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.
Research Areas
Authored Publications
Google Publications
Other Publications
Sort By
Dynamic Pre-training of Vision-Language Models
Wei Li
ICLR 2023 Workshop on Multimodal Representation Learning (2023)
Preview abstract
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.
View details
PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model
Piotr Padlewski
Daniel Salz
Basil Mustafa
Keran Rong
Hassan Akbari
Linting Xue
James Bradbury
Carlos Riquelme
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) (2023)
Preview abstract
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.
View details
Preview abstract
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.
View details
Preview abstract
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.
View details
Region-Aware Pretraining for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Vision Transformers
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2023)
Preview abstract
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.
View details
MaMMUT: A Simple Vision-Encoder Text-Decoder Architecture for MultiModal Tasks
Wei Li
Abhijit Ogale
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (2023)
Preview abstract
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.
View details
Video Question Answering with Iterative Video-Text Co-Tokenization
Kairo Morton
Michael Ryoo
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) (2022)
Preview abstract
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.
View details
Answer-Me: Multi-Task Open-Vocabulary Learning for Visual Question-Answering
Wei Li
Fred Bertsch
CVPR Workshop (2022)
Preview abstract
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.
View details
Learning Open-World Object Proposals without Learning to Classify
Tsung-Yi Lin
In So Kweon
Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) Journal and International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (2022)
Preview abstract
Object proposals have become an integral preprocessing step of many vision pipelines including objec detection, weakly supervised detection, object discovery, tracking, etc. Compared to the learning-free methods, learning-based proposals have become popular recently due to the growing interest in object detection. The common paradigm is to learn object proposals from data labeled with a set of object regions and their corresponding categories. However, this approach often struggles with novel objects in the open world that are absent in the training set. In this paper, we identify that the problem is that the binary classifiers in existing proposal methods tend to overfit to the training categories. Therefore, we propose a classification-free Object Localization Network (OLN) which estimates the objectness of each region purely by how well the location and shape of a region overlap with any groundtruth object (e.g., centerness and IoU). This strategy learns generalizable objectness and outperforms existing proposals on cross-category generalization on COCO. We further explore more challenging cross-dataset generalization onto RoboNet and EpicKitchens dataset and demonstrate clear improvement
over the state-of-the-art object detectors and object proposers. The code is publicly available.
View details
Preview abstract
We present a pre-training approach for vision and language transformer models, which is based on a mixture of diverse tasks. We explore both the use of image-text captioning data in pre-training, which does not need additional supervision, as well as object-aware strategies to pre-train the model. We evaluate the method on a number of text-generative vision+language tasks, such as Visual Question Answering, visual entailment and captioning, and demonstrate large gains over standard pre-training methods.
View details
FindIt: Generalized Localization with Natural Language Queries
Fred Bertsch
Wei Li
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) (2022)
Preview abstract
We propose FindIt, a simple and versatile framework that unifies a variety of visual grounding and localization tasks including referring expression comprehension, text-based localization, and object detection. Key to our architecture is an efficient multi-scale fusion module that unifies the disparate localization requirements across the tasks. In addition, we discover that a standard object detector is surprisingly effective in unifying these tasks without a need for task-specific design, losses, or pre computed detections. Our end-to-end trainable framework responds flexibly and accurately to a wide range of referring expression, localization or detection queries for zero, one, or multiple objects. Jointly trained on these tasks, FindIt outperforms the state of the art on both referring expression and text-based localization, and shows competitive performance on object detection. Finally, FindIt generalizes better to out-of-distribution data and novel categories compared to strong singletask baselines. All of these are accomplished by a single, unified and efficient model
View details
Preview abstract
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.
View details
Patch2CAD: Patchwise Embedding Learning for In-the-Wild Shape Retrieval from a Single Image
Tsung-Yi Lin
Angela Dai
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (2021)
Preview abstract
3D perception of object shapes from RGB image input is fundamental towards semantic scene understanding, grounding image-based perception in our spatially 3-dimensional real-world environments. To achieve a mapping between image views of objects and 3D shapes, we leverage CAD model priors from existing large-scale databases, and propose a novel approach towards constructing a joint embedding space between 2D images and 3D CAD models in a patch-wise fashion – establishing correspondences between patches of an image view of an object and patches of CAD geometry. This enables part similarity reasoning for retrieving similar CADs to a new image view without exact matches in the database. Our patch embedding provides more robust CAD retrieval for shape estimation in our end-to-end estimation of CAD model shape and pose for detected objects in a single input image. Experiments on in-the-wild, complex imagery from ScanNet show that our approach is more robust than state of the art in real-world scenarios without any exact CAD matches.
View details
Preview abstract
Object recognition has seen significant progress in the image domain, with focus primarily on 2D perception. We propose to leverage existing large-scale datasets of 3D models to understand the underlying 3D structure of objects seen in an image by constructing a CAD-based representation of the objects and their poses. We present Mask2CAD, which jointly detects objects in real-world images and for each detected object, optimizes for the most similar CAD model and its pose. We construct a joint embedding space between the detected regions of an image corresponding to an object and 3D CAD models, enabling retrieval of CAD models for an input RGB image. This produces a clean, lightweight representation of the objects in an image; this CAD-based representation ensures a valid, efficient shape representation for applications such as content creation or interactive scenarios, and makes a step towards understanding the transformation of real-world imagery to a synthetic domain. Experiments on real-world images from Pix3D demonstrate the advantage of our approach in comparison to state of the art. To facilitate future research, we additionally propose a new image-to-3D baseline on ScanNet which features larger shape diversity, real-world occlusions, and challenging image views.
View details
ShapeMask: Learning to Segment Novel Objects by Refining Shape Priors
Jitendra Malik
Tsung-Yi Lin
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) (2019)
Preview abstract
Instance segmentation aims to detect and segment individual objects in a scene. Most existing methods rely on precise mask annotations of every category. However, it is difficult and costly to segment objects in novel categories because a large number of mask annotations is required. We introduce ShapeMask, which learns the intermediate concept of object shape to address the problem of generalization in instance segmentation to novel categories. ShapeMask starts with a bounding box detection and gradually refines it by first estimating the shape of the detected object through a collection of shape priors. Next, ShapeMask refines the coarse shape into an instance level mask by learning instance embeddings. The shape priors provide a strong cue for object-like prediction, and the instance embeddings model the instance specific appearance information. ShapeMask significantly outperforms the state-ofthe-art by 6.4 and 3.8 AP when learning across categories, and obtains competitive performance in the fully supervised setting. It is also robust to inaccurate detections, decreased model capacity, and small training data. Moreover, it runs efficiently with 150ms inference time on a GPU and trains within 11 hours on TPUs. With a larger backbone model, ShapeMask increases the gap with state-of-the-art to 9.4 and 6.2 AP across categories. Code will be publicly available at: https://sites.google.com/view/shapemask/home.
View details
No Results Found
