline. Our extensive experiments show that Leffa achieves state-of-the-art performance in controlling appearance (virtual try-on) and pose (pose transfer), significantly reducing fine-grained detail distortion while maintaining high image quality. Additionally, we show that our loss is model-agnostic and can be used to improve the performance of other diffusion models.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) often rely on easy-to-learn discriminatory features, or cues, that are not necessarily essential to the problem at hand. For example, ducks in an image may be recognized based on their typical background scenery, such as lakes or streams. This phenomenon, also known as shortcut learning, is emerging as a key limitation of the current generation of machine learning models. In this work, we introduce a set of experiments to deepen our understanding of shortcut learning and its implications. We design a training setup with several shortcut cues, named WCST-ML, where each cue is equally conducive to the visual recognition problem at hand. Even under equal opportunities, we observe that (1) certain cues are preferred to others, (2) solutions biased to the easy-to-learn cues tend to converge to relatively flat minima on the loss surface, and (3) the solutions focusing on those preferred cues are far more abundant in the parameter space. We explain the abundance of certain cues via their Kolmogorov (descriptional) complexity: solutions corresponding to Kolmogorov-simple cues are abundant in the parameter space and are thus preferred by DNNs. Our studies are based on the synthetic dataset DSprites and the face dataset UTKFace. In our WCST-ML, we observe that the inborn bias of models leans toward simple cues, such as color and ethnicity. Our findings emphasize the importance of active human intervention to remove the inborn model biases that may cause negative societal impacts.