We present Language-binding Object Graph Network, the first neural reasoning method with dynamic relational structures across both visual and textual domains with applications in visual question answering. Relaxing the common assumption made by current models that the object predicates pre-exist and stay static, passive to the reasoning process, we propose that these dynamic predicates expand across the domain borders to include pair-wise visual-linguistic object binding. In our method, these contextualized object links are actively found within each recurrent reasoning step without relying on external predicative priors. These dynamic structures reflect the conditional dual-domain object dependency given the evolving context of the reasoning through co-attention. Such discovered dynamic graphs facilitate multi-step knowledge combination and refinements that iteratively deduce the compact representation of the final answer. The effectiveness of this model is demonstrated on image question answering demonstrating favorable performance on major VQA datasets. Our method outperforms other methods in sophisticated question-answering tasks wherein multiple object relations are involved. The graph structure effectively assists the progress of training, and therefore the network learns efficiently compared to other reasoning models.
UCLA Center for Vision, Cognition, Learning and Autonomy（加州大学洛杉矶分校视觉、认知、学习与自主性中心）；International Center for AI and Robot Autonomy (CARA)（人工智能与机器人自主性国际中心（CARA））
Dramatic progress has been witnessed in basic vision tasks involving low-level perception, such as object recognition, detection, and tracking. Unfortunately, there is still an enormous performance gap between artificial vision systems and human intelligence in terms of higher-level vision problems, especially ones involving reasoning. Earlier attempts in equipping machines with high-level reasoning have hovered around Visual Question Answering (VQA), one typical task associating vision and language understanding. In this work, we propose a new dataset, built in the context of Raven's Progress…
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Heuritech（赫瑞泰克公司）；Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers（法国国立工艺学院）
Multimodal attentional networks are currently state-of-the-art models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks involving real images. Although attention allows to focus on the visual content relevant to the question, this simple mechanism is arguably insufficient to model complex reasoning features required for VQA or other high-level tasks. In this paper, we propose MuRel, a multimodal relational network which is learned end-to-end to reason over real images. Our first contribution is the introduction of the MuRel cell, an atomic reasoning primitive representing interactions between question…
HyperVis: Continuous Latent Visual Relational Graphs on the Lorentz Hyperboloid for Compositional Reasoning
Data Science and AI, University of Doha for Science and Technology, Qatar（数据科学与人工智能，多哈科学技术大学，卡塔尔）；Pluralis Research, Australia（Pluralis研究，澳大利亚）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North South University, Bangladesh（电气与计算机工程系，北南大学，孟加拉国）
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Demystifying the interactions among multiple agents from their past trajectories is fundamental to precise and interpretable trajectory prediction. However, previous works only consider pair-wise interactions with limited relational reasoning. To promote more comprehensive interaction modeling for relational reasoning, we propose GroupNet, a multiscale hypergraph neural network, which is novel in terms of both interaction capturing and representation learning. From the aspect of interaction capturing, we propose a trainable multiscale hypergraph to capture both pair-wise and group-wise interac…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）；Facebook AI（脸书人工智能）
Incorporating relational reasoning into neural networks has greatly expanded their capabilities and scope. One defining trait of relational reasoning is that it operates on a set of entities, as opposed to standard vector representations. Existing end-to-end approaches typically extract entities from inputs by directly interpreting the latent feature representations as a set. We show that these approaches do not respect set permutational invariance and thus have fundamental representational limitations. To resolve this limitation, we propose a simple and general network module called a Set Ref…
Incorporating relational reasoning in neural networks for object recognition remains an open problem. Although many attempts have been made for relational reasoning, they generally only consider a single type of relationship. For example, pixel relations through self-attention (e.g., non-local networks), scale relations through feature fusion (e.g., feature pyramid networks), or object relations through graph convolutions (e.g., reasoning-RCNN). Little attention has been given to more generalized frameworks that can reason across these relationships. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical re…
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Boston University（波士顿大学）
Solving grounded language tasks often requires reasoning about relationships between objects in the context of a given task. For example, to answer the question "What color is the mug on the plate?" we must check the color of the specific mug that satisfies the "on" relationship with respect to the plate. Recent work has proposed various methods capable of complex relational reasoning. However, most of their power is in the inference structure, while the scene is represented with simple local appearance features. In this paper, we take an alternate approach and build contextualized representat…
School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学计算机与通信工程学院）；USTB-EEasyTech Joint Lab of Artificial Intelligence, Tencent Technology (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd（北京科技大学-易享科技人工智能联合实验室，腾讯科技（深圳）有限公司）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学人工智能研究院）
Arbitrary shape text detection is a challenging task due to the high variety and complexity of scenes texts. In this paper, we propose a novel unified relational reasoning graph network for arbitrary shape text detection. In our method, an innovative local graph bridges a text proposal model via Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a deep relational reasoning network via Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), making our network end-to-end trainable. To be concrete, every text instance will be divided into a series of small rectangular components, and the geometry attributes (e.g., height, width,…
Temporal relational reasoning, the ability to link meaningful transformations of objects or entities over time, is a fundamental property of intelligent species. In this paper, we introduce an effective and interpretable network module, the Temporal Relation Network (TRN), designed to learn and reason about temporal dependencies between video frames at multiple time scales. We evaluate TRN-equipped networks on activity recognition tasks using three recent video datasets - Something-Something, Jester, and Charades - which fundamentally depend on temporal relational reasoning. Our results demons…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
Exploiting relationships among objects has achieved remarkable progress in interpreting images or videos by natural language. Most existing methods resort to first detecting objects and their relationships, and then generating textual descriptions, which heavily depends on pre-trained detectors and leads to performance drop when facing problems of heavy occlusion, tiny-size objects and long-tail in object detection. In addition, the separate procedure of detecting and captioning results in semantic inconsistency between the pre-defined object/relation categories and the target lexical words. W…
Samsung Electronics（三星电子）；Seoul National University（首尔国立大学）
In this paper, we propose the Broadcasting Convolutional Network (BCN) that extracts key object features from the global field of an entire input image and recognizes their relationship with local features. BCN is a simple network module that collects effective spatial features, embeds location information and broadcasts them to the entire feature maps. We further introduce the Multi-Relational Network (multiRN) that improves the existing Relation Network (RN) by utilizing the BCN module. In pixel-based relation reasoning problems, with the help of BCN, multiRN extends the concept of `pairwise…
Transfer learning has become the de facto standard in computer vision and natural language processing, especially where labeled data is scarce. Accuracy can be significantly improved by using pre-trained models and subsequent fine-tuning. In visual reasoning tasks, such as image question answering, transfer learning is more complex. In addition to transferring the capability to recognize visual features, we also expect to transfer the system's ability to reason. Moreover, for video data, temporal reasoning adds another dimension. In this work, we formalize these unique aspects of transfer lear…
Reasoning about visual relationships is central to how humans interpret the visual world. This task remains challenging for current deep learning algorithms since it requires addressing three key technical problems jointly: 1) identifying object entities and their properties, 2) inferring semantic relations between pairs of entities, and 3) generalizing to novel object-relation combinations, i.e., systematic generalization. In this work, we use vision transformers (ViTs) as our base model for visual reasoning and make better use of concepts defined as object entities and their relations to imp…
TRCoRSurg: Temporal-Relational Co-Reasoning for Surgical Video Triplet Recognition
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院）；Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology（深圳理工大学）
Generalization of CNNs on Relational Reasoning with Bar Charts
School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University（山东大学计算机科学与技术学院）；State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University（浙江大学CAD&CG国家重点实验室）；School of Information, Renmin University of China（中国人民大学信息学院）；College of Science and Mathematics, University of Massachusetts Boston（马萨诸塞大学波士顿分校科学与数学学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University（哈佛大学工程与应用科学学院）
UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；MIT BCS, CBMM, CSAIL（麻省理工学院脑与认知科学系、心智/大脑/机器研究中心、计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；MIT CSAIL（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（麻省理工学院-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）
A critical aspect of human visual perception is the ability to parse visual scenes into individual objects and further into object parts, forming part-whole hierarchies. Such composite structures could induce a rich set of semantic concepts and relations, thus playing an important role in the interpretation and organization of visual signals as well as for the generalization of visual perception and reasoning. However, existing visual reasoning benchmarks mostly focus on objects rather than parts. Visual reasoning based on the full part-whole hierarchy is much more challenging than object-cent…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
While the modeling of pair-wise relations has been widely studied in multi-agent interacting systems, its ability to capture higher-level and larger-scale group-wise activities is limited. In this paper, we propose a group-aware relational reasoning approach (named EvolveHypergraph) with explicit inference of the underlying dynamically evolving relational structures, and we demonstrate its effectiveness for multi-agent trajectory prediction. In addition to the edges between a pair of nodes (i.e., agents), we propose to infer hyperedges that adaptively connect multiple nodes to enable group-awa…
Unraveling the geometry of visual relational reasoning
Program in Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School（神经科学项目，哈佛医学院）；Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School（波士顿儿童医院，哈佛医学院）；Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines（大脑、心智与机器中心）；Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University（埃德蒙与莉莉·萨弗脑科学中心，希伯来大学）
Honda Research Institute, USA（本田美国研究所）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Multi-agent interacting systems are prevalent in the world, from pure physical systems to complicated social dynamic systems. In many applications, effective understanding of the situation and accurate trajectory prediction of interactive agents play a significant role in downstream tasks, such as decision making and planning. In this paper, we propose a generic trajectory forecasting framework (named EvolveGraph) with explicit relational structure recognition and prediction via latent interaction graphs among multiple heterogeneous, interactive agents. Considering the uncertainty of future be…
Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Hunan University（湖南大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；City University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Research Institute（香港城市大学深圳研究院）
Salient object detection (SOD) for optical remote sensing images (RSIs) aims at locating and extracting visually distinctive objects/regions from the optical RSIs. Despite some saliency models were proposed to solve the intrinsic problem of optical RSIs (such as complex background and scale-variant objects), the accuracy and completeness are still unsatisfactory. To this end, we propose a relational reasoning network with parallel multi-scale attention for SOD in optical RSIs in this paper. The relational reasoning module that integrates the spatial and the channel dimensions is designed to in…
School of Computer and Information Technology at Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学计算机与信息技术学院）
With the aim of matching a pair of instances from two different modalities, cross modality mapping has attracted growing attention in the computer vision community. Existing methods usually formulate the mapping function as the similarity measure between the pair of instance features, which are embedded to a common space. However, we observe that the relationships among the instances within a single modality (intra relations) and those between the pair of heterogeneous instances (inter relations) are insufficiently explored in previous approaches. Motivated by this, we redefine the mapping fun…
Applied AI Lab, University of Oxford（牛津大学应用人工智能实验室）
The majority of contemporary object-tracking approaches do not model interactions between objects. This contrasts with the fact that objects' paths are not independent: a cyclist might abruptly deviate from a previously planned trajectory in order to avoid colliding with a car. Building upon HART, a neural class-agnostic single-object tracker, we introduce a multi-object tracking method MOHART capable of relational reasoning. Importantly, the entire system, including the understanding of interactions and relations between objects, is class-agnostic and learned simultaneously in an end-to-end f…
Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；Italian Institute of Technology（意大利技术研究院）
Semantic novelty detection aims at discovering unknown categories in the test data. This task is particularly relevant in safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving or healthcare, where it is crucial to recognize unknown objects at deployment time and issue a warning to the user accordingly. Despite the impressive advancements of deep learning research, existing models still need a finetuning stage on the known categories in order to recognize the unknown ones. This could be prohibitive when privacy rules limit data access, or in case of strict memory and computational constraint…
GHR-VQA: Graph-guided Hierarchical Relational Reasoning for Video Question Answering
School of ECE National Technical University of Athens（国家技术大学雅典电子工程学院）；Robotics Institute Athena Research Center（雅典研究中心机器人研究所）；University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学）
Why Relational Graphs Will Save the Next Generation of Vision Foundation Models?
Department of Computer Science, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, College of Science, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran（塔里斯坦大学科学学院计算机科学系）
Multi-Agent Dynamic Relational Reasoning for Social Robot Navigation
University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术院）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the state of the art method for image classification in the last ten years. Despite the fact that they achieve superhuman classification accuracy on many popular datasets, they often perform much worse on more abstract image classification tasks. We will show that these difficult tasks are linked to relational concepts from cognitive psychology and that despite progress over the last few years, such relational reasoning tasks still remain difficult for current neural network architectures. We will review deep learning research that is linked to …
Northeastern University（东北大学）；Baidu Smart Life Group（百度智能生活事业群组）；The University of Auckland（奥克兰大学）
Modeling implicit feature interaction patterns is of significant importance to object detection tasks. However, in the two-stage detectors, due to the excessive use of hand-crafted components, it is very difficult to reason about the implicit relationship of the instance features. To tackle this problem, we analyze three different levels of feature interaction relationships, namely, the dependency relationship between the cropped local features and global features, the feature autocorrelation within the instance, and the cross-correlation relationship between the instances. To this end, we pro…
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学医学院）
In this paper, we present a novel unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method, named Domain Adaptive Relational Reasoning (DARR), to generalize 3D multi-organ segmentation models to medical data collected from different scanners and/or protocols (domains). Our method is inspired by the fact that the spatial relationship between internal structures in medical images is relatively fixed, e.g., a spleen is always located at the tail of a pancreas, which serves as a latent variable to transfer the knowledge shared across multiple domains. We formulate the spatial relationship by solving a jigsaw p…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；Huawei Technology Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）
In this paper, we propose a graph-based kinship reasoning (GKR) network for kinship verification, which aims to effectively perform relational reasoning on the extracted features of an image pair. Unlike most existing methods which mainly focus on how to learn discriminative features, our method considers how to compare and fuse the extracted feature pair to reason about the kin relations. The proposed GKR constructs a star graph called kinship relational graph where each peripheral node represents the information comparison in one feature dimension and the central node is used as a bridge for…
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））
Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) focuses on improving the generalization ability of object detectors via knowledge transfer. Recent advances in DAOD strive to change the emphasis of the adaptation process from global to local in virtue of fine-grained feature alignment methods. However, both the global and local alignment approaches fail to capture the topological relations among different foreground objects as the explicit dependencies and interactions between and within domains are neglected. In this case, only seeking one-vs-one alignment does not necessarily ensure the precise knowl…
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））；RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau（科布伦茨-兰道大学（RPTU））；University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷吉奥-艾米利亚大学）
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Ther-AI, LLC（Ther-AI有限责任公司）；National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), National Institutes of Health (NIH)（美国国立卫生研究院下属国立牙科与颅面研究所）；Boston Children’s Hospital（波士顿儿童医院）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Northwestern University（西北大学）；Sheikh Zyed Children’s Hospital（谢赫·扎耶德儿童医院）；George Washington University（乔治·华盛顿大学）
Purpose: We perform anatomical landmarking for craniomaxillofacial (CMF) bones without explicitly segmenting them. Towards this, we propose a new simple yet efficient deep network architecture, called \textit{relational reasoning network (RRN)}, to accurately learn the local and the global relations among the landmarks in CMF bones; specifically, mandible, maxilla, and nasal bones. Approach: The proposed RRN works in an end-to-end manner, utilizing learned relations of the landmarks based on dense-block units. For a given few landmarks as input, RRN treats the landmarking process similar to a …
ROSE Lab, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学ROSE实验室）；Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Research on group activity recognition mostly leans on the standard two-stream approach (RGB and Optical Flow) as their input features. Few have explored explicit pose information, with none using it directly to reason about the persons interactions. In this paper, we leverage the skeleton information to learn the interactions between the individuals straight from it. With our proposed method GIRN, multiple relationship types are inferred from independent modules, that describe the relations between the body joints pair-by-pair. Additionally to the joints relations, we also experiment with the…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Localizing text instances in natural scenes is regarded as a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Nevertheless, owing to the extremely varied aspect ratios and scales of text instances in real scenes, most conventional text detectors suffer from the sub-text problem that only localizes the fragments of text instance (i.e., sub-texts). In this work, we quantitatively analyze the sub-text problem and present a simple yet effective design, COntrastive RElation (CORE) module, to mitigate that issue. CORE first leverages a vanilla relation block to model the relations among all text proposals …
Explicit Relational Reasoning Network for Scene Text Detection
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）；Tomorrow Advancing Life；School of Computer Science, Xiangtan University（湘潭大学计算机科学学院）；Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and International Communication, Hunan Normal University（湖南师范大学人工智能与国际传播实验室）
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Locating lesions is important in the computer-aided diagnosis of X-ray images. However, box-level annotation is time-consuming and laborious. How to locate lesions accurately with few, or even without careful annotations is an urgent problem. Although several works have approached this problem with weakly-supervised methods, the performance needs to be improved. One obstacle is that general weakly-supervised methods have failed to consider the characteristics of X-ray images, such as the highly-structural attribute. We therefore propose the Cross-chest Graph (CCG), which improves the performan…
Temporal relational modeling in video is essential for human action understanding, such as action recognition and action segmentation. Although Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) have shown promising advantages in relation reasoning on many tasks, it is still a challenge to apply graph convolution networks on long video sequences effectively. The main reason is that large number of nodes (i.e., video frames) makes GCNs hard to capture and model temporal relations in videos. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we introduce an effective GCN module, Dilated Temporal Graph Reasoning Module (DTGR…
ReGraP-LLaVA: Reasoning enabled Graph-based Personalized Large Language and Vision Assistant
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究所）；School of Engineering, Westlake University（西湖大学工程学院）；University of Minnesota – Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
