Weicheng Kuo
Weicheng Kuo is a research software engineer in the Robot Vision research team in Brain Robotics at Google Brain. His recent research focuses on deep learning for instance segmentation, semantic segmentation and object detection, with applications in robotics and medicine. In 2019, he received his PhD degree in Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley, advised by Prof. Jitendra Malik. His PhD thesis was focused on brain hemorrhage detection and segmentation.
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We present F-VLM, a simple open-vocabulary object detection method built upon Frozen Vision and Language Models. F-VLM simplifies the current multi-stage training pipeline by eliminating the need for knowledge distillation or detection-tailored pretraining. Surprisingly, we observe that a frozen VLM: 1) retains the locality-sensitive features necessary for detection, and 2) is a strong region classifier. We finetune only the detector head and combine the detector and VLM outputs for each region at inference time. F-VLM shows compelling scaling behavior and achieves +6.5 mask AP improvement over the previous state of the art on novel categories of LVIS open-vocabulary detection benchmark. In addition, we demonstrate very competitive results on COCO open-vocabulary detection benchmark and cross dataset transfer detection, in addition to significant training speed-up and compute savings. Code will be released at https://sites.google.com/corp/view/f-vlm/home.
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Region-Aware Pretraining for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2023)
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We present Region-aware Open-vocabulary Vision Transformers (RO-ViT) – a contrastive image-text pretraining recipe to bridge the gap between image-level pretraining and open-vocabulary object detection. At the pretraining phase, we propose to randomly crop and resize regions of positional embeddings instead of using the whole image positional embeddings. This better matches the use of positional embeddings at region-level in the detection finetuning phase. In addition, we replace the common softmax cross entropy loss in contrastive learning with focal loss to better learn the informative yet difficult examples. Finally, we leverage recent advances in novel object proposals to improve open-vocabulary detection finetuning. We evaluate our full model on the LVIS and COCO open-vocabulary detection benchmarks and zero-shot transfer. RO-ViT achieves a state-of-the-art 32.1 APr on LVIS, surpassing the best existing approach by +5.8 points in addition to competitive zero-shot transfer detection. Surprisingly, RO-ViT improves the image-level representation as well and achieves the state of the art on 9 out of 12 metrics on COCO and Flickr image-text retrieval benchmarks, outperforming competitive approaches with larger models.
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MaMMUT: A Simple Vision-Encoder Text-Decoder Architecture for MultiModal Tasks
Wei Li
Abhijit Ogale
Luowei Zhou
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (2023)
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The development of language models have moved from encoder-decoder to decoder-only designs. In addition, the common knowledge has it that the two most popular multimodal tasks, the generative and contrastive tasks, tend to conflict with one another, are hard to accommodate in one architecture, and further need complex adaptations for downstream tasks. We propose a novel paradigm of training with a decoder-only model for multimodal tasks, which is surprisingly effective in jointly learning of these disparate vision-language tasks. This is done with a simple model, called MaMMUT. It consists of a single vision encoder and a text decoder, and is able to accommodate contrastive and generative learning by a novel two-pass approach on the text decoder. We demonstrate that joint learning of these diverse objectives is simple, effective, and maximizes the weight-sharing of the model across these tasks. Furthermore, the same architecture enables straightforward extensions to open-vocabulary object detection and video-language tasks. The model tackles a diverse range of tasks, while being modest in capacity. Our model achieves the state of the art on image-text and text-image retrieval, video question answering and open-vocabulary detection tasks, outperforming much larger and more extensively trained foundational models. It shows very competitive results on VQA and Video Captioning, especially considering its capacity. Ablations confirm the flexibility and advantages of our approach.
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Dynamic Pre-training of Vision-Language Models
Wei Li
ICLR 2023 Workshop on Multimodal Representation Learning (2023)
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Vision-Language pretraining aims to learn universal cross-modal representations and to create models with broad capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic pretraining resampling for a variety of pretraining tasks. Unlike recent large-scale vision-language approaches, we show that a set of diverse self- and weakly-supervised pretraining tasks dynamically sampled according to task difficulty provides strong performance. Further, the approach is sample-efficient, using much less data and compute to address a range of downstream tasks. We show that a single 330M pretrained model using only smaller and publicly accessible datasets, achieves competitive or SOTA performance on three diverse groups of tasks: visual question answering, text-based image localization by referring expressions, and video question answering.
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PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model
Piotr Padlewski
Daniel Salz
Sebastian Alexander Goodman
Basil Mustafa
Lucas Beyer
Alexander Kolesnikov
Keran Rong
Hassan Akbari
Linting Xue
James Bradbury
Chao Jia
Carlos Riquelme
Xiaohua Zhai
Neil Houlsby
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) (2023)
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Effective scaling and a flexible task interface enable large-capacity language models to excel at many tasks. PaLI (Pathways Language and Image model) extends these ideas to the joint modeling of language and vision. PaLI is a model that generates text based on visual and textual inputs. Using this API, PaLI is able to perform many vision, language, and multimodal tasks, across many languages. We train PaLI with two main principles: reuse of pretrained unimodal components, and joint scaling of modalities. Using large-capacity pretrained language models and vision models allows us to capitalize on their existing capabilities, while leveraging the substantial cost of training them. We scale PaLI models across three axes:the language component, the vision component, and the training data that fuses them. For the vision component, we train the largest and best-performing VisionTransformer (ViT) to date. For the data, we build an image-text training set over10B images and covering over 100 languages.
PaLI inherits and enhances language-understanding capabilities, and achieves state-of-the-art in multiple vision and language tasks (image classification, image captioning, visual question-answering, scene-text understanding, etc.), based on a simple, modular, and reuse-friendly platform for modeling and scaling.
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We present a simple approach which can turn a ViT encoder into an efficient video model, which can seamlessly work with both image and video inputs. By sparsely sampling the inputs, the model is able to do training and inference from both inputs. The model is easily scalable and can be adapted to large-scale pre-trained ViTs without requiring full finetuning. The model achieves SOTA results.
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We present a novel efficient image-language learning model for multi-task visual question answering tasks which works at a fraction of the computational cost. New compact features are learned adaptively to jointly represent the image and language modalities according to the data. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art multi-task approaches on SNLI-VE and GQA, and works competitively on VQA2.0. The model is highly efficient using 7-10 fewer GFLOPs and scales well to more than twice the input
image size.
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FindIt: Generalized Localization with Natural Language Queries
Fred Bertsch
Wei Li
Mohammad Taghi Saffar
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) (2022)
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We propose FindIt, a simple and versatile framework that unifies a variety of visual grounding and localization tasks including referring expression comprehension, text-based localization, and object detection. Key to our architecture is an efficient multi-scale fusion module that unifies the disparate localization requirements across the tasks. In addition, we discover that a standard object detector is surprisingly effective in unifying these tasks without a need for task-specific design, losses, or pre computed detections. Our end-to-end trainable framework responds flexibly and accurately to a wide range of referring expression, localization or detection queries for zero, one, or multiple objects. Jointly trained on these tasks, FindIt outperforms the state of the art on both referring expression and text-based localization, and shows competitive performance on object detection. Finally, FindIt generalizes better to out-of-distribution data and novel categories compared to strong singletask baselines. All of these are accomplished by a single, unified and efficient model
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Video Question Answering with Iterative Video-Text Co-Tokenization
Kairo Morton
Michael Ryoo
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) (2022)
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Video question answering is a challenging task that requires understanding jointly the language input, the visual information in individual video frames, as well as the temporal information about the events occurring in the video. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-stream video encoder for video question answering that uses multiple video inputs and a new video-text iterative co-tokenization approach to answer a variety of questions related to videos. We experimentally evaluate the model on several datasets, such as MSRVTT-QA, MSVD-QA, IVQA, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art by large margins. Simultaneously, our model requires only 67 GFLOPs, producing a highly efficient video question answering model.
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Answer-Me: Multi-Task Open-Vocabulary Learning for Visual Question-Answering
Wei Li
Mohammad Taghi Saffar
Fred Bertsch
CVPR Workshop (2022)
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We present Answer-Me, a task-aware multi-task framework which unifies multiple question answering tasks, such as, visual question answering, visual entailment, visual reasoning. In contrast to previous works using contrastive or generative captioning training, we propose a novel and simple recipe to pretrain a vision-language joint model, which is multi-task as well, and uses the entire architecture end-to-end. Our results, which are in the challenging open-vocabulary generative setting, show state-of-the-art performance, zero-shot generalization, robustness to forgetting.
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