21 accepted papers
Today's strongest video-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary, and the strongest open-weight models often rely on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs and do not disclose their training data or recipe. As a result, the open-source community lacks the foundations needed to improve on the state-of
Visual grouping--operationalized through tasks such as instance segmentation, visual grounding, and object detection--enables applications ranging from robotic perception to photo editing. These fundamental problems in computer vision are powered by large-scale, painstakingly annotated datasets. Des
Videos are unique in their ability to capture actions which transcend multiple frames. Accordingly, action recognition has long been a quintessential task for video models. Unfortunately, due to a lack of sufficiently diverse and challenging data, modern vision-language models (VLMs) are no longer e
The ability to acknowledge the inevitable uncertainty in their knowledge and reasoning is a prerequisite for AI systems to be truly truthful and reliable. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of uncertainty specific to vision-language AI systems, distinguishing between epistemic uncertainty (arising…
Today's most advanced vision-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed VLMs into open ones. As a result, the community has been missing foundational…
Reasoning over visual relationships--spatial, functional, interactional, social, etc.--are considered to be a fundamental component of human cognition.Yet, despite the major advances in visual comprehension in multimodal language models (MLMs), precise reasoning over relationships remains a challeng…
Our world is full of varied actions and moves in specialized fields that we, as humans, seek to identify and learn about. To evaluate the effectiveness of multi-modal models in helping us recognize such fine-grained actions, we introduce ActionAtlas, a video question answering (VideoQA) benchmark on…
Many applications today provide users with multiple auto-complete drafts as they type, including GitHub's code completion, Gmail's smart compose, and Apple's messaging auto-suggestions. Under the hood, language models support this by running an autoregressive inference pass to provide a draft. Conse…
Language models are capable of commonsense reasoning: while domain-specific models can learn from explicit knowledge (e.g. commonsense graphs [6], ethical norms [25]), and larger models like GPT-3 manifest broad commonsense reasoning capacity. Can their knowledge be extended to multimodal inputs suc…
Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible interface that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion. However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user to “point to" and access specific regions within images. This capabilit…
Recent video-text models can retrieve relevant videos based on text with a high accuracy, but to what extent do they comprehend the semantics of the text? Can they discriminate between similar entities and actions? To answer this, we propose an evaluation framework that probes video-text models with…
"Humans have remarkable capacity to reason abductively and hypothesize about what lies beyond the literal content of an image. By identifying concrete visual clues scattered throughout a scene, we almost can’t help but draw probable inferences beyond the literal scene based on our everyday experienc…
Learning binary representations of instances and classes is a classical problem with several high potential applications. In modern settings, the compression of high-dimensional neural representations to low-dimensional binary codes is a challenging task and often require large bit-codes to be accur…
As humans, we understand events in the visual world contextually, performing multimodal reasoning across time to make inferences about the past, present, and future. We introduce MERLOT, a model that learns multimodal script knowledge by watching millions of YouTube videos with transcribed speech --…
We present an efficient algorithm to compute tight upper bounds of collision probability between two objects with positional uncertainties, whose error distributions are represented with non-Gaussian forms. Our approach can handle noisy datasets from depth sensors, whose distributions may correspond
Standard video and movie description tasks abstract away from person identities, thus failing to link identities across sentences. We propose a multi-sentence Identity-Aware Video Description task, which overcomes this limitation and requires to re-identify persons locally within a set of consecutiv…
Even from a single frame of a still image, people can reason about the dynamic story of the image before, after, and beyond the frame. For example, given an image of a man struggling to stay afloat in water, we can reason that the man fell into the water sometime in the past, the intent of that man…
While significant progress has been made in the image captioning task, video description is still in its infancy due to the complex nature of video data. Generating multi-sentence descriptions for long videos is even more challenging. Among the main issues are the fluency and coherence of the genera…
We present an algorithm for combining natural language processing (NLP) and fast robot motion planning to automatically generate robot movements. Our formulation uses a novel concept called Dynamic Constraint Mapping to transform complex, attribute-based natural language instructions into appropriat…
We present new algorithms to perform fast probabilistic collision queries between convex as well as non-convex objects. Our approach is applicable to general shapes, where one or more objects are represented using Gaussian probability distributions. We present a fast new algorithm for a pair of conv…
We present a motion planning algorithm to compute collision-free and smooth trajectories for high-DOF robots interacting with humans in a shared workspace. Our approach uses offline learning of human actions along with temporal coherence to predict the human actions. Our intention-aware online plan…