We present SEED, an elaborate image tokenizer that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the emergent ability to SEE and Draw at the same time. Research on image tokenizers has previously reached an impasse, as frameworks employing quantized visual tokens have lost prominence due to subpar performance and convergence in multimodal comprehension (compared to BLIP-2, etc.) or generation (compared to Stable Diffusion, etc.). Despite the limitations, we remain confident in its natural capacity to unify visual and textual representations, facilitating scalable multimodal training with LLM's original recipe. In this study, we identify two crucial principles for the architecture and training of SEED that effectively ease subsequent alignment with LLMs. (1) Image tokens should be independent of 2D physical patch positions and instead be produced with a 1D causal dependency, exhibiting intrinsic interdependence that aligns with the left-to-right autoregressive prediction mechanism in LLMs. (2) Image tokens should capture high-level semantics consistent with the degree of semantic abstraction in words, and be optimized for both discriminativeness and reconstruction during the tokenizer training phase. As a result, the off-the-shelf LLM is able to perform both image-to-text and text-to-image generation by incorporating our SEED through efficient LoRA tuning. Comprehensive multimodal pretraining and instruction tuning, which may yield improved results, are reserved for future investigation. This version of SEED was trained in 5.7 days using only 64 V100 GPUs and 5M publicly available image-text pairs. Our preliminary study emphasizes the great potential of discrete visual tokens in versatile multimodal LLMs and the importance of proper image tokenizers in broader research.
Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering（康考迪亚信息系统工程研究所）；Concordia University（康考迪亚大学）；Université TELUQ（TELUQ大学）
Site preparation by mounding is a commonly used silvicultural treatment that improves tree growth conditions by mechanically creating planting microsites called mounds. Following site preparation, the next critical step is to count the number of mounds, which provides forest managers with a precise estimate of the number of seedlings required for a given plantation block. Counting the number of mounds is generally conducted through manual field surveys by forestry workers, which is costly and prone to errors, especially for large areas. To address this issue, we present a novel framework explo…
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）；AdTech Corp（AdTech公司）
Quality assessment of agricultural produce is a crucial step in minimizing food stock wastage. However, this is currently done manually and often requires expert supervision, especially in smaller seeds like corn. We propose a novel computer vision-based system for automating this process. We build a novel seed image acquisition setup, which captures both the top and bottom views. Dataset collection for this problem has challenges of data annotation costs/time and class imbalance. We address these challenges by i.) using a Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN) to generate real-look…
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；Fujitsu（富士通）
In recent years, various watermarking methods were suggested to detect computer vision models obtained illegitimately from their owners, however they fail to demonstrate satisfactory robustness against model extraction attacks. In this paper, we present an adaptive framework to watermark a protected model, leveraging the unique behavior present in the model due to a unique random seed initialized during the model training. This watermark is used to detect extracted models, which have the same unique behavior, indicating an unauthorized usage of the protected model's intellectual property (IP).…
Many vision tasks use secondary information at inference time -- a seed -- to assist a computer vision model in solving a problem. For example, an initial bounding box is needed to initialize visual object tracking. To date, all such work makes the assumption that the seed is a good one. However, in practice, from crowdsourcing to noisy automated seeds, this is often not the case. We hence propose the problem of seed rejection -- determining whether to reject a seed based on the expected performance degradation when it is provided in place of a gold-standard seed. We provide a formal definitio…
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Matching local features across images is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Targeting towards high accuracy and efficiency, we propose Seeded Graph Matching Network, a graph neural network with sparse structure to reduce redundant connectivity and learn compact representation. The network consists of 1) Seeding Module, which initializes the matching by generating a small set of reliable matches as seeds. 2) Seeded Graph Neural Network, which utilizes seed matches to pass messages within/across images and predicts assignment costs. Three novel operations are proposed as basic elements fo…
Beyond Balanced Accuracy: A Resolution and Parity-Controlled Benchmark for Vision-Language and Vision-Only Defect Assessment in UAV Power-Line Inspection
State Grid Sichuan Electric Power Research Institute（国网四川省电力公司电力科学研究院）；Power System Security and Operation Key Laboratory of Sichuan Province（四川省电力系统安全与运行重点实验室）
SEED: Semantics Enhanced Encoder-Decoder Framework for Scene Text Recognition
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
University of Texas, Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Google（谷歌）
This work targets automated designing and scaling of Vision Transformers (ViTs). The motivation comes from two pain spots: 1) the lack of efficient and principled methods for designing and scaling ViTs; 2) the tremendous computational cost of training ViT that is much heavier than its convolution counterpart. To tackle these issues, we propose As-ViT, an auto-scaling framework for ViTs without training, which automatically discovers and scales up ViTs in an efficient and principled manner. Specifically, we first design a "seed" ViT topology by leveraging a training-free search process. This ex…
Dynamic Multimodal Evaluation with Flexible Complexity by Vision-Language Bootstrapping
School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能学院）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Tongji University（同济大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）
The first step toward Seed Phenotyping i.e. the comprehensive assessment of complex seed traits such as growth, development, tolerance, resistance, ecology, yield, and the measurement of pa-rameters that form more complex traits is the identification of seed type. Generally, a plant re-searcher inspects the visual attributes of a seed such as size, shape, area, color and texture to identify the seed type, a process that is tedious and labor-intensive. Advances in the areas of computer vision and deep learning have led to the development of convolutional neural networks (CNN) that aid in classi…
Compressing And Debiasing Vision-Language Pre-Trained Models for Visual Question Answering
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Peking University（北京大学）
MVC-Bench: Benchmarking Calibration of Medical Vision-Language Models
Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka（斯里兰卡萨巴拉加穆瓦大学）；Digital Platform Development, SLT PLC（SLT公共有限公司数字平台开发部）
Integrative Sciences and Engineering Programme, National University of Singapore（国立新加坡大学整合科学与工程学程）；School of Computing, National University of Singapore（国立新加坡大学计算机学院）
