81 accepted papers
A promising recipe towards intelligent robotic decision-making is the finetuning of pretrained generative control policies, which can summarize offline experience effectively through behavior cloning, with reinforcement learning techniques to adapt them to online experience. In this work we present …
Multi-modal collaborative perception calls for great attention to enhancing the safety of autonomous driving. However, current multi-modal approaches remain a ``local fusion to communication” sequence, which fuses multi-modal data locally and needs high bandwidth to transmit an individual's feature …
Recent advancements in video generation have enabled the development of "world models" capable of simulating potential futures for robotics and planning. However, specifying precise goals for these models remains a challenge; text instructions are often too abstract to capture physical nuances, whil
Reinforcement learning often produces high-frequency oscillatory control signals that undermine the safety and stability required for physical deployment. Explicit action chunking addresses this by predicting fixed-horizon trajectories but increases the policy output dimension to R^hd, leading to op…
Video generative models trained on expert demonstrations have been utilized as performant text-conditioned visual planners for solving robotic tasks. However, generalization to unseen tasks remains a challenge. Whereas improved generalization may be facilitated by leveraging learned prior knowledge…
Recent advances in visual generative models have enabled high-fidelity image editing guided by human instructions. However, these models often struggle with complex instructions involving combinatorial editing operations or inter-step dependencies. This difficulty stems from the limitations of two c
Deploying multiple models within shared GPU clusters is a key strategy to improve resource efficiency in large language model (LLM) serving. Existing multi-LLM serving systems improve GPU utilization at the cost of degraded inference performance, particularly time-to-first-token (TTFT). We attribute…
Video object detection (VOD) of motile cells (e.g., bacteria and sperm) under microscopy is challenging due to motion blur, sporadic out-of-focus, and pose variations. Compared with VOD in generic scenes, the lower contrast and smaller color space of microscopy imaging further introduce feature over
We propose a new task and model for dense video object captioning -- detecting, tracking and captioning trajectories of objects in a video. This task unifies spatial and temporal localization in video, whilst also requiring fine-grained visual understanding that is best described by natural language…
Scaling up autoregressive models in vision has not proven as beneficial as in large language models. In this work, we investigate this scaling problem in the context of text-to-image generation, focusing on two critical factors: whether models use discrete or continuous tokens, and whether tokens ar…
Recent advances in video generation models have sparked interest in world models capable of simulating realistic environments. While navigation has been well-explored, physically meaningful interactions that mimic real-world forces remain largely understudied. In this work, we investigate using phy…
As the quality of large language models has improved, there has been increased interest in using them to model non-linguistic tokens. For example, the Decision Transformer recasts agentic decision making as a sequence modeling problem, using a decoder-only LLM to model the distribution over the disc…
Do we still need to represent objects explicitly in multimodal large language models (MLLMs)? To one extreme, pre-trained encoders convert images into visual tokens, with which objects and spatiotemporal relationships may be implicitly modeled. To the other extreme, image captions by themselves prov…
Large language models continually learn through the accumulation of gradient-based updates, but how individual pieces of new information affect existing knowledge, leading to both beneficial generalization and problematic hallucination, remains poorly understood. We demonstrate that when learning ne…
Advanced interpretation of hyperspectral remote sensing images benefits many precise Earth observation tasks. Recently, visual foundation models have promoted the remote sensing interpretation but concentrating on RGB and multispectral images. Due to the varied hyperspectral channels, existing found…
Robotic steering of magnetic guidewires has shown great potential in accelerating endovascular interventions, enhancing the success rate of time-sensitive surgeries such as stroke treatment. Incomplete state feedback of the guidewire from 2D perspective images and unknown interactions with the surro
Text-Image-to-Video (TI2V) generation aims to generate a video from an image following a text description, which is also referred to as text-guided image animation. Most existing methods struggle to generate videos that align well with the text prompts, particularly when motion is specified. To over…
Motion control is crucial for generating expressive and compelling video content; however, most existing video generation models rely mainly on text prompts for control, which struggle to capture the nuances of dynamic actions and temporal compositions. To this end, we train a video generation model…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly used in autonomous driving (AD) and shows clear advantages. However, most RL-based AD methods overlook policy structure design. An RL policy that only outputs short-timescale vehicle control commands results in fluctuating driving behavior due to fluctuati
Recognizing the physical states of objects and their transformations within videos is crucial for structured video understanding and enabling robust real-world applications, such as robotic manipulation. However, pretrained vision-language models often struggle to capture these nuanced dynamics and…
Video generative models demonstrate great promise in robotics by serving as visual planners or as policy supervisors. When pretrained on internet-scale data, such video models intimately understand alignment with natural language, and can thus facilitate generalization to novel downstream behavior…
Can we better anticipate an actor’s future actions (e.g. mix eggs) by knowing what commonly happens after the current action (e.g. crack eggs)? What if the actor also shares the goal (e.g. make fried rice) with us? The long-term action anticipation (LTA) task aims to predict an actor’s future behavi…
We present a new algorithm for amortized inference in sparse probabilistic graphical models (PGMs), which we call $\Delta$-amortized inference ($\Delta$-AI). Our approach is based on the observation that when the sampling of variables in a PGM is seen as a sequence of actions taken by an agent, spar…
Long-horizon decision-making tasks present significant challenges for LLM-based agents due to the need for extensive planning over multiple steps. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework that decomposes complex tasks into manageable subgoals, utilizing separate LLMs for subgoal prediction…
The most performant spatio-temporal action localisation models use external person proposals and complex external memory banks. We propose a fully end-to-end transformer based model that directly ingests an input video and outputs tubelets -- a sequence of bounding boxes and the action classes at ea…
Large language models have achieved great success in recent years so as their variants in vision. Existing vision-language models can describe images in natural languages answer visual-related questions or perform complex reasoning about the image. However it is yet unclear how localization tasks su…
Effective motion planning in high dimensional spaces is a long-standing open problem in robotics. One class of traditional motion planning algorithms corresponds to potential-based motion planning. An advantage of potential based motion planning is composability -- different motion constraints can e…
As synthetic data becomes higher quality and proliferates on the internet, machine learning models are increasingly trained on a mix of human- and machine-generated data. Despite the successful stories of using synthetic data for representation learning, using synthetic data for generative model tra…
Training an agent to achieve particular goals or perform desired behaviors is often accomplished through reinforcement learning, especially in the absence of expert demonstrations. However, supporting novel goals or behaviors through reinforcement learning requires the ad-hoc design of appropriate…
"What makes good representations for video understanding, such as anticipating future activities, or answering video-conditioned questions? While earlier approaches focus on end-to-end learning directly from video pixels, we propose to revisit text-based representations, such as general-purpose vide…
In this paper, we propose an autonomous information seeking visual question answering framework, AVIS. Our method leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) to dynamically strategize the utilization of external tools and to investigate their outputs via tree search, thereby acquiring the indispensable k…
Modular neural networks without additional training have recently been shown to surpass end-to-end neural networks on challenging vision–language tasks. The latest such methods simultaneously introduce LLM-based code generation to build programs and a number of skill-specific, task-oriented modules…
In real life, success is often contingent upon multiple critical steps that are distant in time from each other and from the final reward. These critical steps are challenging to identify with traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods that rely on the Bellman equation for credit assignment. He…
In real-world applications, deep learning models often run in non-stationary environments where the target data distribution continually shifts over time. There have been numerous domain adaptation (DA) methods in both online and offline modes to improve cross-domain adaptation ability. However, the…
We aim to investigate whether end-to-end learning of visual reasoning can be achieved with general-purpose neural networks, with the help of visual pretraining. A positive result would refute the common belief that explicit visual abstraction (e.g. object detection) is essential for compositional ge…
Decision making via sequence modeling aims to mimic the success of language models, where actions taken by an embodied agent are modeled as tokens to predict. Despite their promising performance, it remains unclear if embodied sequence modeling leads to the emergence of internal representations that…
Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of formulating decision making as supervised learning on offline-collected trajectories. Powerful sequence models, such as GPT or BERT, are often employed to encode the trajectories. However, the benefits of performing sequence modeling on trajectory da…
Current state-of-the-art video models process a video clip as a long sequence of spatio-temporal tokens. However, they do not explicitly model objects, their interactions across the video, and instead process all the tokens in the video. In this paper, we investigate how we can use knowledge of obje…
In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model (REVEAL) that learns to encode world knowledge into a large-scale memory, and to retrieve from it to answer knowledge-intensive queries. REVEAL consists of four key components: the memory, the encoder, the retriever an…
Distributional models learn representations of words from text, but are criticized for their lack of grounding, or the linking of text to the non-linguistic world. Grounded language models have had success in learning to connect concrete categories like nouns and adjectives to the world via images a…
"There has been a recent explosion of large-scale image-text datasets, as images with alt-text captions can be easily obtained online. Obtaining large-scale, high quality data for video in the form of text-video and text-audio pairs however, is more challenging. To close this gap we propose a new vi…
Video understanding requires reasoning at multiple spatiotemporal resolutions -- from short fine-grained motions to events taking place over longer durations. Although transformer architectures have recently advanced the state-of-the-art, they have not explicitly modelled different spatiotemporal re…
"YouTube users looking for instructions for a specific task may spend a long time browsing content trying to find the right video that matches their needs. Creating a visual summary (abridged version of a video) provides viewers with a quick overview and massively reduces search time. In this work,…
Generative flow networks (GFlowNets) are a method for learning a stochastic policy for generating compositional objects, such as graphs or strings, from a given unnormalized density by sequences of actions, where many possible action sequences may lead to the same object. We find previously proposed…
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks. A common approach for building multimodal m…
We focus on contrastive methods for self-supervised video representation learning. A common paradigm in contrastive learning is to construct positive pairs by sampling different data views for the same instance, with different data instances as negatives. These methods implicitly assume a set of rep…
Due to the stochasticity of human behaviors, predicting the future trajectories of road agents is challenging for autonomous driving. Recently, goal-based multi-trajectory prediction methods are proved to be effective, where they first score over-sampled goal candidates and then select a final set f…
Deep learning has advanced from fully connected architectures to structured models organized into components, e.g., the transformer composed of positional elements, modular architectures divided into slots, and graph neural nets made up of nodes. The nature of structured models is that communication…
Linguistic representations derived from text alone have been criticized for their lack of grounding, i.e., connecting words to their meanings in the physical world. Vision-and- Language (VL) models, trained jointly on text and image or video data, have been offered as a response to such criticisms.…
Interaction and navigation defined by natural language instructions in dynamic environments pose significant challenges for neural agents. This paper focuses on addressing two challenges: handling long sequence of subtasks, and understanding complex human instructions. We propose Episodic Transforme…
High Definition (HD) maps are maps with precise definitions of road lanes with rich semantics of the traffic rules. They are critical for several key stages in an autonomous driving system, including motion forecasting and planning. However, there are only a small amount of real-world road topologie…
Learning to model how the world changes as time elapses has proven a challenging problem for the computer vision community. We introduce a self-supervised approach to this problem that solves a multi-modal temporal cycle consistency objective, MMCC, jointly in vision and language. This objective req…
Accurate video understanding involves reasoning about the relationships between actors, objects and their environment, often over long temporal intervals. In this paper, we propose a message passing graph neural network that explicitly models these spatio-temporal relations and can use explicit repr…
We present pure-transformer based models for video classification, drawing upon the recent success of such models in image classification. Our model extracts spatio-temporal tokens from the input video, which are then encoded by a series of transformer layers. In order to handle the long sequences o…
Computational spectral imaging has been striving to capture the spectral information of the dynamic world in the last few decades. In this paper, we propose an interpretable neural network for computational spectral imaging. First, we introduce a novel data-driven prior that can adaptively exploit b…
Autonomous urban driving navigation is still an open problem and has ample room for improvement in unknown complex environments and terrible weather conditions. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework, called IPP-RL, to handle these problems. IPP means an Imitation learning method fusing vis…
The task of retrieving video content relevant to natural language queries plays a critical role in effectively handling internet-scale datasets. Most of the existing methods for this caption-to-video retrieval problem do not fully exploit cross-modal cues present in video. Furthermore, they aggregat…
Is it possible to guess human action from dialogue alone? In this work we investigate the link between spoken words and actions in movies. We note that movie screenplays describe actions, as well as contain the speech of characters and hence can be used to learn this correlation with no additional s…
Predicting the future behavior of moving agents is essential for real world applications. It is challenging as the intent of the agent and the corresponding behavior is unknown and intrinsically multimodal. Our key insight is that for prediction within a moderate time horizon, the future modes can b
Despite the recent advances in video classification, progress in spatio-temporal action recognition has lagged behind. A major contributing factor has been the prohibitive cost of annotating videos frame-by-frame. In this paper, we present a spatio-temporal action recognition model that is trained w…
Behavior prediction in dynamic, multi-agent systems is an important problem in the context of self-driving cars, due to the complex representations and interactions of road components, including moving agents (e.g. pedestrians and vehicles) and road context information (e.g. lanes, traffic lights).…
Contrastive learning between multiple views of the data has recently achieved state of the art performance in the field of self-supervised representation learning. Despite its success, the influence of different view choices has been less studied. In this paper, we use theoretical and empirical anal…
In this paper, we study the task of image retrieval, where the input query is specified in the form of an image plus some text that describes desired modifications to the input image. For example, we may present an image of the Eiffel tower, and ask the system to find images which are visually simil…
Regularization is a fundamental technique to solve an ill-posed optimization problem robustly and is essential to reconstruct compressive hyperspectral images. Various hand-crafted priors have been employed as a regularizer but are often insufficient to handle the wide variety of spectra of natural…
This paper focuses on multi-person action forecasting in videos. More precisely, given a history of H previous frames, the goal is to detect actors and to predict their future actions for the next T frames. Our approach jointly models temporal and spatial interactions among different actors by const…
We present a method which learns to integrate temporal information, from a learned dynamics model, with ambiguous visual information, from a learned vision model, in the context of interacting agents. Our method is based on a graph-structured variational recurrent neural network, which is trained en…
Humans easily recognize object parts and their hierarchical structure by watching how they move; they can then predict how each part moves in the future. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation that simultaneously learns a hierarchical, disentangled object representation and a dynamics model f…
Extracting and predicting object structure and dynamics from videos without supervision is a major challenge in machine learning. To address this challenge, we adopt a keypoint-based image representation and learn a stochastic dynamics model of the keypoints. Future frames are reconstructed from the…
Self-supervised learning has become increasingly important to leverage the abundance of unlabeled data available on platforms like YouTube. Whereas most existing approaches learn low-level representations, we propose a joint visual-linguistic model to learn high-level features without any explicit s…
This paper introduces a video dataset of spatio-temporally localized Atomic Visual Actions (AVA). The AVA dataset densely annotates 80 atomic visual actions in 437 15-minute video clips, where actions are localized in space and time, resulting in 1.59M action labels with multiple labels per person o…
Current state-of-the-art approaches for spatio-temporal action localization rely on detections at the frame level and model temporal context with 3D ConvNets. Here, we go one step further and model spatio-temporal relations to capture the interactions between human actors, relevant objects and scene…
Transferring the knowledge learned from large scale datasets (e.g., ImageNet) via fine-tuning offers an effective solution for domain-specific fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) tasks (e.g., recognizing bird species or car make & model). In such scenarios, data annotation often calls for spec…
Despite the steady progress in video analysis led by the adoption of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the relative improvement has been less drastic as that in 2D static image classification. Three main challenges exist including spatial (image) feature representation, temporal information repr…
Existing image classification datasets used in computer vision tend to have a uniform distribution of images across object categories. In contrast, the natural world is heavily imbalanced, as some species are more abundant and easier to photograph than others. To encourage further progress in challe…
The success of deep learning in vision can be attributed to: (a) models with high capacity; (b) increased computational power; and (c) availability of large-scale labeled data. Since 2012, there have been significant advances in representation capabilities of the models and computational capabilitie…
The goal of this paper is to serve as a guide for selecting a detection architecture that achieves the right speed/memory/accuracy balance for a given application and platform. To this end, we investigate various ways to trade accuracy for speed and memory usage in modern convolutional object detect…
This paper focuses on temporal localization of actions from untrimmed videos. Existing methods typically involve training classifiers for a pre-defined list of actions and applying the classifiers in a sliding window fashion. However, activities in the wild consist of a wide combination of actors, a…
We address the problem of Temporal Action Proposal (TAP) generation. This is an important problem, as fast extraction of semantically important (e.g. human actions) segments from untrimmed videos is an important step for large-scale video analysis. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Temporal…
Rich and dense human labeled datasets are the main enabling factor, among others, for the recent exciting work on vision-language understanding. Many seemingly distinct annotations (e.g., semantic segmentation and visual questions answering (VQA)) are inherently connected in that they reveal differe…
This paper aims to classify and locate objects accurately and efficiently, without using bounding box annotations. It is challenging as objects in the wild could appear at arbitrary locations and in different scales. In this paper, we propose a novel classification architecture ProNet based on convo…
Humans connect language and vision to perceive the world. How to build a similar connection for computers? One possible way is via visual concepts, which are text terms that relate to visually discriminative entities. We propose an automatic visual concept discovery algorithm using parallel text and…