Daily Papers

The Smart Dietary Assistant utilizes Machine Learning to provide personalized dietary advice, focusing on users with conditions like diabetes. This app leverages the Grounding DINO model, which combines a text encoder and image backbone to enhance food item detection without requiring a labeled dataset. With an AP score of 52.5 on the COCO dataset, the model demonstrates high accuracy in real-world scenarios, utilizing attention mechanisms to precisely recognize objects based on user-provided labels and images. Developed using React Native and TypeScript, the app operates seamlessly across multiple platforms and integrates a self-hosted PostgreSQL database, ensuring data integrity and enhancing user privacy. Key functionalities include personalized nutrition profiles, real-time food scanning, and health insights, facilitating informed dietary choices for health management and lifestyle optimization. Future developments aim to integrate wearable technologies for more tailored health recommendations. Keywords: Food Image Recognition, Machine Learning in Nutrition, Zero-Shot Object Detection

Grounding-DINO is a state-of-the-art open-set detection model that tackles multiple vision tasks including Open-Vocabulary Detection (OVD), Phrase Grounding (PG), and Referring Expression Comprehension (REC). Its effectiveness has led to its widespread adoption as a mainstream architecture for various downstream applications. However, despite its significance, the original Grounding-DINO model lacks comprehensive public technical details due to the unavailability of its training code. To bridge this gap, we present MM-Grounding-DINO, an open-source, comprehensive, and user-friendly baseline, which is built with the MMDetection toolbox. It adopts abundant vision datasets for pre-training and various detection and grounding datasets for fine-tuning. We give a comprehensive analysis of each reported result and detailed settings for reproduction. The extensive experiments on the benchmarks mentioned demonstrate that our MM-Grounding-DINO-Tiny outperforms the Grounding-DINO-Tiny baseline. We release all our models to the research community. Codes and trained models are released at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection/tree/main/configs/mm_grounding_dino.

This paper introduces Grounding DINO 1.5, a suite of advanced open-set object detection models developed by IDEA Research, which aims to advance the "Edge" of open-set object detection. The suite encompasses two models: Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro, a high-performance model designed for stronger generalization capability across a wide range of scenarios, and Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge, an efficient model optimized for faster speed demanded in many applications requiring edge deployment. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model advances its predecessor by scaling up the model architecture, integrating an enhanced vision backbone, and expanding the training dataset to over 20 million images with grounding annotations, thereby achieving a richer semantic understanding. The Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, while designed for efficiency with reduced feature scales, maintains robust detection capabilities by being trained on the same comprehensive dataset. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of Grounding DINO 1.5, with the Grounding DINO 1.5 Pro model attaining a 54.3 AP on the COCO detection benchmark and a 55.7 AP on the LVIS-minival zero-shot transfer benchmark, setting new records for open-set object detection. Furthermore, the Grounding DINO 1.5 Edge model, when optimized with TensorRT, achieves a speed of 75.2 FPS while attaining a zero-shot performance of 36.2 AP on the LVIS-minival benchmark, making it more suitable for edge computing scenarios. Model examples and demos with API will be released at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Grounding-DINO-1.5-API

In this paper, we introduce DINO-X, which is a unified object-centric vision model developed by IDEA Research with the best open-world object detection performance to date. DINO-X employs the same Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture as Grounding DINO 1.5 to pursue an object-level representation for open-world object understanding. To make long-tailed object detection easy, DINO-X extends its input options to support text prompt, visual prompt, and customized prompt. With such flexible prompt options, we develop a universal object prompt to support prompt-free open-world detection, making it possible to detect anything in an image without requiring users to provide any prompt. To enhance the model's core grounding capability, we have constructed a large-scale dataset with over 100 million high-quality grounding samples, referred to as Grounding-100M, for advancing the model's open-vocabulary detection performance. Pre-training on such a large-scale grounding dataset leads to a foundational object-level representation, which enables DINO-X to integrate multiple perception heads to simultaneously support multiple object perception and understanding tasks, including detection, segmentation, pose estimation, object captioning, object-based QA, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of DINO-X. Specifically, the DINO-X Pro model achieves 56.0 AP, 59.8 AP, and 52.4 AP on the COCO, LVIS-minival, and LVIS-val zero-shot object detection benchmarks, respectively. Notably, it scores 63.3 AP and 56.5 AP on the rare classes of LVIS-minival and LVIS-val benchmarks, both improving the previous SOTA performance by 5.8 AP. Such a result underscores its significantly improved capacity for recognizing long-tailed objects.

We introduce Grounded SAM, which uses Grounding DINO as an open-set object detector to combine with the segment anything model (SAM). This integration enables the detection and segmentation of any regions based on arbitrary text inputs and opens a door to connecting various vision models. As shown in Fig.1, a wide range of vision tasks can be achieved by using the versatile Grounded SAM pipeline. For example, an automatic annotation pipeline based solely on input images can be realized by incorporating models such as BLIP and Recognize Anything. Additionally, incorporating Stable-Diffusion allows for controllable image editing, while the integration of OSX facilitates promptable 3D human motion analysis. Grounded SAM also shows superior performance on open-vocabulary benchmarks, achieving 48.7 mean AP on SegInW (Segmentation in the wild) zero-shot benchmark with the combination of Grounding DINO-Base and SAM-Huge models.

Advances in multimodal pre-training have propelled object-level foundation models, such as Grounding DINO and Florence-2, in tasks like visual grounding and object detection. However, interpreting these models\' decisions has grown increasingly challenging. Existing interpretable attribution methods for object-level task interpretation have notable limitations: (1) gradient-based methods lack precise localization due to visual-textual fusion in foundation models, and (2) perturbation-based methods produce noisy saliency maps, limiting fine-grained interpretability. To address these, we propose a Visual Precision Search method that generates accurate attribution maps with fewer regions. Our method bypasses internal model parameters to overcome attribution issues from multimodal fusion, dividing inputs into sparse sub-regions and using consistency and collaboration scores to accurately identify critical decision-making regions. We also conducted a theoretical analysis of the boundary guarantees and scope of applicability of our method. Experiments on RefCOCO, MS COCO, and LVIS show our approach enhances object-level task interpretability over SOTA for Grounding DINO and Florence-2 across various evaluation metrics, with faithfulness gains of 23.7\%, 31.6\%, and 20.1\% on MS COCO, LVIS, and RefCOCO for Grounding DINO, and 102.9\% and 66.9\% on MS COCO and RefCOCO for Florence-2. Additionally, our method can interpret failures in visual grounding and object detection tasks, surpassing existing methods across multiple evaluation metrics. The code will be released at https://github.com/RuoyuChen10/VPS.

End-to-end transformer-based detectors (DETRs) have shown exceptional performance in both closed-set and open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) tasks through the integration of language modalities. However, their demanding computational requirements have hindered their practical application in real-time object detection (OD) scenarios. In this paper, we scrutinize the limitations of two leading models in the OVDEval benchmark, OmDet and Grounding-DINO, and introduce OmDet-Turbo. This novel transformer-based real-time OVD model features an innovative Efficient Fusion Head (EFH) module designed to alleviate the bottlenecks observed in OmDet and Grounding-DINO. Notably, OmDet-Turbo-Base achieves a 100.2 frames per second (FPS) with TensorRT and language cache techniques applied. Notably, in zero-shot scenarios on COCO and LVIS datasets, OmDet-Turbo achieves performance levels nearly on par with current state-of-the-art supervised models. Furthermore, it establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks on ODinW and OVDEval, boasting an AP of 30.1 and an NMS-AP of 26.86, respectively. The practicality of OmDet-Turbo in industrial applications is underscored by its exceptional performance on benchmark datasets and superior inference speed, positioning it as a compelling choice for real-time object detection tasks. Code: https://github.com/om-ai-lab/OmDet

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made significant strides in expanding the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the incorporation of visual perception interfaces. Despite the emergence of exciting applications and the availability of diverse instruction tuning data, existing approaches often rely on CLIP or its variants as the visual branch, and merely extract features from the deep layers. However, these methods lack a comprehensive analysis of the visual encoders in MLLMs. In this paper, we conduct an extensive investigation into the effectiveness of different vision encoders within MLLMs. Our findings reveal that the shallow layer features of CLIP offer particular advantages for fine-grained tasks such as grounding and region understanding. Surprisingly, the vision-only model DINO, which is not pretrained with text-image alignment, demonstrates promising performance as a visual branch within MLLMs. By simply equipping it with an MLP layer for alignment, DINO surpasses CLIP in fine-grained related perception tasks. Building upon these observations, we propose a simple yet effective feature merging strategy, named COMM, that integrates CLIP and DINO with Multi-level features Merging, to enhance the visual capabilities of MLLMs. We evaluate COMM through comprehensive experiments on a wide range of benchmarks, including image captioning, visual question answering, visual grounding, and object hallucination. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of COMM compared to existing methods, showcasing its enhanced visual capabilities within MLLMs. Code will be made available at https://github.com/YuchenLiu98/COMM.

In this paper, we present an open-set object detector, called Grounding DINO, by marrying Transformer-based detector DINO with grounded pre-training, which can detect arbitrary objects with human inputs such as category names or referring expressions. The key solution of open-set object detection is introducing language to a closed-set detector for open-set concept generalization. To effectively fuse language and vision modalities, we conceptually divide a closed-set detector into three phases and propose a tight fusion solution, which includes a feature enhancer, a language-guided query selection, and a cross-modality decoder for cross-modality fusion. While previous works mainly evaluate open-set object detection on novel categories, we propose to also perform evaluations on referring expression comprehension for objects specified with attributes. Grounding DINO performs remarkably well on all three settings, including benchmarks on COCO, LVIS, ODinW, and RefCOCO/+/g. Grounding DINO achieves a 52.5 AP on the COCO detection zero-shot transfer benchmark, i.e., without any training data from COCO. It sets a new record on the ODinW zero-shot benchmark with a mean 26.1 AP. Code will be available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/GroundingDINO.

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) methods entail detecting anomalies directly without access to any known normal or abnormal samples within the target item categories. Existing approaches typically rely on the robust generalization capabilities of multimodal pretrained models, computing similarities between manually crafted textual features representing "normal" or "abnormal" semantics and image features to detect anomalies and localize anomalous patches. However, the generic descriptions of "abnormal" often fail to precisely match diverse types of anomalies across different object categories. Additionally, computing feature similarities for single patches struggles to pinpoint specific locations of anomalies with various sizes and scales. To address these issues, we propose a novel ZSAD method called FiLo, comprising two components: adaptively learned Fine-Grained Description (FG-Des) and position-enhanced High-Quality Localization (HQ-Loc). FG-Des introduces fine-grained anomaly descriptions for each category using Large Language Models (LLMs) and employs adaptively learned textual templates to enhance the accuracy and interpretability of anomaly detection. HQ-Loc, utilizing Grounding DINO for preliminary localization, position-enhanced text prompts, and Multi-scale Multi-shape Cross-modal Interaction (MMCI) module, facilitates more accurate localization of anomalies of different sizes and shapes. Experimental results on datasets like MVTec and VisA demonstrate that FiLo significantly improves the performance of ZSAD in both detection and localization, achieving state-of-the-art performance with an image-level AUC of 83.9% and a pixel-level AUC of 95.9% on the VisA dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/CASIA-IVA-Lab/FiLo.

The ability to predict future outcomes given control actions is fundamental for physical reasoning. However, such predictive models, often called world models, have proven challenging to learn and are typically developed for task-specific solutions with online policy learning. We argue that the true potential of world models lies in their ability to reason and plan across diverse problems using only passive data. Concretely, we require world models to have the following three properties: 1) be trainable on offline, pre-collected trajectories, 2) support test-time behavior optimization, and 3) facilitate task-agnostic reasoning. To realize this, we present DINO World Model (DINO-WM), a new method to model visual dynamics without reconstructing the visual world. DINO-WM leverages spatial patch features pre-trained with DINOv2, enabling it to learn from offline behavioral trajectories by predicting future patch features. This design allows DINO-WM to achieve observational goals through action sequence optimization, facilitating task-agnostic behavior planning by treating desired goal patch features as prediction targets. We evaluate DINO-WM across various domains, including maze navigation, tabletop pushing, and particle manipulation. Our experiments demonstrate that DINO-WM can generate zero-shot behavioral solutions at test time without relying on expert demonstrations, reward modeling, or pre-learned inverse models. Notably, DINO-WM exhibits strong generalization capabilities compared to prior state-of-the-art work, adapting to diverse task families such as arbitrarily configured mazes, push manipulation with varied object shapes, and multi-particle scenarios.

The goal of this paper is to improve the generality and accuracy of open-vocabulary object counting in images. To improve the generality, we repurpose an open-vocabulary detection foundation model (GroundingDINO) for the counting task, and also extend its capabilities by introducing modules to enable specifying the target object to count by visual exemplars. In turn, these new capabilities - being able to specify the target object by multi-modalites (text and exemplars) - lead to an improvement in counting accuracy. We make three contributions: First, we introduce the first open-world counting model, CountGD, where the prompt can be specified by a text description or visual exemplars or both; Second, we show that the performance of the model significantly improves the state of the art on multiple counting benchmarks - when using text only, CountGD is comparable to or outperforms all previous text-only works, and when using both text and visual exemplars, we outperform all previous models; Third, we carry out a preliminary study into different interactions between the text and visual exemplar prompts, including the cases where they reinforce each other and where one restricts the other. The code and an app to test the model are available at https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/countgd/.

Very-High Resolution (VHR) remote sensing imagery is increasingly accessible, but often lacks annotations for effective machine learning applications. Recent foundation models like GroundingDINO and Segment Anything (SAM) provide opportunities to automatically generate annotations. This study introduces FMARS (Foundation Model Annotations in Remote Sensing), a methodology leveraging VHR imagery and foundation models for fast and robust annotation. We focus on disaster management and provide a large-scale dataset with labels obtained from pre-event imagery over 19 disaster events, derived from the Maxar Open Data initiative. We train segmentation models on the generated labels, using Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) techniques to increase transferability to real-world scenarios. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging foundation models to automatically annotate remote sensing data at scale, enabling robust downstream models for critical applications. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/links-ads/igarss-fmars.

Large language models (LLMs) show their powerful automatic reasoning and planning capability with a wealth of semantic knowledge about the human world. However, the grounding problem still hinders the applications of LLMs in the real-world environment. Existing studies try to fine-tune the LLM or utilize pre-defined behavior APIs to bridge the LLMs and the environment, which not only costs huge human efforts to customize for every single task but also weakens the generality strengths of LLMs. To autonomously ground the LLM onto the environment, we proposed the Self-Driven Grounding (SDG) framework to automatically and progressively ground the LLM with self-driven skill learning. SDG first employs the LLM to propose the hypothesis of sub-goals to achieve tasks and then verify the feasibility of the hypothesis via interacting with the underlying environment. Once verified, SDG can then learn generalized skills with the guidance of these successfully grounded subgoals. These skills can be further utilized to accomplish more complex tasks which fail to pass the verification phase. Verified in the famous instruction following task set-BabyAI, SDG achieves comparable performance in the most challenging tasks compared with imitation learning methods that cost millions of demonstrations, proving the effectiveness of learned skills and showing the feasibility and efficiency of our framework.

Existing work in language grounding typically study single environments. How do we build unified models that apply across multiple environments? We propose the multi-environment Symbolic Interactive Language Grounding benchmark (SILG), which unifies a collection of diverse grounded language learning environments under a common interface. SILG consists of grid-world environments that require generalization to new dynamics, entities, and partially observed worlds (RTFM, Messenger, NetHack), as well as symbolic counterparts of visual worlds that require interpreting rich natural language with respect to complex scenes (ALFWorld, Touchdown). Together, these environments provide diverse grounding challenges in richness of observation space, action space, language specification, and plan complexity. In addition, we propose the first shared model architecture for RL on these environments, and evaluate recent advances such as egocentric local convolution, recurrent state-tracking, entity-centric attention, and pretrained LM using SILG. Our shared architecture achieves comparable performance to environment-specific architectures. Moreover, we find that many recent modelling advances do not result in significant gains on environments other than the one they were designed for. This highlights the need for a multi-environment benchmark. Finally, the best models significantly underperform humans on SILG, which suggests ample room for future work. We hope SILG enables the community to quickly identify new methodologies for language grounding that generalize to a diverse set of environments and their associated challenges.

Today, large language models (LLMs) are taught to use new tools by providing a few demonstrations of the tool's usage. Unfortunately, demonstrations are hard to acquire, and can result in undesirable biased usage if the wrong demonstration is chosen. Even in the rare scenario that demonstrations are readily available, there is no principled selection protocol to determine how many and which ones to provide. As tasks grow more complex, the selection search grows combinatorially and invariably becomes intractable. Our work provides an alternative to demonstrations: tool documentation. We advocate the use of tool documentation, descriptions for the individual tool usage, over demonstrations. We substantiate our claim through three main empirical findings on 6 tasks across both vision and language modalities. First, on existing benchmarks, zero-shot prompts with only tool documentation are sufficient for eliciting proper tool usage, achieving performance on par with few-shot prompts. Second, on a newly collected realistic tool-use dataset with hundreds of available tool APIs, we show that tool documentation is significantly more valuable than demonstrations, with zero-shot documentation significantly outperforming few-shot without documentation. Third, we highlight the benefits of tool documentations by tackling image generation and video tracking using just-released unseen state-of-the-art models as tools. Finally, we highlight the possibility of using tool documentation to automatically enable new applications: by using nothing more than the documentation of GroundingDino, Stable Diffusion, XMem, and SAM, LLMs can re-invent the functionalities of the just-released Grounded-SAM and Track Anything models.

Predicting future dynamics is crucial for applications like autonomous driving and robotics, where understanding the environment is key. Existing pixel-level methods are computationally expensive and often focus on irrelevant details. To address these challenges, we introduce DINO-Foresight, a novel framework that operates in the semantic feature space of pretrained Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Our approach trains a masked feature transformer in a self-supervised manner to predict the evolution of VFM features over time. By forecasting these features, we can apply off-the-shelf, task-specific heads for various scene understanding tasks. In this framework, VFM features are treated as a latent space, to which different heads attach to perform specific tasks for future-frame analysis. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms existing methods, demonstrating its robustness and scalability. Additionally, we highlight how intermediate transformer representations in DINO-Foresight improve downstream task performance, offering a promising path for the self-supervised enhancement of VFM features. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/Sta8is/DINO-Foresight .

3D visual grounding is a critical skill for household robots, enabling them to navigate, manipulate objects, and answer questions based on their environment. While existing approaches often rely on extensive labeled data or exhibit limitations in handling complex language queries, we propose LLM-Grounder, a novel zero-shot, open-vocabulary, Large Language Model (LLM)-based 3D visual grounding pipeline. LLM-Grounder utilizes an LLM to decompose complex natural language queries into semantic constituents and employs a visual grounding tool, such as OpenScene or LERF, to identify objects in a 3D scene. The LLM then evaluates the spatial and commonsense relations among the proposed objects to make a final grounding decision. Our method does not require any labeled training data and can generalize to novel 3D scenes and arbitrary text queries. We evaluate LLM-Grounder on the ScanRefer benchmark and demonstrate state-of-the-art zero-shot grounding accuracy. Our findings indicate that LLMs significantly improve the grounding capability, especially for complex language queries, making LLM-Grounder an effective approach for 3D vision-language tasks in robotics. Videos and interactive demos can be found on the project website https://chat-with-nerf.github.io/ .

Existing text-to-video (T2V) models often struggle with generating videos with sufficiently pronounced or complex actions. A key limitation lies in the text prompt's inability to precisely convey intricate motion details. To address this, we propose a novel framework, MVideo, designed to produce long-duration videos with precise, fluid actions. MVideo overcomes the limitations of text prompts by incorporating mask sequences as an additional motion condition input, providing a clearer, more accurate representation of intended actions. Leveraging foundational vision models such as GroundingDINO and SAM2, MVideo automatically generates mask sequences, enhancing both efficiency and robustness. Our results demonstrate that, after training, MVideo effectively aligns text prompts with motion conditions to produce videos that simultaneously meet both criteria. This dual control mechanism allows for more dynamic video generation by enabling alterations to either the text prompt or motion condition independently, or both in tandem. Furthermore, MVideo supports motion condition editing and composition, facilitating the generation of videos with more complex actions. MVideo thus advances T2V motion generation, setting a strong benchmark for improved action depiction in current video diffusion models. Our project page is available at https://mvideo-v1.github.io/.

Current 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding methods mostly utilize well-aligned 2D images as the bridge to learn 3D features with language. However, applying these approaches becomes challenging in scenarios where 2D images are absent. In this work, we introduce a completely new pipeline, namely, OpenIns3D, which requires no 2D image inputs, for 3D open-vocabulary scene understanding at the instance level. The OpenIns3D framework employs a "Mask-Snap-Lookup" scheme. The "Mask" module learns class-agnostic mask proposals in 3D point clouds. The "Snap" module generates synthetic scene-level images at multiple scales and leverages 2D vision language models to extract interesting objects. The "Lookup" module searches through the outcomes of "Snap" with the help of Mask2Pixel maps, which contain the precise correspondence between 3D masks and synthetic images, to assign category names to the proposed masks. This 2D input-free, easy-to-train, and flexible approach achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of indoor and outdoor datasets with a large margin. Furthermore, OpenIns3D allows for effortless switching of 2D detectors without re-training. When integrated with state-of-the-art 2D open-world models such as ODISE and GroundingDINO, superb results are observed on open-vocabulary instance segmentation. When integrated with LLM-powered 2D models like LISA, it demonstrates a remarkable capacity to process highly complex text queries, including those that require intricate reasoning and world knowledge. Project page: https://zheninghuang.github.io/OpenIns3D/

Grounding the common-sense reasoning of Large Language Models in physical domains remains a pivotal yet unsolved problem for embodied AI. Whereas prior works have focused on leveraging LLMs directly for planning in symbolic spaces, this work uses LLMs to guide the search of task structures and constraints implicit in multi-step demonstrations. Specifically, we borrow from manipulation planning literature the concept of mode families, which group robot configurations by specific motion constraints, to serve as an abstraction layer between the high-level language representations of an LLM and the low-level physical trajectories of a robot. By replaying a few human demonstrations with synthetic perturbations, we generate coverage over the demonstrations' state space with additional successful executions as well as counterfactuals that fail the task. Our explanation-based learning framework trains an end-to-end differentiable neural network to predict successful trajectories from failures and as a by-product learns classifiers that ground low-level states and images in mode families without dense labeling. The learned grounding classifiers can further be used to translate language plans into reactive policies in the physical domain in an interpretable manner. We show our approach improves the interpretability and reactivity of imitation learning through 2D navigation and simulated and real robot manipulation tasks. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/grounding-plans

We introduce EarthPT -- an Earth Observation (EO) pretrained transformer. EarthPT is a 700 million parameter decoding transformer foundation model trained in an autoregressive self-supervised manner and developed specifically with EO use-cases in mind. We demonstrate that EarthPT is an effective forecaster that can accurately predict future pixel-level surface reflectances across the 400-2300 nm range well into the future. For example, forecasts of the evolution of the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) have a typical error of approximately 0.05 (over a natural range of -1 -> 1) at the pixel level over a five month test set horizon, out-performing simple phase-folded models based on historical averaging. We also demonstrate that embeddings learnt by EarthPT hold semantically meaningful information and could be exploited for downstream tasks such as highly granular, dynamic land use classification. Excitingly, we note that the abundance of EO data provides us with -- in theory -- quadrillions of training tokens. Therefore, if we assume that EarthPT follows neural scaling laws akin to those derived for Large Language Models (LLMs), there is currently no data-imposed limit to scaling EarthPT and other similar `Large Observation Models.'

While computer science has seen remarkable advancements in foundation models, which remain underexplored in geoscience. Addressing this gap, we introduce a workflow to develop geophysical foundation models, including data preparation, model pre-training, and adaption to downstream tasks. From 192 globally collected 3-D seismic volumes, we create a carefully curated dataset of 2,286,422 2-D seismic images. Fully using these unlabeled images, we employ the self-supervised learning to pre-train a Transformer-based Seismic Foundation Model (SFM) for producing all-purpose seismic features that work across various tasks and surveys. Through experiments on seismic facies classification, geobody identification, interpolation, denoising, and inversion, our pre-trained model demonstrates versatility, generalization, scalability, and superior performance over baseline models. Conclusively, we provide a foundation model and vast dataset to advance AI in geophysics, addressing challenges (poor generalization, lacking labels, and repetitive training for task-specified models) of applying AI in geophysics and paving the way for future innovations in geoscience.

Recent works successfully leveraged Large Language Models' (LLM) abilities to capture abstract knowledge about world's physics to solve decision-making problems. Yet, the alignment between LLMs' knowledge and the environment can be wrong and limit functional competence due to lack of grounding. In this paper, we study an approach (named GLAM) to achieve this alignment through functional grounding: we consider an agent using an LLM as a policy that is progressively updated as the agent interacts with the environment, leveraging online Reinforcement Learning to improve its performance to solve goals. Using an interactive textual environment designed to study higher-level forms of functional grounding, and a set of spatial and navigation tasks, we study several scientific questions: 1) Can LLMs boost sample efficiency for online learning of various RL tasks? 2) How can it boost different forms of generalization? 3) What is the impact of online learning? We study these questions by functionally grounding several variants (size, architecture) of FLAN-T5.

Affordance grounding refers to the task of finding the area of an object with which one can interact. It is a fundamental but challenging task, as a successful solution requires the comprehensive understanding of a scene in multiple aspects including detection, localization, and recognition of objects with their parts, of geo-spatial configuration/layout of the scene, of 3D shapes and physics, as well as of the functionality and potential interaction of the objects and humans. Much of the knowledge is hidden and beyond the image content with the supervised labels from a limited training set. In this paper, we make an attempt to improve the generalization capability of the current affordance grounding by taking the advantage of the rich world, abstract, and human-object-interaction knowledge from pretrained large-scale vision language models. Under the AGD20K benchmark, our proposed model demonstrates a significant performance gain over the competing methods for in-the-wild object affordance grounding. We further demonstrate it can ground affordance for objects from random Internet images, even if both objects and actions are unseen during training. Project site: https://jasonqsy.github.io/AffordanceLLM/

We present ScienceWorld, a benchmark to test agents' scientific reasoning abilities in a new interactive text environment at the level of a standard elementary school science curriculum. Despite the transformer-based progress seen in question-answering and scientific text processing, we find that current models cannot reason about or explain learned science concepts in novel contexts. For instance, models can easily answer what the conductivity of a known material is but struggle when asked how they would conduct an experiment in a grounded environment to find the conductivity of an unknown material. This begs the question of whether current models are simply retrieving answers by way of seeing a large number of similar examples or if they have learned to reason about concepts in a reusable manner. We hypothesize that agents need to be grounded in interactive environments to achieve such reasoning capabilities. Our experiments provide empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis -- showing that a 1.5 million parameter agent trained interactively for 100k steps outperforms a 11 billion parameter model statically trained for scientific question-answering and reasoning from millions of expert demonstrations.

Large language models can encode a wealth of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge could be extremely useful to robots aiming to act upon high-level, temporally extended instructions expressed in natural language. However, a significant weakness of language models is that they lack real-world experience, which makes it difficult to leverage them for decision making within a given embodiment. For example, asking a language model to describe how to clean a spill might result in a reasonable narrative, but it may not be applicable to a particular agent, such as a robot, that needs to perform this task in a particular environment. We propose to provide real-world grounding by means of pretrained skills, which are used to constrain the model to propose natural language actions that are both feasible and contextually appropriate. The robot can act as the language model's "hands and eyes," while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task. We show how low-level skills can be combined with large language models so that the language model provides high-level knowledge about the procedures for performing complex and temporally-extended instructions, while value functions associated with these skills provide the grounding necessary to connect this knowledge to a particular physical environment. We evaluate our method on a number of real-world robotic tasks, where we show the need for real-world grounding and that this approach is capable of completing long-horizon, abstract, natural language instructions on a mobile manipulator. The project's website and the video can be found at https://say-can.github.io/.

3D visual grounding (3DVG) is challenging because of the requirement of understanding on visual information, language and spatial relationships. While supervised approaches have achieved superior performance, they are constrained by the scarcity and high cost of 3D vision-language datasets. On the other hand, LLM/VLM based agents are proposed for 3DVG, eliminating the need for training data. However, these methods incur prohibitive time and token costs during inference. To address the challenges, we introduce a novel training-free symbolic framework for 3D visual grounding, namely Evolvable Symbolic Visual Grounder, that offers significantly reduced inference costs compared to previous agent-based methods while maintaining comparable performance. EaSe uses LLM generated codes to compute on spatial relationships. EaSe also implements an automatic pipeline to evaluate and optimize the quality of these codes and integrate VLMs to assist in the grounding process. Experimental results demonstrate that EaSe achieves 52.9% accuracy on Nr3D dataset and 49.2% [email protected] on ScanRefer, which is top-tier among training-free methods. Moreover, it substantially reduces the inference time and cost, offering a balanced trade-off between performance and efficiency. Codes are available at https://github.com/OpenRobotLab/EaSe.

3D vision-language grounding, which focuses on aligning language with the 3D physical environment, stands as a cornerstone in the development of embodied agents. In comparison to recent advancements in the 2D domain, grounding language in 3D scenes faces several significant challenges: (i) the inherent complexity of 3D scenes due to the diverse object configurations, their rich attributes, and intricate relationships; (ii) the scarcity of paired 3D vision-language data to support grounded learning; and (iii) the absence of a unified learning framework to distill knowledge from grounded 3D data. In this work, we aim to address these three major challenges in 3D vision-language by examining the potential of systematically upscaling 3D vision-language learning in indoor environments. We introduce the first million-scale 3D vision-language dataset, SceneVerse, encompassing about 68K 3D indoor scenes and comprising 2.5M vision-language pairs derived from both human annotations and our scalable scene-graph-based generation approach. We demonstrate that this scaling allows for a unified pre-training framework, Grounded Pre-training for Scenes (GPS), for 3D vision-language learning. Through extensive experiments, we showcase the effectiveness of GPS by achieving state-of-the-art performance on all existing 3D visual grounding benchmarks. The vast potential of SceneVerse and GPS is unveiled through zero-shot transfer experiments in the challenging 3D vision-language tasks. Project website: https://scene-verse.github.io .

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated the ability to learn and leverage Internet-scale knowledge through pre-training with autoregressive models. Unfortunately, applying such models to settings with embodied agents, such as robots, is challenging due to their lack of experience with the physical world, inability to parse non-language observations, and ignorance of rewards or safety constraints that robots may require. On the other hand, language-conditioned robotic policies that learn from interaction data can provide the necessary grounding that allows the agent to be correctly situated in the real world, but such policies are limited by the lack of high-level semantic understanding due to the limited breadth of the interaction data available for training them. Thus, if we want to make use of the semantic knowledge in a language model while still situating it in an embodied setting, we must construct an action sequence that is both likely according to the language model and also realizable according to grounded models of the environment. We frame this as a problem similar to probabilistic filtering: decode a sequence that both has high probability under the language model and high probability under a set of grounded model objectives. We demonstrate this guided decoding strategy is able to solve complex, long-horizon embodiment tasks in a robotic setting by leveraging the knowledge of both models. The project's website can be found at grounded-decoding.github.io.

We introduce FACTS Grounding, an online leaderboard and associated benchmark that evaluates language models' ability to generate text that is factually accurate with respect to given context in the user prompt. In our benchmark, each prompt includes a user request and a full document, with a maximum length of 32k tokens, requiring long-form responses. The long-form responses are required to be fully grounded in the provided context document while fulfilling the user request. Models are evaluated using automated judge models in two phases: (1) responses are disqualified if they do not fulfill the user request; (2) they are judged as accurate if the response is fully grounded in the provided document. The automated judge models were comprehensively evaluated against a held-out test-set to pick the best prompt template, and the final factuality score is an aggregate of multiple judge models to mitigate evaluation bias. The FACTS Grounding leaderboard will be actively maintained over time, and contains both public and private splits to allow for external participation while guarding the integrity of the leaderboard. It can be found at https://www.kaggle.com/facts-leaderboard.

Animals are capable of extreme agility, yet understanding their complex dynamics, which have ecological, biomechanical and evolutionary implications, remains challenging. Being able to study this incredible agility will be critical for the development of next-generation autonomous legged robots. In particular, the cheetah (acinonyx jubatus) is supremely fast and maneuverable, yet quantifying its whole-body 3D kinematic data during locomotion in the wild remains a challenge, even with new deep learning-based methods. In this work we present an extensive dataset of free-running cheetahs in the wild, called AcinoSet, that contains 119,490 frames of multi-view synchronized high-speed video footage, camera calibration files and 7,588 human-annotated frames. We utilize markerless animal pose estimation to provide 2D keypoints. Then, we use three methods that serve as strong baselines for 3D pose estimation tool development: traditional sparse bundle adjustment, an Extended Kalman Filter, and a trajectory optimization-based method we call Full Trajectory Estimation. The resulting 3D trajectories, human-checked 3D ground truth, and an interactive tool to inspect the data is also provided. We believe this dataset will be useful for a diverse range of fields such as ecology, neuroscience, robotics, biomechanics as well as computer vision.

The integration of language and 3D perception is crucial for developing embodied agents and robots that comprehend and interact with the physical world. While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive language understanding and generation capabilities, their adaptation to 3D environments (3D-LLMs) remains in its early stages. A primary challenge is the absence of large-scale datasets that provide dense grounding between language and 3D scenes. In this paper, we introduce 3D-GRAND, a pioneering large-scale dataset comprising 40,087 household scenes paired with 6.2 million densely-grounded scene-language instructions. Our results show that instruction tuning with 3D-GRAND significantly enhances grounding capabilities and reduces hallucinations in 3D-LLMs. As part of our contributions, we propose a comprehensive benchmark 3D-POPE to systematically evaluate hallucination in 3D-LLMs, enabling fair comparisons among future models. Our experiments highlight a scaling effect between dataset size and 3D-LLM performance, emphasizing the critical role of large-scale 3D-text datasets in advancing embodied AI research. Notably, our results demonstrate early signals for effective sim-to-real transfer, indicating that models trained on large synthetic data can perform well on real-world 3D scans. Through 3D-GRAND and 3D-POPE, we aim to equip the embodied AI community with essential resources and insights, setting the stage for more reliable and better-grounded 3D-LLMs. Project website: https://3d-grand.github.io

The recent development on large multimodal models (LMMs), especially GPT-4V(ision) and Gemini, has been quickly expanding the capability boundaries of multimodal models beyond traditional tasks like image captioning and visual question answering. In this work, we explore the potential of LMMs like GPT-4V as a generalist web agent that can follow natural language instructions to complete tasks on any given website. We propose SEEACT, a generalist web agent that harnesses the power of LMMs for integrated visual understanding and acting on the web. We evaluate on the recent MIND2WEB benchmark. In addition to standard offline evaluation on cached websites, we enable a new online evaluation setting by developing a tool that allows running web agents on live websites. We show that GPT-4V presents a great potential for web agents - it can successfully complete 50% of the tasks on live websites if we manually ground its textual plans into actions on the websites. This substantially outperforms text-only LLMs like GPT-4 or smaller models (FLAN-T5 and BLIP-2) specifically fine-tuned for web agents. However, grounding still remains a major challenge. Existing LMM grounding strategies like set-of-mark prompting turns out not effective for web agents, and the best grounding strategy we develop in this paper leverages both the HTML text and visuals. Yet, there is still a substantial gap with oracle grounding, leaving ample room for further improvement.

Consider a robot tasked with tidying a desk with a meticulously constructed Lego sports car. A human may recognize that it is not socially appropriate to disassemble the sports car and put it away as part of the "tidying". How can a robot reach that conclusion? Although large language models (LLMs) have recently been used to enable social reasoning, grounding this reasoning in the real world has been challenging. To reason in the real world, robots must go beyond passively querying LLMs and *actively gather information from the environment* that is required to make the right decision. For instance, after detecting that there is an occluded car, the robot may need to actively perceive the car to know whether it is an advanced model car made out of Legos or a toy car built by a toddler. We propose an approach that leverages an LLM and vision language model (VLM) to help a robot actively perceive its environment to perform grounded social reasoning. To evaluate our framework at scale, we release the MessySurfaces dataset which contains images of 70 real-world surfaces that need to be cleaned. We additionally illustrate our approach with a robot on 2 carefully designed surfaces. We find an average 12.9% improvement on the MessySurfaces benchmark and an average 15% improvement on the robot experiments over baselines that do not use active perception. The dataset, code, and videos of our approach can be found at https://minaek.github.io/groundedsocialreasoning.