Answer grounding aims to reveal the visual evidence for visual question answering (VQA), which entails highlighting relevant positions in the image when answering questions about images. Previous attempts typically tackle this problem using pretrained object detectors, but without the flexibility for objects not in the predefined vocabulary. However, these black-box methods solely concentrate on the linguistic generation, ignoring the visual interpretability. In this paper, we propose Dual Visual-Linguistic Interaction (DaVI), a novel unified end-to-end framework with the capability for both linguistic answering and visual grounding. DaVI innovatively introduces two visual-linguistic interaction mechanisms: 1) visual-based linguistic encoder that understands questions incorporated with visual features and produces linguistic-oriented evidence for further answer decoding, and 2) linguistic-based visual decoder that focuses visual features on the evidence-related regions for answer grounding. This way, our approach ranked the 1st place in the answer grounding track of 2022 VizWiz Grand Challenge.
University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；Disney Research（迪士尼研究院）
We propose a weakly-supervised approach that takes image-sentence pairs as input and learns to visually ground (i.e., localize) arbitrary linguistic phrases, in the form of spatial attention masks. Specifically, the model is trained with images and their associated image-level captions, without any explicit region-to-phrase correspondence annotations. To this end, we introduce an end-to-end model which learns visual groundings of phrases with two types of carefully designed loss functions. In addition to the standard discriminative loss, which enforces that attended image regions and phrases a…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Visual grounding is a task to locate the target indicated by a natural language expression. Existing methods extend the generic object detection framework to this problem. They base the visual grounding on the features from pre-generated proposals or anchors, and fuse these features with the text embeddings to locate the target mentioned by the text. However, modeling the visual features from these predefined locations may fail to fully exploit the visual context and attribute information in the text query, which limits their performance. In this paper, we propose a transformer-based framework…
School of Data Science（数据科学学院）；Engineering East China Normal University Shanghai, China（工程 东华师范大学 上海中国）；OpenScience Lab Shanghai AI Laboratory Shanghai, China（OpenScience Lab 上海AI实验室 上海中国）；School of Life Science（生命科学学院）；Technology Xi'an Jiaotong University Xi'an, China（技术 西安交通大学 西安中国）；Medical Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Westlake University Hangzhou, China（医学人工智能实验室 西湖大学 杭州中国）
Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute, Deakin University（迪肯大学应用人工智能研究所）
The current success of modern visual reasoning systems is arguably attributed to cross-modality attention mechanisms. However, in deliberative reasoning such as in VQA, attention is unconstrained at each step, and thus may serve as a statistical pooling mechanism rather than a semantic operation intended to select information relevant to inference. This is because at training time, attention is only guided by a very sparse signal (i.e. the answer label) at the end of the inference chain. This causes the cross-modality attention weights to deviate from the desired visual-language bindings. To r…
Tell Model Where to Look: Mitigating Hallucinations in MLLMs by Vision-Guided Attention
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）；Southeast Academy of Information Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学信息科技东南学院）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
Visual grounding is a ubiquitous building block in many vision-language tasks and yet remains challenging due to large variations in visual and linguistic features of grounding entities, strong context effect and the resulting semantic ambiguities. Prior works typically focus on learning representations of individual phrases with limited context information. To address their limitations, this paper proposes a language-guided graph representation to capture the global context of grounding entities and their relations, and develop a cross-modal graph matching strategy for the multiple-phrase vis…
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Recently proposed fine-grained 3D visual grounding is an essential and challenging task, whose goal is to identify the 3D object referred by a natural language sentence from other distractive objects of the same category. Existing works usually adopt dynamic graph networks to indirectly model the intra/inter-modal interactions, making the model difficult to distinguish the referred object from distractors due to the monolithic representations of visual and linguistic contents. In this work, we exploit Transformer for its natural suitability on permutation-invariant 3D point clouds data and pro…
Weakly supervised visual grounding aims to predict the region in an image that corresponds to a specific linguistic query, where the mapping between the target object and query is unknown in the training stage. The state-of-the-art method uses a vision language pre-training model to acquire heatmaps from Grad-CAM, which matches every query word with an image region, and uses the combined heatmap to rank the region proposals. In this paper, we propose two simple but efficient methods for improving this approach. First, we propose a target-aware cropping approach to encourage the model to learn …
Visual referring expression recognition is a challenging task that requires natural language understanding in the context of an image. We critically examine RefCOCOg, a standard benchmark for this task, using a human study and show that 83.7% of test instances do not require reasoning on linguistic structure, i.e., words are enough to identify the target object, the word order doesn't matter. To measure the true progress of existing models, we split the test set into two sets, one which requires reasoning on linguistic structure and the other which doesn't. Additionally, we create an out-of-di…
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. However, while VL pretraining has shown success on multimodal tasks such as visual question answering, it is not yet known how the internal linguistic representations themselves compare to their text-only counterparts. This paper compares the semantic representations learned via VL vs. text-only pret…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
Visual grounding, a task to ground (i.e., localize) natural language in images, essentially requires composite visual reasoning. However, existing methods over-simplify the composite nature of language into a monolithic sentence embedding or a coarse composition of subject-predicate-object triplet. In this paper, we propose to ground natural language in an intuitive, explainable, and composite fashion as it should be. In particular, we develop a novel modular network called Neural Module Tree network (NMTree) that regularizes the visual grounding along the dependency parsing tree of the senten…
SRIBD（深圳理工大学（筹））；CUHK-Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；FNii（未来网络智研院）；Deepwise AI Lab（深兰人工智能实验室）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
Grounding referring expressions in RGBD image has been an emerging field. We present a novel task of 3D visual grounding in single-view RGBD image where the referred objects are often only partially scanned due to occlusion. In contrast to previous works that directly generate object proposals for grounding in the 3D scenes, we propose a bottom-up approach to gradually aggregate context-aware information, effectively addressing the challenge posed by the partial geometry. Our approach first fuses the language and the visual features at the bottom level to generate a heatmap that coarsely local…
Key Lab of Intell. Info. Process., Inst. of Comput. Tech., CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所智能信息处理重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Weakly supervised referring expression grounding aims at localizing the referential object in an image according to the linguistic query, where the mapping between the referential object and query is unknown in the training stage. To address this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end adaptive reconstruction network (ARN). It builds the correspondence between image region proposal and query in an adaptive manner: adaptive grounding and collaborative reconstruction. Specifically, we first extract the subject, location and context features to represent the proposals and the query respectively. T…
CAS Key Laboratory of GIPAS, University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学中国科学院GIPAS重点实验室）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center（合肥综合性国家科学中心人工智能研究院）
In this paper, we present a neat yet effective transformer-based framework for visual grounding, namely TransVG, to address the task of grounding a language query to the corresponding region onto an image. The state-of-the-art methods, including two-stage or one-stage ones, rely on a complex module with manually-designed mechanisms to perform the query reasoning and multi-modal fusion. However, the involvement of certain mechanisms in fusion module design, such as query decomposition and image scene graph, makes the models easily overfit to datasets with specific scenarios, and limits the plen…
HiVG: Hierarchical Multimodal Fine-grained Modulation for Visual Grounding
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging（上海智能视觉与成像工程技术研究中心）
An LBYL (`Look Before You Leap') Network is proposed for end-to-end trainable one-stage visual grounding. The idea behind LBYL-Net is intuitive and straightforward: we follow a language's description to localize the target object based on its relative spatial relation to `Landmarks', which is characterized by some spatial positional words and some descriptive words about the object. The core of our LBYL-Net is a landmark feature convolution module that transmits the visual features with the guidance of linguistic description along with different directions. Consequently, such a module encodes …
Pengcheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Object grounding tasks aim to locate the target object in an image through verbal communications. Understanding human command is an important process needed for effective human-robot communication. However, this is challenging because human commands can be ambiguous and erroneous. This paper aims to disambiguate the human's referring expressions by allowing the agent to ask relevant questions based on semantic data obtained from scene graphs. We test if our agent can use relations between objects from a scene graph to ask semantically relevant questions that can disambiguate the original user …
DeCo: Efficient Decouple-to-Couple Learning for Multi-Task Visual Grounding
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Perception and Image Understanding of Ministry of Education（教育部智能感知与图像理解重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）
Context Disentangling and Prototype Inheriting for Robust Visual Grounding
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）
Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Weakly supervised referring expression grounding (REG) aims at localizing the referential entity in an image according to linguistic query, where the mapping between the image region (proposal) and the query is unknown in the training stage. In referring expressions, people usually describe a target entity in terms of its relationship with other contextual entities as well as visual attributes. However, previous weakly supervised REG methods rarely pay attention to the relationship between the entities. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-guided pairwise reconstruction network (KPRN), which …
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；Amazon Alexa AI（亚马逊Alexa AI）
GuessWhat?! is a two-player visual dialog guessing game where player A asks a sequence of yes/no questions (Questioner) and makes a final guess (Guesser) about a target object in an image, based on answers from player B (Oracle). Based on this dialog history between the Questioner and the Oracle, a Guesser makes a final guess of the target object. Previous baseline Oracle model encodes no visual information in the model, and it cannot fully understand complex questions about color, shape, relationships and so on. Most existing work for Guesser encode the dialog history as a whole and train the…
EPIC-Bench: A Perception-Centric Benchmark for Fine-Grained Embodied Visual Grounding in Vision-Language Models
X-Humanoid；Fudan University（复旦大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Monash University（墨尔本大学）；Celonis AI；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
For robots to understand human instructions and perform meaningful tasks in the near future, it is important to develop learned models that comprehend referential language to identify common objects in real-world 3D scenes. In this paper, we introduce a spatial-language model for a 3D visual grounding problem. Specifically, given a reconstructed 3D scene in the form of point clouds with 3D bounding boxes of potential object candidates, and a language utterance referring to a target object in the scene, our model successfully identifies the target object from a set of potential candidates. Spec…
Evaluating Linguistic Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs in the Lens of Few-Shot Learning
Hacettepe University（哈杰泰佩大学）；Aselsan Research（阿塞尔桑研究院）；Koç University（科克大学）；Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学医学中心，阿姆斯特丹大学）；Amsterdam Public Health（阿姆斯特丹公共卫生研究院）
Weakly-Supervised 3D Visual Grounding based on Visual Language Alignment
College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学计算机科学与软件工程学院）；Meituan Inc.（美团公司）；College of Electronics and Information Engineering, Shenzhen University（深圳大学电子与信息工程学院）；Guangdong Key Laboratory of Intelligent Information Processing（广东省智能信息处理重点实验室）
The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Deepwise AI Lab（深睿医疗人工智能实验室）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Grounding referring expressions aims to locate in an image an object referred to by a natural language expression. The linguistic structure of a referring expression provides a layout of reasoning over the visual contents, and it is often crucial to align and jointly understand the image and the referring expression. In this paper, we propose a scene graph guided modular network (SGMN), which performs reasoning over a semantic graph and a scene graph with neural modules under the guidance of the linguistic structure of the expression. In particular, we model the image as a structured semantic …
