David A. Ross

David A. Ross

Authored Publications
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    Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation
    Nitesh Bharadwaj Gundavarapu
    Luca Versari
    Kihyuk Sohn
    Agrim Gupta
    Xiuye Gu
    Alex Hauptmann
    Boqing Gong
    Lu Jiang
    ICLR(2024)
    Preview abstract While Large Language Models (LLMs) are the dominant models for generative tasks in language, they do not perform as well as diffusion models on image and video generation. To effectively use LLMs for visual generation, one crucial component is the visual tokenizer that maps pixel-space inputs to discrete tokens appropriate for LLM learning. In this paper, we introduce MAGVIT-v2, a video tokenizer designed to generate concise and expressive tokens for both videos and images using a common token vocabulary. Equipped with this new tokenizer, we show that LLMs outperform diffusion models on standard image and video generation benchmarks including ImageNet and Kinetics. In addition, we demonstrate that our tokenizer surpasses the previously top-performing video tokenizer on two more tasks: (1) video compression comparable to the next-generation video codec (VCC) according to human evaluations, and (2) learning effective representations for action recognition tasks. View details
    VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation
    Dan Kondratyuk
    Xiuye Gu
    Grant Schindler
    Rachel Hornung
    Jimmy Yan
    Ming-Chang Chiu
    Hassan Akbari
    Josh Dillon
    Agrim Gupta
    Meera Hahn
    Anja Hauth
    David Hendon
    Alonso Martinez
    Kihyuk Sohn
    Xuan Yang
    Huisheng Wang
    Lu Jiang
    ICML(2024)
    Preview abstract We present VideoPoet, a language model capable of synthesizing high-quality video, with matching audio, from a large variety of conditioning signals. VideoPoet employs a decoder-only transformer architecture that processes multimodal inputs -- including images, videos, text, and audio. The training protocol follows that of Large Language Models (LLMs), consisting of two stages: pretraining and task-specific adaptation. During pretraining, VideoPoet incorporates a mixture of multimodal generative objectives within an autoregressive Transformer framework. The pretrained LLM serves as a foundation that can be adapted for a range of video generation tasks. We present empirical results demonstrating the model's state-of-the-art capabilities in zero-shot video generation, specifically highlighting VideoPoet's ability to generate high-fidelity motions. Project page: http://sites.research.google/videopoet/ View details
    UnLoc: a unified framework for video localization tasks
    Shen Yan
    Xuehan Xiong
    Anurag Arnab
    Zhonghao Wang
    Weina Ge
    International Conference on Computer Vision(2023)
    Preview abstract We adapt large-scale image-text pretrained models such as CLIP for temporal localization tasks in untrimmed videos, which is still a relatively unexplored task. We do so by designing a new approach called UnLoc, which uses a pretrained image and text tower, and feeds tokens to a video-text fusion model. The output of the fusion module are then used to construct a feature pyramid in which each level connects to a head to predict a per-frame relevancy score and start/end time displacements. Unlike previous works, our architecture enables zero-shot Moment Retrieval, TAL and action segmentation with a single stage model, without the need for action proposals or representation masking. Unlike specialised models, we achieve state of the art results on three different localization tasks with a unified approach - in some cases outperforming previous works by large margins. View details
    Preview abstract In this work, we introduce Semantic Pyramid AutoEncoder (SPAE) for enabling frozen LLMs to perform both understanding and generation tasks involving non-linguistic modalities such as images or videos. SPAE converts between raw pixels and interpretable lexical tokens (or words) extracted from the LLM's vocabulary. The resulting tokens capture both the semantic meaning and the fine-grained details needed for visual reconstruction, effectively translating the visual content into a language comprehensible to the LLM, and empowering it to perform a wide array of multimodal tasks. Our approach is validated through in-context learning experiments with frozen PaLM 2 and GPT 3.5 on a diverse set of image understanding and generation tasks. Our method marks the first successful attempt to enable a frozen LLM to generate image content while surpassing state-of-the-art performance in image understanding tasks, under the same setting, by over 25%. View details
    Preview abstract We present AIST++, a new multi-modal dataset of 3D dance motion and music, along with FACT, a Full-AttentionCross-modal Transformer network for generating 3D dance motion conditioned on music.The proposed AIST++dataset contains 1.1M frames of 3D dance motion in 1408sequences, covering 10 dance genres with multi-view videos with known camera poses—the largest dataset of this kind to our knowledge. We show that naively applying sequence models such as transformers to this dataset for the task of music conditioned 3D motion generation does not produce satisfactory 3D motion that is well correlated with the input music. We overcome these shortcomings by introducing key changes in its architecture design and supervision: FACT model involves a deep cross-modal transformer block with full-attention that is trained to predict N future motions.We empirically show that these changes are key factors in generating long sequences of realistic dance motion that is well-attuned to the input music. We conduct extensive experiments on AIST++ with user studies, where our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. View details
    Preview abstract Semantic segmentation of 3D meshes is an important problem for 3D scene understanding. In this paper we revisit the classic multiview representation of 3D meshes and study several techniques that make them effective for 3D semantic segmentation of meshes. Given a 3D mesh reconstructed from RGBD sensors, our method effectively chooses different virtual views of the 3D mesh and renders multiple 2D channels for training an effective 2D semantic segmentation model. Features from multiple per view predictions are finally fused on 3D mesh vertices to predict mesh semantic segmentation labels. Using the large scale indoor 3D semantic segmentation benchmark of ScanNet, we show that our virtual views enable more effective training of 2D semantic segmentation networks than previous multiview approaches. When the 2D per pixel predictions are aggregated on 3D surfaces, our virtual multiview fusion method is able to achieve significantly better 3D semantic segmentation results compared to all prior multiview approaches and competitive with recent 3D convolution approaches. View details
    Preview abstract Detecting objects in 3D LiDAR data is a core technology for autonomous driving and other robotics applications. Although LiDAR data is acquired over time, most of the 3D object detection algorithms propose object bounding boxes independently for each frame and neglect the useful information available in the temporal domain. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a sparse LSTM-based multi-frame 3d object detection algorithm. We use a U-Net style 3D sparse convolution network to extract features for each frame's LiDAR point-cloud. These features are fed to the LSTM module together with the hidden and memory features from last frame to predict the 3d objects in the current frame as well as hidden and memory features that are passed to the next frame. Experiments on the Waymo Open Dataset show that our algorithm outperforms the traditional frame by frame approach by 7.5% mAP@0.7 and other multi-frame approaches by 1.2% while using less memory and computation per frame. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to use an LSTM for 3D object detection in sparse point clouds. View details
    Preview abstract We present a simple and flexible object detection framework optimized for autonomous driving. Building on the observation that point clouds in this application are extremely sparse, we propose a practical pillar-based approach to fix the imbalance issue caused by anchors. In particular, our algorithm incorporates a cylindrical projection into multi-view feature learning, predicts bounding box parameters per pillar rather than per point or per anchor, and includes an aligned pillar-to-point projection module to improve the final prediction. Our anchor-free approach avoids hyperparameter search associated with past methods, simplifying 3D object detection while significantly improving upon state-of-the-art. View details
    Preview abstract We propose DOPS, a fast single-stage 3D object detection method for LIDAR data. Previous methods often make domain-specific design decisions, for example projecting points into a bird-eye view image in autonomous driving scenarios. In contrast, we propose a general-purpose method that works on both indoor and outdoor scenes. The core novelty of our method is a fast, single-pass architecture that both detects objects in 3D and estimates their shapes. 3D bounding box parameters are estimated in one pass for every point, aggregated through graph convolutions, and fed into a branch of the network that predicts latent codes representing the shape of each detected object. The latent shape space and shape decoder are learned on a synthetic dataset and then used as supervision for the end-toend training of the 3D object detection pipeline. Thus our model is able to extract shapes without access to groundtruth shape information in the target dataset. During experiments, we find that our proposed method achieves stateof-the-art results by ∼5% on object detection in ScanNet scenes, and it gets top results by 3.4% in the Waymo Open Dataset, while reproducing the shapes of detected cars. View details
    Preview abstract Can we guess human action from dialogue alone? In this work we investigate the link between spoken words and actions in movies. We note that movie scripts describe actions, as well as contain the speech of characters and hence can be used to learn this correlation with no additional supervision. We train a speech to action classifier on 1k movie scripts downloaded from IMSDb and show that such a classifier performs well for certain classes, and when applied to the speech segments of a large \textit{unlabelled} movie corpus (288k videos, 188M speech segments), provides weak labels for over 800k video clips. By training on these video clips, we demonstrate superior action recognition performance on standard action recognition benchmarks, without using a single labelled action example. View details