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Jun 9

Distilling Neuro-Symbolic Programs into 3D Multi-modal LLMs

Current 3D spatial reasoning methods face a fundamental trade-off: neuro-symbolic 3D (NS3D) concept learners achieve interpretable reasoning through compositional programs but are constrained to closed-set concept vocabularies and simple programs; end-to-end 3D multi-modal LLMs (3D MLLMs) could handle complex natural language and open-vocabulary concepts but suffer from black-box reasoning without explicit spatial verification. We introduce APEIRIA, a neuro-symbolic 3D MLLM to bridge two paradigms by distilling symbolic reasoning patterns into MLLMs with natural language chain-of-thought. Our three-stage curriculum progressively builds reasoning capabilities: a) 3D perception alignment grounds object visual-geometric features to the LLM, b) CoT-SFT teaches query decomposition and stepwise verification from symbolic program traces, and c) CoT-RL extends reasoning patterns to open-set concepts and deeply nested instructions. By transferring reasoning patterns rather than concept-specific knowledge, APEIRIA preserves key NS3D virtues: transparent reasoning and modular interchangeability of planning and perception components. Evaluations on grounding, question answering, and captioning show that APEIRIA surpasses prior NS3D methods and matches state-of-the-art 3D MLLMs on 3D spatial reasoning datasets, unifying symbolic methods' systematic reasoning with MLLMs' flexibility. Code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/APEIRIA.

  • 2 authors
·
May 30

Inject Semantic Concepts into Image Tagging for Open-Set Recognition

In this paper, we introduce the Recognize Anything Plus Model~(RAM++), a fundamental image recognition model with strong open-set recognition capabilities, by injecting semantic concepts into image tagging training framework. Previous approaches are either image tagging models constrained by limited semantics, or vision-language models with shallow interaction for suboptimal performance in multi-tag recognition. In contrast, RAM++ integrates image-text alignment and image-tagging within a unified fine-grained interaction framework based on image-tags-text triplets. This design enables RAM++ not only excel in identifying predefined categories, but also significantly augment the recognition ability in open-set categories. Moreover, RAM++ employs large language models~(LLMs) to generate diverse visual tag descriptions, pioneering the integration of LLM's knowledge into image tagging training. This approach empowers RAM++ to integrate visual description concepts for open-set recognition during inference. Evaluations on comprehensive image recognition benchmarks demonstrate RAM++ exceeds existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) fundamental image recognition models on most aspects. Specifically, for predefined common-used tag categories, RAM++ showcases 10.2 mAP and 15.4 mAP enhancements over CLIP on OpenImages and ImageNet. For open-set categories beyond predefined, RAM++ records improvements of 5 mAP and 6.4 mAP over CLIP and RAM respectively on OpenImages. For diverse human-object interaction phrases, RAM++ achieves 7.8 mAP and 4.7 mAP improvements on the HICO benchmark. Code, datasets and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/xinyu1205/recognize-anything.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 23, 2023 1

Multi-subject Open-set Personalization in Video Generation

Video personalization methods allow us to synthesize videos with specific concepts such as people, pets, and places. However, existing methods often focus on limited domains, require time-consuming optimization per subject, or support only a single subject. We present Video Alchemist - a video model with built-in multi-subject, open-set personalization capabilities for both foreground objects and background, eliminating the need for time-consuming test-time optimization. Our model is built on a new Diffusion Transformer module that fuses each conditional reference image and its corresponding subject-level text prompt with cross-attention layers. Developing such a large model presents two main challenges: dataset and evaluation. First, as paired datasets of reference images and videos are extremely hard to collect, we sample selected video frames as reference images and synthesize a clip of the target video. However, while models can easily denoise training videos given reference frames, they fail to generalize to new contexts. To mitigate this issue, we design a new automatic data construction pipeline with extensive image augmentations. Second, evaluating open-set video personalization is a challenge in itself. To address this, we introduce a personalization benchmark that focuses on accurate subject fidelity and supports diverse personalization scenarios. Finally, our extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms existing personalization methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 10, 2025 2

OpenNeRF: Open Set 3D Neural Scene Segmentation with Pixel-Wise Features and Rendered Novel Views

Large visual-language models (VLMs), like CLIP, enable open-set image segmentation to segment arbitrary concepts from an image in a zero-shot manner. This goes beyond the traditional closed-set assumption, i.e., where models can only segment classes from a pre-defined training set. More recently, first works on open-set segmentation in 3D scenes have appeared in the literature. These methods are heavily influenced by closed-set 3D convolutional approaches that process point clouds or polygon meshes. However, these 3D scene representations do not align well with the image-based nature of the visual-language models. Indeed, point cloud and 3D meshes typically have a lower resolution than images and the reconstructed 3D scene geometry might not project well to the underlying 2D image sequences used to compute pixel-aligned CLIP features. To address these challenges, we propose OpenNeRF which naturally operates on posed images and directly encodes the VLM features within the NeRF. This is similar in spirit to LERF, however our work shows that using pixel-wise VLM features (instead of global CLIP features) results in an overall less complex architecture without the need for additional DINO regularization. Our OpenNeRF further leverages NeRF's ability to render novel views and extract open-set VLM features from areas that are not well observed in the initial posed images. For 3D point cloud segmentation on the Replica dataset, OpenNeRF outperforms recent open-vocabulary methods such as LERF and OpenScene by at least +4.9 mIoU.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 4, 2024

Follow Anything: Open-set detection, tracking, and following in real-time

Tracking and following objects of interest is critical to several robotics use cases, ranging from industrial automation to logistics and warehousing, to healthcare and security. In this paper, we present a robotic system to detect, track, and follow any object in real-time. Our approach, dubbed ``follow anything'' (FAn), is an open-vocabulary and multimodal model -- it is not restricted to concepts seen at training time and can be applied to novel classes at inference time using text, images, or click queries. Leveraging rich visual descriptors from large-scale pre-trained models (foundation models), FAn can detect and segment objects by matching multimodal queries (text, images, clicks) against an input image sequence. These detected and segmented objects are tracked across image frames, all while accounting for occlusion and object re-emergence. We demonstrate FAn on a real-world robotic system (a micro aerial vehicle) and report its ability to seamlessly follow the objects of interest in a real-time control loop. FAn can be deployed on a laptop with a lightweight (6-8 GB) graphics card, achieving a throughput of 6-20 frames per second. To enable rapid adoption, deployment, and extensibility, we open-source all our code on our project webpage at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/FollowAnything . We also encourage the reader the watch our 5-minutes explainer video in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mgt3EPytrw .

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

Diversify and Conquer: Open-set Disagreement for Robust Semi-supervised Learning with Outliers

Conventional semi-supervised learning (SSL) ideally assumes that labeled and unlabeled data share an identical class distribution, however in practice, this assumption is easily violated, as unlabeled data often includes unknown class data, i.e., outliers. The outliers are treated as noise, considerably degrading the performance of SSL models. To address this drawback, we propose a novel framework, Diversify and Conquer (DAC), to enhance SSL robustness in the context of open-set semi-supervised learning. In particular, we note that existing open-set SSL methods rely on prediction discrepancies between inliers and outliers from a single model trained on labeled data. This approach can be easily failed when the labeled data is insufficient, leading to performance degradation that is worse than naive SSL that do not account for outliers. In contrast, our approach exploits prediction disagreements among multiple models that are differently biased towards the unlabeled distribution. By leveraging the discrepancies arising from training on unlabeled data, our method enables robust outlier detection even when the labeled data is underspecified. Our key contribution is constructing a collection of differently biased models through a single training process. By encouraging divergent heads to be differently biased towards outliers while making consistent predictions for inliers, we exploit the disagreement among these heads as a measure to identify unknown concepts. Our code is available at https://github.com/heejokong/DivCon.

  • 4 authors
·
May 30, 2025

Towards Open Vocabulary Learning: A Survey

In the field of visual scene understanding, deep neural networks have made impressive advancements in various core tasks like segmentation, tracking, and detection. However, most approaches operate on the close-set assumption, meaning that the model can only identify pre-defined categories that are present in the training set. Recently, open vocabulary settings were proposed due to the rapid progress of vision language pre-training. These new approaches seek to locate and recognize categories beyond the annotated label space. The open vocabulary approach is more general, practical, and effective compared to weakly supervised and zero-shot settings. This paper provides a thorough review of open vocabulary learning, summarizing and analyzing recent developments in the field. In particular, we begin by comparing it to related concepts such as zero-shot learning, open-set recognition, and out-of-distribution detection. Then, we review several closely related tasks in the case of segmentation and detection, including long-tail problems, few-shot, and zero-shot settings. For the method survey, we first present the basic knowledge of detection and segmentation in close-set as the preliminary knowledge. Next, we examine various scenarios in which open vocabulary learning is used, identifying common design elements and core ideas. Then, we compare the recent detection and segmentation approaches in commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we conclude with insights, issues, and discussions regarding future research directions. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive literature review of open vocabulary learning. We keep tracing related works at https://github.com/jianzongwu/Awesome-Open-Vocabulary.

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 27, 2023

PET-DINO: Unifying Visual Cues into Grounding DINO with Prompt-Enriched Training

Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD) enables recognition of novel categories beyond fixed classes but faces challenges in aligning text representations with complex visual concepts and the scarcity of image-text pairs for rare categories. This results in suboptimal performance in specialized domains or with complex objects. Recent visual-prompted methods partially address these issues but often involve complex multi-modal designs and multi-stage optimizations, prolonging the development cycle. Additionally, effective training strategies for data-driven OSOD models remain largely unexplored. To address these challenges, we propose PET-DINO, a universal detector supporting both text and visual prompts. Our Alignment-Friendly Visual Prompt Generation (AFVPG) module builds upon an advanced text-prompted detector, addressing the limitations of text representation guidance and reducing the development cycle. We introduce two prompt-enriched training strategies: Intra-Batch Parallel Prompting (IBP) at the iteration level and Dynamic Memory-Driven Prompting (DMD) at the overall training level. These strategies enable simultaneous modeling of multiple prompt routes, facilitating parallel alignment with diverse real-world usage scenarios. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that PET-DINO exhibits competitive zero-shot object detection capabilities across various prompt-based detection protocols. These strengths can be attributed to inheritance-based philosophy and prompt-enriched training strategies, which play a critical role in building an effective generic object detector. Project page: https://fuweifuvtoo.github.io/pet-dino.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 6

EAGLE: Efficient Adaptive Geometry-based Learning in Cross-view Understanding

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation has been an efficient approach to transferring the semantic segmentation model across data distributions. Meanwhile, the recent Open-vocabulary Semantic Scene understanding based on large-scale vision language models is effective in open-set settings because it can learn diverse concepts and categories. However, these prior methods fail to generalize across different camera views due to the lack of cross-view geometric modeling. At present, there are limited studies analyzing cross-view learning. To address this problem, we introduce a novel Unsupervised Cross-view Adaptation Learning approach to modeling the geometric structural change across views in Semantic Scene Understanding. First, we introduce a novel Cross-view Geometric Constraint on Unpaired Data to model structural changes in images and segmentation masks across cameras. Second, we present a new Geodesic Flow-based Correlation Metric to efficiently measure the geometric structural changes across camera views. Third, we introduce a novel view-condition prompting mechanism to enhance the view-information modeling of the open-vocabulary segmentation network in cross-view adaptation learning. The experiments on different cross-view adaptation benchmarks have shown the effectiveness of our approach in cross-view modeling, demonstrating that we achieve State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance compared to prior unsupervised domain adaptation and open-vocabulary semantic segmentation methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 3, 2024

SetCon: Towards Open-Ended Referring Segmentation via Set-Level Concept Prediction

Referring segmentation grounds natural-language queries to pixel-level masks, but extending it to complex scenarios with multiple instances, cross-category groups, or open-ended target sets remains challenging. Previous Large Vision Language Model (LVLM)-based methods represent referred targets with one or more special tokens sequentially, treating multiple targets as separate outputs rather than a coherent set and offering little incentive to capture set-level properties such as completeness and mutual exclusivity. We reformulate open-ended referring segmentation as explicit set-level concept prediction and propose Set-Concept Segmentation (SetCon), which uses LVLM-generated natural-language concepts, instead of segmentation-specific tokens, as semantic conditions for joint mask-set decoding. A hierarchical semantic decomposition first predicts a shared set-level concept defining the target scope and then refines it into fine-grained concept groups aligned with target subsets. To support this, a two-stage annotation pipeline augments existing reasoning segmentation datasets with hierarchical semantic supervision (236k samples, 784k concept phrases). SetCon achieves state-of-the-art results on image benchmarks (+3.3 gIoU on gRefCOCO, +12.1 gIoU on MUSE), with margins that grow as the number of referred targets increases. The concept interface also transfers to video under a detect-and-track setting, yielding new state-of-the-art results on seven referring video benchmarks, including +10.9 J&F on MeViS and +12.4 J&F on Ref-SeCVOS.

  • 9 authors
·
May 18

Open-vocabulary vs. Closed-set: Best Practice for Few-shot Object Detection Considering Text Describability

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), detecting specific classes of objects using only their linguistic descriptions (e.g., class names) without any image samples, has garnered significant attention. However, in real-world applications, the target class concepts is often hard to describe in text and the only way to specify target objects is to provide their image examples, yet it is often challenging to obtain a good number of samples. Thus, there is a high demand from practitioners for few-shot object detection (FSOD). A natural question arises: Can the benefits of OVD extend to FSOD for object classes that are difficult to describe in text? Compared to traditional methods that learn only predefined classes (referred to in this paper as closed-set object detection, COD), can the extra cost of OVD be justified? To answer these questions, we propose a method to quantify the ``text-describability'' of object detection datasets using the zero-shot image classification accuracy with CLIP. This allows us to categorize various OD datasets with different text-describability and emprically evaluate the FSOD performance of OVD and COD methods within each category. Our findings reveal that: i) there is little difference between OVD and COD for object classes with low text-describability under equal conditions in OD pretraining; and ii) although OVD can learn from more diverse data than OD-specific data, thereby increasing the volume of training data, it can be counterproductive for classes with low-text-describability. These findings provide practitioners with valuable guidance amidst the recent advancements of OVD methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 20, 2024

Exploring Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation without Human Labels

Semantic segmentation is a crucial task in computer vision that involves segmenting images into semantically meaningful regions at the pixel level. However, existing approaches often rely on expensive human annotations as supervision for model training, limiting their scalability to large, unlabeled datasets. To address this challenge, we present ZeroSeg, a novel method that leverages the existing pretrained vision-language (VL) model (e.g. CLIP) to train open-vocabulary zero-shot semantic segmentation models. Although acquired extensive knowledge of visual concepts, it is non-trivial to exploit knowledge from these VL models to the task of semantic segmentation, as they are usually trained at an image level. ZeroSeg overcomes this by distilling the visual concepts learned by VL models into a set of segment tokens, each summarizing a localized region of the target image. We evaluate ZeroSeg on multiple popular segmentation benchmarks, including PASCAL VOC 2012, PASCAL Context, and COCO, in a zero-shot manner (i.e., no training or adaption on target segmentation datasets). Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance when compared to other zero-shot segmentation methods under the same training data, while also performing competitively compared to strongly supervised methods. Finally, we also demonstrated the effectiveness of ZeroSeg on open-vocabulary segmentation, through both human studies and qualitative visualizations.

  • 9 authors
·
Jun 1, 2023

Specificity-aware reinforcement learning for fine-grained open-world classification

Classifying fine-grained visual concepts under open-world settings, i.e., without a predefined label set, demands models to be both accurate and specific. Recent reasoning Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit strong visual understanding capability but tend to produce overly generic predictions when performing fine-grained image classification. Our preliminary analysis reveals that models do possess the intrinsic fine-grained domain knowledge. However, promoting more specific predictions (specificity) without compromising correct ones (correctness) remains a non-trivial and understudied challenge. In this work, we investigate how to steer reasoning LMMs toward predictions that are both correct and specific. We propose a novel specificity-aware reinforcement learning framework, SpeciaRL, to fine-tune reasoning LMMs on fine-grained image classification under the open-world setting. SpeciaRL introduces a dynamic, verifier-based reward signal anchored to the best predictions within online rollouts, promoting specificity while respecting the model's capabilities to prevent incorrect predictions. Our out-of-domain experiments show that SpeciaRL delivers the best trade-off between correctness and specificity across extensive fine-grained benchmarks, surpassing existing methods and advancing open-world fine-grained image classification. Code and model are publicly available at https://github.com/s-angheben/SpeciaRL.

Overcoming the Pitfalls of Vision-Language Model Finetuning for OOD Generalization

Existing vision-language models exhibit strong generalization on a variety of visual domains and tasks. However, such models mainly perform zero-shot recognition in a closed-set manner, and thus struggle to handle open-domain visual concepts by design. There are recent finetuning methods, such as prompt learning, that not only study the discrimination between in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, but also show some improvements in both ID and OOD accuracies. In this paper, we first demonstrate that vision-language models, after long enough finetuning but without proper regularization, tend to overfit the known classes in the given dataset, with degraded performance on unknown classes. Then we propose a novel approach OGEN to address this pitfall, with the main focus on improving the OOD GENeralization of finetuned models. Specifically, a class-conditional feature generator is introduced to synthesize OOD features using just the class name of any unknown class. Such synthesized features will provide useful knowledge about unknowns and help regularize the decision boundary between ID and OOD data when optimized jointly. Equally important is our adaptive self-distillation mechanism to regularize our feature generation model during joint optimization, i.e., adaptively transferring knowledge between model states to further prevent overfitting. Experiments validate that our method yields convincing gains in OOD generalization performance in different settings.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024 1

Segment Anyword: Mask Prompt Inversion for Open-Set Grounded Segmentation

Open-set image segmentation poses a significant challenge because existing methods often demand extensive training or fine-tuning and generally struggle to segment unified objects consistently across diverse text reference expressions. Motivated by this, we propose Segment Anyword, a novel training-free visual concept prompt learning approach for open-set language grounded segmentation that relies on token-level cross-attention maps from a frozen diffusion model to produce segmentation surrogates or mask prompts, which are then refined into targeted object masks. Initial prompts typically lack coherence and consistency as the complexity of the image-text increases, resulting in suboptimal mask fragments. To tackle this issue, we further introduce a novel linguistic-guided visual prompt regularization that binds and clusters visual prompts based on sentence dependency and syntactic structural information, enabling the extraction of robust, noise-tolerant mask prompts, and significant improvements in segmentation accuracy. The proposed approach is effective, generalizes across different open-set segmentation tasks, and achieves state-of-the-art results of 52.5 (+6.8 relative) mIoU on Pascal Context 59, 67.73 (+25.73 relative) cIoU on gRefCOCO, and 67.4 (+1.1 relative to fine-tuned methods) mIoU on GranDf, which is the most complex open-set grounded segmentation task in the field.

  • 11 authors
·
May 23, 2025

Progressive Open Space Expansion for Open-Set Model Attribution

Despite the remarkable progress in generative technology, the Janus-faced issues of intellectual property protection and malicious content supervision have arisen. Efforts have been paid to manage synthetic images by attributing them to a set of potential source models. However, the closed-set classification setting limits the application in real-world scenarios for handling contents generated by arbitrary models. In this study, we focus on a challenging task, namely Open-Set Model Attribution (OSMA), to simultaneously attribute images to known models and identify those from unknown ones. Compared to existing open-set recognition (OSR) tasks focusing on semantic novelty, OSMA is more challenging as the distinction between images from known and unknown models may only lie in visually imperceptible traces. To this end, we propose a Progressive Open Space Expansion (POSE) solution, which simulates open-set samples that maintain the same semantics as closed-set samples but embedded with different imperceptible traces. Guided by a diversity constraint, the open space is simulated progressively by a set of lightweight augmentation models. We consider three real-world scenarios and construct an OSMA benchmark dataset, including unknown models trained with different random seeds, architectures, and datasets from known ones. Extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate POSE is superior to both existing model attribution methods and off-the-shelf OSR methods.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 13, 2023

Hyperspherical embedding for novel class classification

Deep learning models have become increasingly useful in many different industries. On the domain of image classification, convolutional neural networks proved the ability to learn robust features for the closed set problem, as shown in many different datasets, such as MNIST FASHIONMNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and IMAGENET. These approaches use deep neural networks with dense layers with softmax activation functions in order to learn features that can separate classes in a latent space. However, this traditional approach is not useful for identifying classes unseen on the training set, known as the open set problem. A similar problem occurs in scenarios involving learning on small data. To tackle both problems, few-shot learning has been proposed. In particular, metric learning learns features that obey constraints of a metric distance in the latent space in order to perform classification. However, while this approach proves to be useful for the open set problem, current implementation requires pair-wise training, where both positive and negative examples of similar images are presented during the training phase, which limits the applicability of these approaches in large data or large class scenarios given the combinatorial nature of the possible inputs.In this paper, we present a constraint-based approach applied to the representations in the latent space under the normalized softmax loss, proposed by[18]. We experimentally validate the proposed approach for the classification of unseen classes on different datasets using both metric learning and the normalized softmax loss, on disjoint and joint scenarios. Our results show that not only our proposed strategy can be efficiently trained on larger set of classes, as it does not require pairwise learning, but also present better classification results than the metric learning strategies surpassing its accuracy by a significant margin.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 5, 2021

Coreset Sampling from Open-Set for Fine-Grained Self-Supervised Learning

Deep learning in general domains has constantly been extended to domain-specific tasks requiring the recognition of fine-grained characteristics. However, real-world applications for fine-grained tasks suffer from two challenges: a high reliance on expert knowledge for annotation and necessity of a versatile model for various downstream tasks in a specific domain (e.g., prediction of categories, bounding boxes, or pixel-wise annotations). Fortunately, the recent self-supervised learning (SSL) is a promising approach to pretrain a model without annotations, serving as an effective initialization for any downstream tasks. Since SSL does not rely on the presence of annotation, in general, it utilizes the large-scale unlabeled dataset, referred to as an open-set. In this sense, we introduce a novel Open-Set Self-Supervised Learning problem under the assumption that a large-scale unlabeled open-set is available, as well as the fine-grained target dataset, during a pretraining phase. In our problem setup, it is crucial to consider the distribution mismatch between the open-set and target dataset. Hence, we propose SimCore algorithm to sample a coreset, the subset of an open-set that has a minimum distance to the target dataset in the latent space. We demonstrate that SimCore significantly improves representation learning performance through extensive experimental settings, including eleven fine-grained datasets and seven open-sets in various downstream tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 20, 2023

A Wholistic View of Continual Learning with Deep Neural Networks: Forgotten Lessons and the Bridge to Active and Open World Learning

Current deep learning methods are regarded as favorable if they empirically perform well on dedicated test sets. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving data is investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless performed in isolation from the real world by monitoring accumulated benchmark test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant, i.e. models are evaluated on data that is guaranteed to originate from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown and corrupted instances. In this work we critically survey the literature and argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, identifying unknown examples outside of the observed set, and the adjacent field of active learning, querying data to maximize the expected performance gain, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Hence, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Finally, the established synergies are supported empirically, showing joint improvement in alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 3, 2020

Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?

The ability to identify whether or not a test sample belongs to one of the semantic classes in a classifier's training set is critical to practical deployment of the model. This task is termed open-set recognition (OSR) and has received significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the ability of a classifier to make the 'none-of-above' decision is highly correlated with its accuracy on the closed-set classes. We find that this relationship holds across loss objectives and architectures, and further demonstrate the trend both on the standard OSR benchmarks as well as on a large-scale ImageNet evaluation. Second, we use this correlation to boost the performance of a maximum logit score OSR 'baseline' by improving its closed-set accuracy, and with this strong baseline achieve state-of-the-art on a number of OSR benchmarks. Similarly, we boost the performance of the existing state-of-the-art method by improving its closed-set accuracy, but the resulting discrepancy with the strong baseline is marginal. Our third contribution is to present the 'Semantic Shift Benchmark' (SSB), which better respects the task of detecting semantic novelty, in contrast to other forms of distribution shift also considered in related sub-fields, such as out-of-distribution detection. On this new evaluation, we again demonstrate that there is negligible difference between the strong baseline and the existing state-of-the-art. Project Page: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/osr/

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 12, 2021

Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET): Endlessly Generating Increasingly Complex and Diverse Learning Environments and Their Solutions

While the history of machine learning so far largely encompasses a series of problems posed by researchers and algorithms that learn their solutions, an important question is whether the problems themselves can be generated by the algorithm at the same time as they are being solved. Such a process would in effect build its own diverse and expanding curricula, and the solutions to problems at various stages would become stepping stones towards solving even more challenging problems later in the process. The Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET) algorithm introduced in this paper does just that: it pairs the generation of environmental challenges and the optimization of agents to solve those challenges. It simultaneously explores many different paths through the space of possible problems and solutions and, critically, allows these stepping-stone solutions to transfer between problems if better, catalyzing innovation. The term open-ended signifies the intriguing potential for algorithms like POET to continue to create novel and increasingly complex capabilities without bound. Our results show that POET produces a diverse range of sophisticated behaviors that solve a wide range of environmental challenges, many of which cannot be solved by direct optimization alone, or even through a direct-path curriculum-building control algorithm introduced to highlight the critical role of open-endedness in solving ambitious challenges. The ability to transfer solutions from one environment to another proves essential to unlocking the full potential of the system as a whole, demonstrating the unpredictable nature of fortuitous stepping stones. We hope that POET will inspire a new push towards open-ended discovery across many domains, where algorithms like POET can blaze a trail through their interesting possible manifestations and solutions.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 7, 2019

Open-Vocabulary HOI Detection with Interaction-aware Prompt and Concept Calibration

Open Vocabulary Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection aims to detect interactions between humans and objects while generalizing to novel interaction classes beyond the training set. Current methods often rely on Vision and Language Models (VLMs) but face challenges due to suboptimal image encoders, as image-level pre-training does not align well with the fine-grained region-level interaction detection required for HOI. Additionally, effectively encoding textual descriptions of visual appearances remains difficult, limiting the model's ability to capture detailed HOI relationships. To address these issues, we propose INteraction-aware Prompting with Concept Calibration (INP-CC), an end-to-end open-vocabulary HOI detector that integrates interaction-aware prompts and concept calibration. Specifically, we propose an interaction-aware prompt generator that dynamically generates a compact set of prompts based on the input scene, enabling selective sharing among similar interactions. This approach directs the model's attention to key interaction patterns rather than generic image-level semantics, enhancing HOI detection. Furthermore, we refine HOI concept representations through language model-guided calibration, which helps distinguish diverse HOI concepts by investigating visual similarities across categories. A negative sampling strategy is also employed to improve inter-modal similarity modeling, enabling the model to better differentiate visually similar but semantically distinct actions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that INP-CC significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on the SWIG-HOI and HICO-DET datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/ltttpku/INP-CC.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 5, 2025

Adapting Multi-modal Large Language Model to Concept Drift in the Long-tailed Open World

Real-world data often exhibit extreme imbalances and out-of-distribution (OOD) instances, which significantly biases the model training. While it has been extensively studied in vision and language domains separately, the impact of long-tailed open worlds on multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we first demonstrate the susceptibility and vulnerability of vision-language models to significant biases caused by tail drift and out-of-distribution (OOD) drift during both the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. To eliminate the bias from different sources, we integrate the tailed drift adaptation and OOD drift detection into a unified framework by extending the concept drift theory to multi-modal. Specifically, a T-distribution-based drift adapter is proposed to effectively mitigate the bias induced by the long-tailed problem, which also facilitates the model in distinguishing OOD data through explicit distribution modelling. Extensive experiments show significant improvements in our model's ability to adapt to tailed drift and OOD drift. Moreover, it enhances the efficiency and accuracy of image-text alignment in vision language model pre-training, particularly in the long-tail open world scenario. Furthermore, we create a set of multi-modal datasets called OpenMMlo, specifically tailored for the long-tailed open world scenario, to validate our findings. To foster the development of the multi-modal community, we have made both OpenMMlo datasets and our code publicly available at: https://github.com/Anonymous0Knight/ConceptDriftMLLMs.

  • 3 authors
·
May 22, 2024

Expanding Scene Graph Boundaries: Fully Open-vocabulary Scene Graph Generation via Visual-Concept Alignment and Retention

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) offers a structured representation critical in many computer vision applications. Traditional SGG approaches, however, are limited by a closed-set assumption, restricting their ability to recognize only predefined object and relation categories. To overcome this, we categorize SGG scenarios into four distinct settings based on the node and edge: Closed-set SGG, Open Vocabulary (object) Detection-based SGG (OvD-SGG), Open Vocabulary Relation-based SGG (OvR-SGG), and Open Vocabulary Detection + Relation-based SGG (OvD+R-SGG). While object-centric open vocabulary SGG has been studied recently, the more challenging problem of relation-involved open-vocabulary SGG remains relatively unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose a unified framework named OvSGTR towards fully open vocabulary SGG from a holistic view. The proposed framework is an end-toend transformer architecture, which learns a visual-concept alignment for both nodes and edges, enabling the model to recognize unseen categories. For the more challenging settings of relation-involved open vocabulary SGG, the proposed approach integrates relation-aware pre-training utilizing image-caption data and retains visual-concept alignment through knowledge distillation. Comprehensive experimental results on the Visual Genome benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 18, 2023

ConceptMix: A Compositional Image Generation Benchmark with Controllable Difficulty

Compositionality is a critical capability in Text-to-Image (T2I) models, as it reflects their ability to understand and combine multiple concepts from text descriptions. Existing evaluations of compositional capability rely heavily on human-designed text prompts or fixed templates, limiting their diversity and complexity, and yielding low discriminative power. We propose ConceptMix, a scalable, controllable, and customizable benchmark which automatically evaluates compositional generation ability of T2I models. This is done in two stages. First, ConceptMix generates the text prompts: concretely, using categories of visual concepts (e.g., objects, colors, shapes, spatial relationships), it randomly samples an object and k-tuples of visual concepts, then uses GPT4-o to generate text prompts for image generation based on these sampled concepts. Second, ConceptMix evaluates the images generated in response to these prompts: concretely, it checks how many of the k concepts actually appeared in the image by generating one question per visual concept and using a strong VLM to answer them. Through administering ConceptMix to a diverse set of T2I models (proprietary as well as open ones) using increasing values of k, we show that our ConceptMix has higher discrimination power than earlier benchmarks. Specifically, ConceptMix reveals that the performance of several models, especially open models, drops dramatically with increased k. Importantly, it also provides insight into the lack of prompt diversity in widely-used training datasets. Additionally, we conduct extensive human studies to validate the design of ConceptMix and compare our automatic grading with human judgement. We hope it will guide future T2I model development.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 25, 2024

Open-Set Facial Expression Recognition

Facial expression recognition (FER) models are typically trained on datasets with a fixed number of seven basic classes. However, recent research works point out that there are far more expressions than the basic ones. Thus, when these models are deployed in the real world, they may encounter unknown classes, such as compound expressions that cannot be classified into existing basic classes. To address this issue, we propose the open-set FER task for the first time. Though there are many existing open-set recognition methods, we argue that they do not work well for open-set FER because FER data are all human faces with very small inter-class distances, which makes the open-set samples very similar to close-set samples. In this paper, we are the first to transform the disadvantage of small inter-class distance into an advantage by proposing a new way for open-set FER. Specifically, we find that small inter-class distance allows for sparsely distributed pseudo labels of open-set samples, which can be viewed as symmetric noisy labels. Based on this novel observation, we convert the open-set FER to a noisy label detection problem. We further propose a novel method that incorporates attention map consistency and cycle training to detect the open-set samples. Extensive experiments on various FER datasets demonstrate that our method clearly outperforms state-of-the-art open-set recognition methods by large margins. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh-uaiaaaa.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 23, 2024

OpenPSG: Open-set Panoptic Scene Graph Generation via Large Multimodal Models

Panoptic Scene Graph Generation (PSG) aims to segment objects and recognize their relations, enabling the structured understanding of an image. Previous methods focus on predicting predefined object and relation categories, hence limiting their applications in the open world scenarios. With the rapid development of large multimodal models (LMMs), significant progress has been made in open-set object detection and segmentation, yet open-set relation prediction in PSG remains unexplored. In this paper, we focus on the task of open-set relation prediction integrated with a pretrained open-set panoptic segmentation model to achieve true open-set panoptic scene graph generation (OpenPSG). Our OpenPSG leverages LMMs to achieve open-set relation prediction in an autoregressive manner. We introduce a relation query transformer to efficiently extract visual features of object pairs and estimate the existence of relations between them. The latter can enhance the prediction efficiency by filtering irrelevant pairs. Finally, we design the generation and judgement instructions to perform open-set relation prediction in PSG autoregressively. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose the open-set PSG task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-set relation prediction and panoptic scene graph generation. Code is available at https://github.com/franciszzj/OpenPSG.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 15, 2024 1

IOMatch: Simplifying Open-Set Semi-Supervised Learning with Joint Inliers and Outliers Utilization

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) aims to leverage massive unlabeled data when labels are expensive to obtain. Unfortunately, in many real-world applications, the collected unlabeled data will inevitably contain unseen-class outliers not belonging to any of the labeled classes. To deal with the challenging open-set SSL task, the mainstream methods tend to first detect outliers and then filter them out. However, we observe a surprising fact that such approach could result in more severe performance degradation when labels are extremely scarce, as the unreliable outlier detector may wrongly exclude a considerable portion of valuable inliers. To tackle with this issue, we introduce a novel open-set SSL framework, IOMatch, which can jointly utilize inliers and outliers, even when it is difficult to distinguish exactly between them. Specifically, we propose to employ a multi-binary classifier in combination with the standard closed-set classifier for producing unified open-set classification targets, which regard all outliers as a single new class. By adopting these targets as open-set pseudo-labels, we optimize an open-set classifier with all unlabeled samples including both inliers and outliers. Extensive experiments have shown that IOMatch significantly outperforms the baseline methods across different benchmark datasets and different settings despite its remarkable simplicity. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/nukezil/IOMatch.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 25, 2023

Bongard-OpenWorld: Few-Shot Reasoning for Free-form Visual Concepts in the Real World

We introduce Bongard-OpenWorld, a new benchmark for evaluating real-world few-shot reasoning for machine vision. It originates from the classical Bongard Problems (BPs): Given two sets of images (positive and negative), the model needs to identify the set that query images belong to by inducing the visual concepts, which is exclusively depicted by images from the positive set. Our benchmark inherits the few-shot concept induction of the original BPs while adding the two novel layers of challenge: 1) open-world free-form concepts, as the visual concepts in Bongard-OpenWorld are unique compositions of terms from an open vocabulary, ranging from object categories to abstract visual attributes and commonsense factual knowledge; 2) real-world images, as opposed to the synthetic diagrams used by many counterparts. In our exploration, Bongard-OpenWorld already imposes a significant challenge to current few-shot reasoning algorithms. We further investigate to which extent the recently introduced Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can solve our task, by directly probing VLMs, and combining VLMs and LLMs in an interactive reasoning scheme. We even designed a neuro-symbolic reasoning approach that reconciles LLMs & VLMs with logical reasoning to emulate the human problem-solving process for Bongard Problems. However, none of these approaches manage to close the human-machine gap, as the best learner achieves 64% accuracy while human participants easily reach 91%. We hope Bongard-OpenWorld can help us better understand the limitations of current visual intelligence and facilitate future research on visual agents with stronger few-shot visual reasoning capabilities.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023

OSLoPrompt: Bridging Low-Supervision Challenges and Open-Set Domain Generalization in CLIP

We introduce Low-Shot Open-Set Domain Generalization (LSOSDG), a novel paradigm unifying low-shot learning with open-set domain generalization (ODG). While prompt-based methods using models like CLIP have advanced DG, they falter in low-data regimes (e.g., 1-shot) and lack precision in detecting open-set samples with fine-grained semantics related to training classes. To address these challenges, we propose OSLOPROMPT, an advanced prompt-learning framework for CLIP with two core innovations. First, to manage limited supervision across source domains and improve DG, we introduce a domain-agnostic prompt-learning mechanism that integrates adaptable domain-specific cues and visually guided semantic attributes through a novel cross-attention module, besides being supported by learnable domain- and class-generic visual prompts to enhance cross-modal adaptability. Second, to improve outlier rejection during inference, we classify unfamiliar samples as "unknown" and train specialized prompts with systematically synthesized pseudo-open samples that maintain fine-grained relationships to known classes, generated through a targeted query strategy with off-the-shelf foundation models. This strategy enhances feature learning, enabling our model to detect open samples with varied granularity more effectively. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that OSLOPROMPT establishes a new state-of-the-art in LSOSDG, significantly outperforming existing methods.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025

Comprehensive Analysis of Transparency and Accessibility of ChatGPT, DeepSeek, And other SoTA Large Language Models

Despite increasing discussions on open-source Artificial Intelligence (AI), existing research lacks a discussion on the transparency and accessibility of state-of-the-art (SoTA) Large Language Models (LLMs). The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has recently released its first formal definition of open-source software. This definition, when combined with standard dictionary definitions and the sparse published literature, provide an initial framework to support broader accessibility to AI models such as LLMs, but more work is essential to capture the unique dynamics of openness in AI. In addition, concerns about open-washing, where models claim openness but lack full transparency, has been raised, which limits the reproducibility, bias mitigation, and domain adaptation of these models. In this context, our study critically analyzes SoTA LLMs from the last five years, including ChatGPT, DeepSeek, LLaMA, and others, to assess their adherence to transparency standards and the implications of partial openness. Specifically, we examine transparency and accessibility from two perspectives: open-source vs. open-weight models. Our findings reveal that while some models are labeled as open-source, this does not necessarily mean they are fully open-sourced. Even in the best cases, open-source models often do not report model training data, and code as well as key metrics, such as weight accessibility, and carbon emissions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that systematically examines the transparency and accessibility of over 100 different SoTA LLMs through the dual lens of open-source and open-weight models. The findings open avenues for further research and call for responsible and sustainable AI practices to ensure greater transparency, accountability, and ethical deployment of these models.(DeepSeek transparency, ChatGPT accessibility, open source, DeepSeek open source)

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 21, 2025

Training-Free Open-Ended Object Detection and Segmentation via Attention as Prompts

Existing perception models achieve great success by learning from large amounts of labeled data, but they still struggle with open-world scenarios. To alleviate this issue, researchers introduce open-set perception tasks to detect or segment unseen objects in the training set. However, these models require predefined object categories as inputs during inference, which are not available in real-world scenarios. Recently, researchers pose a new and more practical problem, i.e., open-ended object detection, which discovers unseen objects without any object categories as inputs. In this paper, we present VL-SAM, a training-free framework that combines the generalized object recognition model (i.e., Vision-Language Model) with the generalized object localization model (i.e., Segment-Anything Model), to address the open-ended object detection and segmentation task. Without additional training, we connect these two generalized models with attention maps as the prompts. Specifically, we design an attention map generation module by employing head aggregation and a regularized attention flow to aggregate and propagate attention maps across all heads and layers in VLM, yielding high-quality attention maps. Then, we iteratively sample positive and negative points from the attention maps with a prompt generation module and send the sampled points to SAM to segment corresponding objects. Experimental results on the long-tail instance segmentation dataset (LVIS) show that our method surpasses the previous open-ended method on the object detection task and can provide additional instance segmentation masks. Besides, VL-SAM achieves favorable performance on the corner case object detection dataset (CODA), demonstrating the effectiveness of VL-SAM in real-world applications. Moreover, VL-SAM exhibits good model generalization that can incorporate various VLMs and SAMs.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 8, 2024

Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All

Vision and language are the two foundational senses for humans, and they build up our cognitive ability and intelligence. While significant breakthroughs have been made in AI language ability, artificial visual intelligence, especially the ability to generate and simulate the world we see, is far lagging behind. To facilitate the development and accessibility of artificial visual intelligence, we created Open-Sora, an open-source video generation model designed to produce high-fidelity video content. Open-Sora supports a wide spectrum of visual generation tasks, including text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, and image-to-video generation. The model leverages advanced deep learning architectures and training/inference techniques to enable flexible video synthesis, which could generate video content of up to 15 seconds, up to 720p resolution, and arbitrary aspect ratios. Specifically, we introduce Spatial-Temporal Diffusion Transformer (STDiT), an efficient diffusion framework for videos that decouples spatial and temporal attention. We also introduce a highly compressive 3D autoencoder to make representations compact and further accelerate training with an ad hoc training strategy. Through this initiative, we aim to foster innovation, creativity, and inclusivity within the community of AI content creation. By embracing the open-source principle, Open-Sora democratizes full access to all the training/inference/data preparation codes as well as model weights. All resources are publicly available at: https://github.com/hpcaitech/Open-Sora.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 29, 2024 1

Towards Distribution-Agnostic Generalized Category Discovery

Data imbalance and open-ended distribution are two intrinsic characteristics of the real visual world. Though encouraging progress has been made in tackling each challenge separately, few works dedicated to combining them towards real-world scenarios. While several previous works have focused on classifying close-set samples and detecting open-set samples during testing, it's still essential to be able to classify unknown subjects as human beings. In this paper, we formally define a more realistic task as distribution-agnostic generalized category discovery (DA-GCD): generating fine-grained predictions for both close- and open-set classes in a long-tailed open-world setting. To tackle the challenging problem, we propose a Self-Balanced Co-Advice contrastive framework (BaCon), which consists of a contrastive-learning branch and a pseudo-labeling branch, working collaboratively to provide interactive supervision to resolve the DA-GCD task. In particular, the contrastive-learning branch provides reliable distribution estimation to regularize the predictions of the pseudo-labeling branch, which in turn guides contrastive learning through self-balanced knowledge transfer and a proposed novel contrastive loss. We compare BaCon with state-of-the-art methods from two closely related fields: imbalanced semi-supervised learning and generalized category discovery. The effectiveness of BaCon is demonstrated with superior performance over all baselines and comprehensive analysis across various datasets. Our code is publicly available.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

MedS^3: Towards Medical Small Language Models with Self-Evolved Slow Thinking

Medical language models (MLMs) have become pivotal in advancing medical natural language processing. However, prior models that rely on pre-training or supervised fine-tuning often exhibit low data efficiency and limited practicality in real-world clinical applications. While OpenAIs O1 highlights test-time scaling in mathematics, attempts to replicate this approach in medicine typically distill responses from GPT-series models to open-source models, focusing primarily on multiple-choice tasks. This strategy, though straightforward, neglects critical concerns like data privacy and realistic deployment in clinical settings. In this work, we present a deployable, small-scale medical language model, \mone, designed for long-chain reasoning in clinical tasks using a self-evolution paradigm. Starting with a seed dataset of around 8,000 instances spanning five domains and 16 datasets, we prompt a base policy model to perform Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to construct verifiable reasoning chains. Each reasoning step is assigned an evolution rollout value, allowing verified trajectories to train the policy model and the reward model. During inference, the policy model generates multiple responses, and the reward model selects the one with the highest reward score. Experiments on eleven evaluation datasets demonstrate that \mone outperforms prior open-source models by 2 points, with the addition of the reward model further boosting performance (sim13 points), surpassing GPT-4o-mini. Code and data are available at https://github.com/pixas/MedSSS.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 21, 2025

Towards Open-Ended Visual Recognition with Large Language Model

Localizing and recognizing objects in the open-ended physical world poses a long-standing challenge within the domain of machine perception. Recent methods have endeavored to address the issue by employing a class-agnostic mask (or box) proposal model, complemented by an open-vocabulary classifier (e.g., CLIP) using pre-extracted text embeddings. However, it is worth noting that these open-vocabulary recognition models still exhibit limitations in practical applications. On one hand, they rely on the provision of class names during testing, where the recognition performance heavily depends on this predefined set of semantic classes by users. On the other hand, when training with multiple datasets, human intervention is required to alleviate the label definition conflict between them. In this paper, we introduce the OmniScient Model (OSM), a novel Large Language Model (LLM) based mask classifier, as a straightforward and effective solution to the aforementioned challenges. Specifically, OSM predicts class labels in a generative manner, thus removing the supply of class names during both training and testing. It also enables cross-dataset training without any human interference, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities due to the world knowledge acquired from the LLM. By combining OSM with an off-the-shelf mask proposal model, we present promising results on various benchmarks, and demonstrate its effectiveness in handling novel concepts. Code/model are available at https://github.com/bytedance/OmniScient-Model.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 14, 2023

The Model Openness Framework: Promoting Completeness and Openness for Reproducibility, Transparency, and Usability in Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI (GAI) offers unprecedented opportunities for research and innovation, but its commercialization has raised concerns about transparency, reproducibility, and safety. Many open GAI models lack the necessary components for full understanding and reproducibility, and some use restrictive licenses whilst claiming to be ``open-source''. To address these concerns, we propose the Model Openness Framework (MOF), a ranked classification system that rates machine learning models based on their completeness and openness, following principles of open science, open source, open data, and open access. The MOF requires specific components of the model development lifecycle to be included and released under appropriate open licenses. This framework aims to prevent misrepresentation of models claiming to be open, guide researchers and developers in providing all model components under permissive licenses, and help individuals and organizations identify models that can be safely adopted without restrictions. By promoting transparency and reproducibility, the MOF combats ``openwashing'' practices and establishes completeness and openness as primary criteria alongside the core tenets of responsible AI. Wide adoption of the MOF will foster a more open AI ecosystem, benefiting research, innovation, and adoption of state-of-the-art models.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 20, 2024

AutoCoreset: An Automatic Practical Coreset Construction Framework

A coreset is a tiny weighted subset of an input set, that closely resembles the loss function, with respect to a certain set of queries. Coresets became prevalent in machine learning as they have shown to be advantageous for many applications. While coreset research is an active research area, unfortunately, coresets are constructed in a problem-dependent manner, where for each problem, a new coreset construction algorithm is usually suggested, a process that may take time or may be hard for new researchers in the field. Even the generic frameworks require additional (problem-dependent) computations or proofs to be done by the user. Besides, many problems do not have (provable) small coresets, limiting their applicability. To this end, we suggest an automatic practical framework for constructing coresets, which requires (only) the input data and the desired cost function from the user, without the need for any other task-related computation to be done by the user. To do so, we reduce the problem of approximating a loss function to an instance of vector summation approximation, where the vectors we aim to sum are loss vectors of a specific subset of the queries, such that we aim to approximate the image of the function on this subset. We show that while this set is limited, the coreset is quite general. An extensive experimental study on various machine learning applications is also conducted. Finally, we provide a ``plug and play" style implementation, proposing a user-friendly system that can be easily used to apply coresets for many problems. Full open source code can be found at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset{https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset}. We believe that these contributions enable future research and easier use and applications of coresets.

  • 4 authors
·
May 19, 2023

What does a platypus look like? Generating customized prompts for zero-shot image classification

Open-vocabulary models are a promising new paradigm for image classification. Unlike traditional classification models, open-vocabulary models classify among any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language during inference. This natural language, called "prompts", typically consists of a set of hand-written templates (e.g., "a photo of a {}") which are completed with each of the category names. This work introduces a simple method to generate higher accuracy prompts, without relying on any explicit knowledge of the task domain and with far fewer hand-constructed sentences. To achieve this, we combine open-vocabulary models with large language models (LLMs) to create Customized Prompts via Language models (CuPL, pronounced "couple"). In particular, we leverage the knowledge contained in LLMs in order to generate many descriptive sentences that contain important discriminating characteristics of the image categories. This allows the model to place a greater importance on these regions in the image when making predictions. We find that this straightforward and general approach improves accuracy on a range of zero-shot image classification benchmarks, including over one percentage point gain on ImageNet. Finally, this simple baseline requires no additional training and remains completely zero-shot. Code available at https://github.com/sarahpratt/CuPL.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 7, 2022

Zero-Shot Dual-Path Integration Framework for Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation

Open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation transcends traditional closed-vocabulary methods by enabling the identification of both previously seen and unseen objects in real-world scenarios. It leverages a dual-modality approach, utilizing both 3D point clouds and 2D multi-view images to generate class-agnostic object mask proposals. Previous efforts predominantly focused on enhancing 3D mask proposal models; consequently, the information that could come from 2D association to 3D was not fully exploited. This bias towards 3D data, while effective for familiar indoor objects, limits the system's adaptability to new and varied object types, where 2D models offer greater utility. Addressing this gap, we introduce Zero-Shot Dual-Path Integration Framework that equally values the contributions of both 3D and 2D modalities. Our framework comprises three components: 3D pathway, 2D pathway, and Dual-Path Integration. 3D pathway generates spatially accurate class-agnostic mask proposals of common indoor objects from 3D point cloud data using a pre-trained 3D model, while 2D pathway utilizes pre-trained open-vocabulary instance segmentation model to identify a diverse array of object proposals from multi-view RGB-D images. In Dual-Path Integration, our Conditional Integration process, which operates in two stages, filters and merges the proposals from both pathways adaptively. This process harmonizes output proposals to enhance segmentation capabilities. Our framework, utilizing pre-trained models in a zero-shot manner, is model-agnostic and demonstrates superior performance on both seen and unseen data, as evidenced by comprehensive evaluations on the ScanNet200 and qualitative results on ARKitScenes datasets.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 16, 2024

COSTARR: Consolidated Open Set Technique with Attenuation for Robust Recognition

Handling novelty remains a key challenge in visual recognition systems. Existing open-set recognition (OSR) methods rely on the familiarity hypothesis, detecting novelty by the absence of familiar features. We propose a novel attenuation hypothesis: small weights learned during training attenuate features and serve a dual role-differentiating known classes while discarding information useful for distinguishing known from unknown classes. To leverage this overlooked information, we present COSTARR, a novel approach that combines both the requirement of familiar features and the lack of unfamiliar ones. We provide a probabilistic interpretation of the COSTARR score, linking it to the likelihood of correct classification and belonging in a known class. To determine the individual contributions of the pre- and post-attenuated features to COSTARR's performance, we conduct ablation studies that show both pre-attenuated deep features and the underutilized post-attenuated Hadamard product features are essential for improving OSR. Also, we evaluate COSTARR in a large-scale setting using ImageNet2012-1K as known data and NINCO, iNaturalist, OpenImage-O, and other datasets as unknowns, across multiple modern pre-trained architectures (ViTs, ConvNeXts, and ResNet). The experiments demonstrate that COSTARR generalizes effectively across various architectures and significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by incorporating previously discarded attenuation information, advancing open-set recognition capabilities.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 1, 2025

Imbalanced Open Set Domain Adaptation via Moving-threshold Estimation and Gradual Alignment

Multimedia applications are often associated with cross-domain knowledge transfer, where Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can be used to reduce the domain shifts. Open Set Domain Adaptation (OSDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a well-labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain under the assumption that the target domain contains unknown classes. Existing OSDA methods consistently lay stress on the covariate shift, ignoring the potential label shift problem. The performance of OSDA methods degrades drastically under intra-domain class imbalance and inter-domain label shift. However, little attention has been paid to this issue in the community. In this paper, the Imbalanced Open Set Domain Adaptation (IOSDA) is explored where the covariate shift, label shift and category mismatch exist simultaneously. To alleviate the negative effects raised by label shift in OSDA, we propose Open-set Moving-threshold Estimation and Gradual Alignment (OMEGA) - a novel architecture that improves existing OSDA methods on class-imbalanced data. Specifically, a novel unknown-aware target clustering scheme is proposed to form tight clusters in the target domain to reduce the negative effects of label shift and intra-domain class imbalance. Furthermore, moving-threshold estimation is designed to generate specific thresholds for each target sample rather than using one for all. Extensive experiments on IOSDA, OSDA and OPDA benchmarks demonstrate that our method could significantly outperform existing state-of-the-arts. Code and data are available at https://github.com/mendicant04/OMEGA.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 8, 2023

DCSEG: Decoupled 3D Open-Set Segmentation using Gaussian Splatting

Open-set 3D segmentation represents a major point of interest for multiple downstream robotics and augmented/virtual reality applications. We present a decoupled 3D segmentation pipeline to ensure modularity and adaptability to novel 3D representations as well as semantic segmentation foundation models. We first reconstruct a scene with 3D Gaussians and learn class-agnostic features through contrastive supervision from a 2D instance proposal network. These 3D features are then clustered to form coarse object- or part-level masks. Finally, we match each 3D cluster to class-aware masks predicted by a 2D open-vocabulary segmentation model, assigning semantic labels without retraining the 3D representation. Our decoupled design (1) provides a plug-and-play interface for swapping different 2D or 3D modules, (2) ensures multi-object instance segmentation at no extra cost, and (3) leverages rich 3D geometry for robust scene understanding. We evaluate on synthetic and real-world indoor datasets, demonstrating improved performance over comparable NeRF-based pipelines on mIoU and mAcc, particularly for challenging or long-tail classes. We also show how varying the 2D backbone affects the final segmentation, highlighting the modularity of our framework. These results confirm that decoupling 3D mask proposal and semantic classification can deliver flexible, efficient, and open-vocabulary 3D segmentation.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 14, 2024

OpenMix: Reviving Known Knowledge for Discovering Novel Visual Categories in An Open World

In this paper, we tackle the problem of discovering new classes in unlabeled visual data given labeled data from disjoint classes. Existing methods typically first pre-train a model with labeled data, and then identify new classes in unlabeled data via unsupervised clustering. However, the labeled data that provide essential knowledge are often underexplored in the second step. The challenge is that the labeled and unlabeled examples are from non-overlapping classes, which makes it difficult to build the learning relationship between them. In this work, we introduce OpenMix to mix the unlabeled examples from an open set and the labeled examples from known classes, where their non-overlapping labels and pseudo-labels are simultaneously mixed into a joint label distribution. OpenMix dynamically compounds examples in two ways. First, we produce mixed training images by incorporating labeled examples with unlabeled examples. With the benefits of unique prior knowledge in novel class discovery, the generated pseudo-labels will be more credible than the original unlabeled predictions. As a result, OpenMix helps to prevent the model from overfitting on unlabeled samples that may be assigned with wrong pseudo-labels. Second, the first way encourages the unlabeled examples with high class-probabilities to have considerable accuracy. We introduce these examples as reliable anchors and further integrate them with unlabeled samples. This enables us to generate more combinations in unlabeled examples and exploit finer object relations among the new classes. Experiments on three classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed OpenMix, which is superior to state-of-the-art methods in novel class discovery.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 12, 2020

OMNI: Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness

Open-ended algorithms aim to learn new, interesting behaviors forever. That requires a vast environment search space, but there are thus infinitely many possible tasks. Even after filtering for tasks the current agent can learn (i.e., learning progress), countless learnable yet uninteresting tasks remain (e.g., minor variations of previously learned tasks). An Achilles Heel of open-endedness research is the inability to quantify (and thus prioritize) tasks that are not just learnable, but also interesting (e.g., worthwhile and novel). We propose solving this problem by Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness (OMNI). The insight is that we can utilize foundation models (FMs) as a model of interestingness (MoI), because they already internalize human concepts of interestingness from training on vast amounts of human-generated data, where humans naturally write about what they find interesting or boring. We show that FM-based MoIs improve open-ended learning by focusing on tasks that are both learnable and interesting, outperforming baselines based on uniform task sampling or learning progress alone. This approach has the potential to dramatically advance the ability to intelligently select which tasks to focus on next (i.e., auto-curricula), and could be seen as AI selecting its own next task to learn, facilitating self-improving AI and AI-Generating Algorithms. Project website at https://www.jennyzhangzt.com/omni/

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 2, 2023

Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Open-vocabulary object detection aims to provide object detectors trained on a fixed set of object categories with the generalizability to detect objects described by arbitrary text queries. Previous methods adopt knowledge distillation to extract knowledge from Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models (PVLMs) and transfer it to detectors. However, due to the non-adaptive proposal cropping and single-level feature mimicking processes, they suffer from information destruction during knowledge extraction and inefficient knowledge transfer. To remedy these limitations, we propose an Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid (OADP) framework, including an Object-Aware Knowledge Extraction (OAKE) module and a Distillation Pyramid (DP) mechanism. When extracting object knowledge from PVLMs, the former adaptively transforms object proposals and adopts object-aware mask attention to obtain precise and complete knowledge of objects. The latter introduces global and block distillation for more comprehensive knowledge transfer to compensate for the missing relation information in object distillation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvement compared to current methods. Especially on the MS-COCO dataset, our OADP framework reaches 35.6 mAP^{N}_{50}, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by 3.3 mAP^{N}_{50}. Code is released at https://github.com/LutingWang/OADP.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 10, 2023

daVinci-LLM:Towards the Science of Pretraining

The foundational pretraining phase determines a model's capability ceiling, as post-training struggles to overcome capability foundations established during pretraining, yet it remains critically under-explored. This stems from a structural paradox: organizations with computational resources operate under commercial pressures that inhibit transparent disclosure, while academic institutions possess research freedom but lack pretraining-scale computational resources. daVinci-LLM occupies this unexplored intersection, combining industrial-scale resources with full research freedom to advance the science of pretraining. We adopt a fully-open paradigm that treats openness as scientific methodology, releasing complete data processing pipelines, full training processes, and systematic exploration results. Recognizing that the field lacks systematic methodology for data processing, we employ the Data Darwinism framework, a principled L0-L9 taxonomy from filtering to synthesis. We train a 3B-parameter model from random initialization across 8T tokens using a two-stage adaptive curriculum that progressively shifts from foundational capabilities to reasoning-intensive enhancement. Through 200+ controlled ablations, we establish that: processing depth systematically enhances capabilities, establishing it as a critical dimension alongside volume scaling; different domains exhibit distinct saturation dynamics, necessitating adaptive strategies from proportion adjustments to format shifts; compositional balance enables targeted intensification while preventing performance collapse; how evaluation protocol choices shape our understanding of pretraining progress. By releasing the complete exploration process, we enable the community to build upon our findings and systematic methodologies to form accumulative scientific knowledge in pretraining.

SII-GAIR-NLP SII-GAIR
·
Mar 28 2

GREAT: Geometry-Intention Collaborative Inference for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Grounding

Open-Vocabulary 3D object affordance grounding aims to anticipate ``action possibilities'' regions on 3D objects with arbitrary instructions, which is crucial for robots to generically perceive real scenarios and respond to operational changes. Existing methods focus on combining images or languages that depict interactions with 3D geometries to introduce external interaction priors. However, they are still vulnerable to a limited semantic space by failing to leverage implied invariant geometries and potential interaction intentions. Normally, humans address complex tasks through multi-step reasoning and respond to diverse situations by leveraging associative and analogical thinking. In light of this, we propose GREAT (GeometRy-intEntion collAboraTive inference) for Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Affordance Grounding, a novel framework that mines the object invariant geometry attributes and performs analogically reason in potential interaction scenarios to form affordance knowledge, fully combining the knowledge with both geometries and visual contents to ground 3D object affordance. Besides, we introduce the Point Image Affordance Dataset v2 (PIADv2), the largest 3D object affordance dataset at present to support the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of GREAT. The code and dataset are available at https://yawen-shao.github.io/GREAT/.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 29, 2024

OpenMathInstruct-2: Accelerating AI for Math with Massive Open-Source Instruction Data

Mathematical reasoning continues to be a critical challenge in large language model (LLM) development with significant interest. However, most of the cutting-edge progress in mathematical reasoning with LLMs has become closed-source due to lack of access to training data. This lack of data access limits researchers from understanding the impact of different choices for synthesizing and utilizing the data. With the goal of creating a high-quality finetuning (SFT) dataset for math reasoning, we conduct careful ablation experiments on data synthesis using the recently released Llama3.1 family of models. Our experiments show that: (a) solution format matters, with excessively verbose solutions proving detrimental to SFT performance, (b) data generated by a strong teacher outperforms on-policy data generated by a weak student model, (c) SFT is robust to low-quality solutions, allowing for imprecise data filtering, and (d) question diversity is crucial for achieving data scaling gains. Based on these insights, we create the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset, which consists of 14M question-solution pairs (approx 600K unique questions), making it nearly eight times larger than the previous largest open-source math reasoning dataset. Finetuning the Llama-3.1-8B-Base using OpenMathInstruct-2 outperforms Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on MATH by an absolute 15.9\% (51.9\% rightarrow 67.8\%). Finally, to accelerate the open-source efforts, we release the code, the finetuned models, and the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset under a commercially permissive license.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024

Open-YOLO 3D: Towards Fast and Accurate Open-Vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation

Recent works on open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation show strong promise, but at the cost of slow inference speed and high computation requirements. This high computation cost is typically due to their heavy reliance on 3D clip features, which require computationally expensive 2D foundation models like Segment Anything (SAM) and CLIP for multi-view aggregation into 3D. As a consequence, this hampers their applicability in many real-world applications that require both fast and accurate predictions. To this end, we propose a fast yet accurate open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation approach, named Open-YOLO 3D, that effectively leverages only 2D object detection from multi-view RGB images for open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. We address this task by generating class-agnostic 3D masks for objects in the scene and associating them with text prompts. We observe that the projection of class-agnostic 3D point cloud instances already holds instance information; thus, using SAM might only result in redundancy that unnecessarily increases the inference time. We empirically find that a better performance of matching text prompts to 3D masks can be achieved in a faster fashion with a 2D object detector. We validate our Open-YOLO 3D on two benchmarks, ScanNet200 and Replica, under two scenarios: (i) with ground truth masks, where labels are required for given object proposals, and (ii) with class-agnostic 3D proposals generated from a 3D proposal network. Our Open-YOLO 3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets while obtaining up to sim16times speedup compared to the best existing method in literature. On ScanNet200 val. set, our Open-YOLO 3D achieves mean average precision (mAP) of 24.7\% while operating at 22 seconds per scene. Code and model are available at github.com/aminebdj/OpenYOLO3D.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 4, 2024

PAC Prediction Sets for Large Language Models of Code

Prediction sets have recently been shown to be a promising strategy for quantifying the uncertainty of deep neural networks in a way that provides theoretical guarantees. However, existing techniques have largely targeted settings where the space of labels is simple, so prediction sets can be arbitrary subsets of labels. For structured prediction problems where the space of labels is exponential in size, even prediction sets containing a small fraction of all labels can be exponentially large. In the context of code generation, we propose a solution that considers a restricted set of prediction sets that can compactly be represented as partial programs, which are programs with portions replaced with holes. Given a trained code generation model, our algorithm leverages a programming language's abstract syntax tree to generate a set of programs such that the correct program is in the set with high-confidence. Valuable applications of our algorithm include a Codex-style code generator with holes in uncertain parts of the generated code, which provides a partial program with theoretical guarantees. We evaluate our approach on PICARD (a T5 model for SQL semantic parsing) and Codex (a GPT model for over a dozen programming languages, including Python), demonstrating that our approach generates compact PAC prediction sets. This is the first research contribution that generates PAC prediction sets for generative code models.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 17, 2023

OV-VG: A Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding

Open-vocabulary learning has emerged as a cutting-edge research area, particularly in light of the widespread adoption of vision-based foundational models. Its primary objective is to comprehend novel concepts that are not encompassed within a predefined vocabulary. One key facet of this endeavor is Visual Grounding, which entails locating a specific region within an image based on a corresponding language description. While current foundational models excel at various visual language tasks, there's a noticeable absence of models specifically tailored for open-vocabulary visual grounding. This research endeavor introduces novel and challenging OV tasks, namely Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding and Open-Vocabulary Phrase Localization. The overarching aim is to establish connections between language descriptions and the localization of novel objects. To facilitate this, we have curated a comprehensive annotated benchmark, encompassing 7,272 OV-VG images and 1,000 OV-PL images. In our pursuit of addressing these challenges, we delved into various baseline methodologies rooted in existing open-vocabulary object detection, VG, and phrase localization frameworks. Surprisingly, we discovered that state-of-the-art methods often falter in diverse scenarios. Consequently, we developed a novel framework that integrates two critical components: Text-Image Query Selection and Language-Guided Feature Attention. These modules are designed to bolster the recognition of novel categories and enhance the alignment between visual and linguistic information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework, which consistently attains SOTA performance across the OV-VG task. Additionally, ablation studies provide further evidence of the effectiveness of our innovative models. Codes and datasets will be made publicly available at https://github.com/cv516Buaa/OV-VG.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 22, 2023

OV-PARTS: Towards Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation

Segmenting and recognizing diverse object parts is a crucial ability in applications spanning various computer vision and robotic tasks. While significant progress has been made in object-level Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation (OVSS), i.e., segmenting objects with arbitrary text, the corresponding part-level research poses additional challenges. Firstly, part segmentation inherently involves intricate boundaries, while limited annotated data compounds the challenge. Secondly, part segmentation introduces an open granularity challenge due to the diverse and often ambiguous definitions of parts in the open world. Furthermore, the large-scale vision and language models, which play a key role in the open vocabulary setting, struggle to recognize parts as effectively as objects. To comprehensively investigate and tackle these challenges, we propose an Open-Vocabulary Part Segmentation (OV-PARTS) benchmark. OV-PARTS includes refined versions of two publicly available datasets: Pascal-Part-116 and ADE20K-Part-234. And it covers three specific tasks: Generalized Zero-Shot Part Segmentation, Cross-Dataset Part Segmentation, and Few-Shot Part Segmentation, providing insights into analogical reasoning, open granularity and few-shot adapting abilities of models. Moreover, we analyze and adapt two prevailing paradigms of existing object-level OVSS methods for OV-PARTS. Extensive experimental analysis is conducted to inspire future research in leveraging foundational models for OV-PARTS. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/OV_PARTS.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 8, 2023

ModHiFi: Identifying High Fidelity predictive components for Model Modification

Open weight models, which are ubiquitous, rarely provide access to their training data or loss function. This makes modifying such models for tasks such as pruning or unlearning constrained by this unavailability an active area of research. Existing techniques typically require gradients or ground-truth labels, rendering them infeasible in settings with limited computational resources. In this work, we investigate the fundamental question of identifying components that are critical to the model's predictive performance, without access to either gradients or the loss function, and with only distributional access such as synthetic data. We theoretically demonstrate that the global reconstruction error is linearly bounded by local reconstruction errors for Lipschitz-continuous networks such as CNNs and well-trained Transformers (which, contrary to existing literature, we find exhibit Lipschitz continuity). This motivates using the locally reconstructive behavior of component subsets to quantify their global importance, via a metric that we term Subset Fidelity. In the uncorrelated features setting, selecting individual components via their Subset Fidelity scores is optimal, which we use to propose ModHiFi, an algorithm for model modification that requires no training data or loss function access. ModHiFi-P, for structured pruning, achieves an 11% speedup over the current state of the art on ImageNet models and competitive performance on language models. ModHiFi-U, for classwise unlearning, achieves complete unlearning on CIFAR-10 without fine-tuning and demonstrates competitive performance on Swin Transformers.

SE-Bench: Benchmarking Self-Evolution with Knowledge Internalization

True self-evolution requires agents to act as lifelong learners that internalize novel experiences to solve future problems. However, rigorously measuring this foundational capability is hindered by two obstacles: the entanglement of prior knowledge, where ``new'' knowledge may appear in pre-training data, and the entanglement of reasoning complexity, where failures may stem from problem difficulty rather than an inability to recall learned knowledge. We introduce SE-Bench, a diagnostic environment that obfuscates the NumPy library and its API doc into a pseudo-novel package with randomized identifiers. Agents are trained to internalize this package and evaluated on simple coding tasks without access to documentation, yielding a clean setting where tasks are trivial with the new API doc but impossible for base models without it. Our investigation reveals three insights: (1) the Open-Book Paradox, where training with reference documentation inhibits retention, requiring "Closed-Book Training" to force knowledge compression into weights; (2) the RL Gap, where standard RL fails to internalize new knowledge completely due to PPO clipping and negative gradients; and (3) the viability of Self-Play for internalization, proving models can learn from self-generated, noisy tasks when coupled with SFT, but not RL. Overall, SE-Bench establishes a rigorous diagnostic platform for self-evolution with knowledge internalization. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/thunlp/SE-Bench.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 4 2

Boosting Open-Vocabulary Object Detection by Handling Background Samples

Open-vocabulary object detection is the task of accurately detecting objects from a candidate vocabulary list that includes both base and novel categories. Currently, numerous open-vocabulary detectors have achieved success by leveraging the impressive zero-shot capabilities of CLIP. However, we observe that CLIP models struggle to effectively handle background images (i.e. images without corresponding labels) due to their language-image learning methodology. This limitation results in suboptimal performance for open-vocabulary detectors that rely on CLIP when processing background samples. In this paper, we propose Background Information Representation for open-vocabulary Detector (BIRDet), a novel approach to address the limitations of CLIP in handling background samples. Specifically, we design Background Information Modeling (BIM) to replace the single, fixed background embedding in mainstream open-vocabulary detectors with dynamic scene information, and prompt it into image-related background representations. This method effectively enhances the ability to classify oversized regions as background. Besides, we introduce Partial Object Suppression (POS), an algorithm that utilizes the ratio of overlap area to address the issue of misclassifying partial regions as foreground. Experiments on OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of achieving performance enhancements across various open-vocabulary detectors.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024