Natural language BERTs are trained with language corpus in a self-supervised manner. Unlike natural language BERTs, vision language BERTs need paired data to train, which restricts the scale of VL-BERT pretraining. We propose a self-training approach that allows training VL-BERTs from unlabeled image data. The proposed method starts with our unified conditional model -- a vision language BERT model that can perform zero-shot conditional generation. Given different conditions, the unified conditional model can generate captions, dense captions, and even questions. We use the labeled image data to train a teacher model and use the trained model to generate pseudo captions on unlabeled image data. We then combine the labeled data and pseudo labeled data to train a student model. The process is iterated by putting the student model as a new teacher. By using the proposed self-training approach and only 300k unlabeled extra data, we are able to get competitive or even better performances compared to the models of similar model size trained with 3 million extra image data.
Salesforce Research（Salesforce研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Visual dialog is a challenging vision-language task, where a dialog agent needs to answer a series of questions through reasoning on the image content and dialog history. Prior work has mostly focused on various attention mechanisms to model such intricate interactions. By contrast, in this work, we propose VD-BERT, a simple yet effective framework of unified vision-dialog Transformer that leverages the pretrained BERT language models for Visual Dialog tasks. The model is unified in that (1) it captures all the interactions between the image and the multi-turn dialog using a single-stream Tran…
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）
Large-scale pretraining and task-specific fine-tuning is now the standard methodology for many tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. Recently, a multitude of methods have been proposed for pretraining vision and language BERTs to tackle challenges at the intersection of these two key areas of AI. These models can be categorised into either single-stream or dual-stream encoders. We study the differences between these two categories, and show how they can be unified under a single theoretical framework. We then conduct controlled experiments to discern the empirical differenc…
The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）
Accuracy of many visiolinguistic tasks has benefited significantly from the application of vision-and-language(V&L) BERT. However, its application for the task of vision-and-language navigation (VLN) remains limited. One reason for this is the difficulty adapting the BERT architecture to the partially observable Markov decision process present in VLN, requiring history-dependent attention and decision making. In this paper we propose a recurrent BERT model that is time-aware for use in VLN. Specifically, we equip the BERT model with a recurrent function that maintains cross-modal state informa…
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Inception Institute of AI (IIAI)（启元人工智能研究院）
We present a new vision-language (VL) pre-training model dubbed Kaleido-BERT, which introduces a novel kaleido strategy for fashion cross-modality representations from transformers. In contrast to random masking strategy of recent VL models, we design alignment guided masking to jointly focus more on image-text semantic relations. To this end, we carry out five novel tasks, i.e., rotation, jigsaw, camouflage, grey-to-color, and blank-to-color for self-supervised VL pre-training at patches of different scale. Kaleido-BERT is conceptually simple and easy to extend to the existing BERT framework,…
The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Yonsei University（延世大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to find a path to a remote location on the basis of natural-language instructions and a set of photo-realistic panoramas. Most existing methods take the words in the instructions and the discrete views of each panorama as the minimal unit of encoding. However, this requires a model to match different nouns (e.g., TV, table) against the same input view feature. In this work, we propose an object-informed sequential BERT to encode visual perceptions and linguistic instructions at the same fine-grained level, namely objects and words. Our seq…
Vision-and-language(V&L) models take image and text as input and learn to capture the associations between them. Prior studies show that pre-trained V&L models can significantly improve the model performance for downstream tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). However, V&L models are less effective when applied in the medical domain (e.g., on X-ray images and clinical notes) due to the domain gap. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of applying pre-trained V&L models in medical applications. In particular, we identify that the visual representation in general V&L models is no…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
We propose bootstrapped masked autoencoders (BootMAE), a new approach for vision BERT pretraining. BootMAE improves the original masked autoencoders (MAE) with two core designs: 1) momentum encoder that provides online feature as extra BERT prediction targets; 2) target-aware decoder that tries to reduce the pressure on the encoder to memorize target-specific information in BERT pretraining. The first design is motivated by the observation that using a pretrained MAE to extract the features as the BERT prediction target for masked tokens can achieve better pretraining performance. Therefore, w…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）
We present ViLBERT (short for Vision-and-Language BERT), a model for learning task-agnostic joint representations of image content and natural language. We extend the popular BERT architecture to a multi-modal two-stream model, pro-cessing both visual and textual inputs in separate streams that interact through co-attentional transformer layers. We pretrain our model through two proxy tasks on the large, automatically collected Conceptual Captions dataset and then transfer it to multiple established vision-and-language tasks -- visual question answering, visual commonsense reasoning, referring…
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing (Sun Yat-sen University), Ministry of Education（机器智能与先进计算教育部重点实验室（中山大学））；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
BERT-type structure has led to the revolution of vision-language pre-training and the achievement of state-of-the-art results on numerous vision-language downstream tasks. Existing solutions dominantly capitalize on the multi-modal inputs with mask tokens to trigger mask-based proxy pre-training tasks (e.g., masked language modeling and masked object/frame prediction). In this work, we argue that such masked inputs would inevitably introduce noise for cross-modal matching proxy task, and thus leave the inherent vision-language association under-explored. As an alternative, we derive a particul…
This paper explores a better prediction target for BERT pre-training of vision transformers. We observe that current prediction targets disagree with human perception judgment.This contradiction motivates us to learn a perceptual prediction target. We argue that perceptually similar images should stay close to each other in the prediction target space. We surprisingly find one simple yet effective idea: enforcing perceptual similarity during the dVAE training. Moreover, we adopt a self-supervised transformer model for deep feature extraction and show that it works well for calculating perceptu…
Humans read and write hundreds of billions of messages every day. Further, due to the availability of large datasets, large computing systems, and better neural network models, natural language processing (NLP) technology has made significant strides in understanding, proofreading, and organizing these messages. Thus, there is a significant opportunity to deploy NLP in myriad applications to help web users, social networks, and businesses. In particular, we consider smartphones and other mobile devices as crucial platforms for deploying NLP models at scale. However, today's highly-accurate NLP…
The advancement of the communication technology and the popularity of the smart phones foster the booming of video ads. Baidu, as one of the leading search engine companies in the world, receives billions of search queries per day. How to pair the video ads with the user search is the core task of Baidu video advertising. Due to the modality gap, the query-to-video retrieval is much more challenging than traditional query-to-document retrieval and image-to-image search. Traditionally, the query-to-video retrieval is tackled by the query-to-title retrieval, which is not reliable when the qualit…
Multimodal target/aspect sentiment classification combines multimodal sentiment analysis and aspect/target sentiment classification. The goal of the task is to combine vision and language to understand the sentiment towards a target entity in a sentence. Twitter is an ideal setting for the task because it is inherently multimodal, highly emotional, and affects real world events. However, multimodal tweets are short and accompanied by complex, possibly irrelevant images. We introduce a two-stream model that translates images in input space using an object-aware transformer followed by a single-…
NAU-QMUL: Utilizing BERT and CLIP for Multi-modal AI-Generated Image Detection
School of Accounting, Nanjing Audit University (NAU), Nanjing, Jiangsu, China（会计学院，南京审计大学（NAU））；School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), London, UK（电子工程与计算机科学学院，女王玛丽大学（QMUL））
In this paper, we have developed a general-purpose architecture, Vit-Gan, capable of performing most of the image-to-image translation tasks from semantic image segmentation to single image depth perception. This paper is a follow-up paper, an extension of generator-based model [1] in which the obtained results were very promising. This opened the possibility of further improvements with adversarial architecture. We used a unique vision transformers-based generator architecture and Conditional GANs(cGANs) with a Markovian Discriminator (PatchGAN) (https://github.com/YigitGunduc/vit-gan). In th…
KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；Asan Medical Center（峨山医学中心）；University of Ulsan College of Medicine（蔚山大学医学院）
Recently a number of studies demonstrated impressive performance on diverse vision-language multi-modal tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering by extending the BERT architecture with multi-modal pre-training objectives. In this work we explore a broad set of multi-modal representation learning tasks in the medical domain, specifically using radiology images and the unstructured report. We propose Medical Vision Language Learner (MedViLL), which adopts a BERT-based architecture combined with a novel multi-modal attention masking scheme to maximize generalization performanc…
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）
Pretrained vision-and-language BERTs aim to learn representations that combine information from both modalities. We propose a diagnostic method based on cross-modal input ablation to assess the extent to which these models actually integrate cross-modal information. This method involves ablating inputs from one modality, either entirely or selectively based on cross-modal grounding alignments, and evaluating the model prediction performance on the other modality. Model performance is measured by modality-specific tasks that mirror the model pretraining objectives (e.g. masked language modellin…
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical pr…
Multi-modal pretraining for learning high-level multi-modal representation is a further step towards deep learning and artificial intelligence. In this work, we propose a novel model, namely InterBERT (BERT for Interaction), which is the first model of our series of multimodal pretraining methods M6 (MultiModality-to-MultiModality Multitask Mega-transformer). The model owns strong capability of modeling interaction between the information flows of different modalities. The single-stream interaction module is capable of effectively processing information of multiple modalilties, and the two-str…
University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We propose Pixel-BERT to align image pixels with text by deep multi-modal transformers that jointly learn visual and language embedding in a unified end-to-end framework. We aim to build a more accurate and thorough connection between image pixels and language semantics directly from image and sentence pairs instead of using region-based image features as the most recent vision and language tasks. Our Pixel-BERT which aligns semantic connection in pixel and text level solves the limitation of task-specific visual representation for vision and language tasks. It also relieves the cost of boundi…
Masked autoencoders are scalable vision learners, as the title of MAE \cite{he2022masked}, which suggests that self-supervised learning (SSL) in vision might undertake a similar trajectory as in NLP. Specifically, generative pretext tasks with the masked prediction (e.g., BERT) have become a de facto standard SSL practice in NLP. By contrast, early attempts at generative methods in vision have been buried by their discriminative counterparts (like contrastive learning); however, the success of mask image modeling has revived the masking autoencoder (often termed denoising autoencoder in the pa…
Meituan Inc.（美团公司）；Beijing Academy of AI（北京人工智能研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
We propose a conditional positional encoding (CPE) scheme for vision Transformers. Unlike previous fixed or learnable positional encodings, which are pre-defined and independent of input tokens, CPE is dynamically generated and conditioned on the local neighborhood of the input tokens. As a result, CPE can easily generalize to the input sequences that are longer than what the model has ever seen during training. Besides, CPE can keep the desired translation-invariance in the image classification task, resulting in improved performance. We implement CPE with a simple Position Encoding Generator…
A big convergence of model architectures across language, vision, speech, and multimodal is emerging. However, under the same name "Transformers", the above areas use different implementations for better performance, e.g., Post-LayerNorm for BERT, and Pre-LayerNorm for GPT and vision Transformers. We call for the development of Foundation Transformer for true general-purpose modeling, which serves as a go-to architecture for various tasks and modalities with guaranteed training stability. In this work, we introduce a Transformer variant, named Magneto, to fulfill the goal. Specifically, we pro…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Google（谷歌）；Facebook AI Research (FAIR)（Facebook人工智能研究院（FAIR））
Following a navigation instruction such as 'Walk down the stairs and stop at the brown sofa' requires embodied AI agents to ground scene elements referenced via language (e.g. 'stairs') to visual content in the environment (pixels corresponding to 'stairs'). We ask the following question -- can we leverage abundant 'disembodied' web-scraped vision-and-language corpora (e.g. Conceptual Captions) to learn visual groundings (what do 'stairs' look like?) that improve performance on a relatively data-starved embodied perception task (Vision-and-Language Navigation)? Specifically, we develop VLN-BER…
Mixture of Cluster-conditional LoRA Experts for Vision-language Instruction Tuning
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）
The visual dialog task attempts to train an agent to answer multi-turn questions given an image, which requires the deep understanding of interactions between the image and dialog history. Existing researches tend to employ the modality-specific modules to model the interactions, which might be troublesome to use. To fill in this gap, we propose a unified framework for image-text joint embedding, named VU-BERT, and apply patch projection to obtain vision embedding firstly in visual dialog tasks to simplify the model. The model is trained over two tasks: masked language modeling and next uttera…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
We introduce a self-supervised vision representation model BEiT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder representation from Image Transformers. Following BERT developed in the natural language processing area, we propose a masked image modeling task to pretrain vision Transformers. Specifically, each image has two views in our pre-training, i.e, image patches (such as 16x16 pixels), and visual tokens (i.e., discrete tokens). We first "tokenize" the original image into visual tokens. Then we randomly mask some image patches and fed them into the backbone Transformer. The pre-training objective …
Images in the medical domain are fundamentally different from the general domain images. Consequently, it is infeasible to directly employ general domain Visual Question Answering (VQA) models for the medical domain. Additionally, medical images annotation is a costly and time-consuming process. To overcome these limitations, we propose a solution inspired by self-supervised pretraining of Transformer-style architectures for NLP, Vision and Language tasks. Our method involves learning richer medical image and text semantic representations using Masked Language Modeling (MLM) with image feature…
Accelerating Conditional Prompt Learning via Masked Image Modeling for Vision-Language Models
Convergence Research Institute, Sungkyunkwan University（convergence research institute, 首尔大学）；School of Information Technology, Deakin University（信息科技学院, 德金大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University（电气与计算机工程系, 首尔大学）
Emotion recognition has become a major problem in computer vision in recent years that made a lot of effort by researchers to overcome the difficulties in this task. In the field of affective computing, emotion recognition has a wide range of applications, such as healthcare, robotics, human-computer interaction. Due to its practical importance for other tasks, many techniques and approaches have been investigated for different problems and various data sources. Nevertheless, comprehensive fusion of the audio-visual and language modalities to get the benefits from them is still a problem to so…
Shouldn't language and vision features be treated equally in vision-language (VL) tasks? Many VL approaches treat the language component as an afterthought, using simple language models that are either built upon fixed word embeddings trained on text-only data or are learned from scratch. We believe that language features deserve more attention, and conduct experiments which compare different word embeddings, language models, and embedding augmentation steps on five common VL tasks: image-sentence retrieval, image captioning, visual question answering, phrase grounding, and text-to-clip retrie…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
Decoding visual stimuli from brain recordings aims to deepen our understanding of the human visual system and build a solid foundation for bridging human and computer vision through the Brain-Computer Interface. However, reconstructing high-quality images with correct semantics from brain recordings is a challenging problem due to the complex underlying representations of brain signals and the scarcity of data annotations. In this work, we present MinD-Vis: Sparse Masked Brain Modeling with Double-Conditioned Latent Diffusion Model for Human Vision Decoding. Firstly, we learn an effective self…
A number of results have recently demonstrated the benefits of incorporating various constraints when training deep architectures in vision and machine learning. The advantages range from guarantees for statistical generalization to better accuracy to compression. But support for general constraints within widely used libraries remains scarce and their broader deployment within many applications that can benefit from them remains under-explored. Part of the reason is that Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), the workhorse for training deep neural networks, does not natively deal with constraints…
CoDoL: Conditional Domain Prompt Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization
East China Normal University（东华师范大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；The University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Aligning image and text encoders from scratch using contrastive learning requires large amounts of paired image-text data. We alleviate this need by aligning individually pre-trained language and vision representation models using a much smaller amount of paired data, augmented with a curriculum learning algorithm to learn fine-grained vision-language alignments. TOnICS (Training with Ontology-Informed Contrastive Sampling) initially samples minibatches whose image-text pairs contain a wide variety of objects to learn object-level alignment, and progressively samples minibatches where all imag…
A Closer Look at Conditional Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models
Southwest Jiaotong University（西南交通大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；University of Trento（特伦特大学）
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Samsung AI Center（三星人工智能中心）
Multilabel conditional image generation is a challenging problem in computer vision. In this work we propose Multi-ingredient Pizza Generator (MPG), a conditional Generative Neural Network (GAN) framework for synthesizing multilabel images. We design MPG based on a state-of-the-art GAN structure called StyleGAN2, in which we develop a new conditioning technique by enforcing intermediate feature maps to learn scalewise label information. Because of the complex nature of the multilabel image generation problem, we also regularize synthetic image by predicting the corresponding ingredients as wel…
Vision Transformer (ViT) is becoming more popular in image processing. Specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of test-time adaptation (TTA) on ViT, a technique that has emerged to correct its prediction during test-time by itself. First, we benchmark various test-time adaptation approaches on ViT-B16 and ViT-L16. It is shown that the TTA is effective on ViT and the prior-convention (sensibly selecting modulation parameters) is not necessary when using proper loss function. Based on the observation, we propose a new test-time adaptation method called class-conditional feature alignment …
We present a new task of query auto-completion for estimating instance probabilities. We complete a user query prefix conditioned upon an image. Given the complete query, we fine tune a BERT embedding for estimating probabilities of a broad set of instances. The resulting instance probabilities are used for selection while being agnostic to the segmentation or attention mechanism. Our results demonstrate that auto-completion using both language and vision performs better than using only language, and that fine tuning a BERT embedding allows to efficiently rank instances in the image. In the sp…
Technical University Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；University of Venice（威尼斯大学）
The unprecedented increase in the usage of computer vision technology in society goes hand in hand with an increased concern in data privacy. In many real-world scenarios like people tracking or action recognition, it is important to be able to process the data while taking careful consideration in protecting people's identity. We propose and develop CIAGAN, a model for image and video anonymization based on conditional generative adversarial networks. Our model is able to remove the identifying characteristics of faces and bodies while producing high-quality images and videos that can be used…
