Daily Papers

Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models have demonstrated considerable success across various vision-language tasks, such as text-to-image retrieval, where the model is required to effectively process natural language input to produce an accurate visual output. However, current models still face limitations in dealing with linguistic variations in input queries, such as paraphrases, making it challenging to handle a broad range of user queries in real-world applications. In this study, we introduce a straightforward fine-tuning approach to enhance the representations of CLIP models for paraphrases. Our approach involves a two-step paraphrase generation process, where we automatically create two categories of paraphrases from web-scale image captions by leveraging large language models. Subsequently, we fine-tune the CLIP text encoder using these generated paraphrases while freezing the image encoder. Our resulting model, which we call ParaCLIP, exhibits significant improvements over baseline CLIP models across various tasks, including paraphrased retrieval (with rank similarity scores improved by up to 2.0% and 5.6%), Visual Genome Relation and Attribution, as well as seven semantic textual similarity tasks.

Despite the success of large vision and language models (VLMs) in many downstream applications, it is unclear how well they encode compositional information. Here, we create the Attribution, Relation, and Order (ARO) benchmark to systematically evaluate the ability of VLMs to understand different types of relationships, attributes, and order. ARO consists of Visual Genome Attribution, to test the understanding of objects' properties; Visual Genome Relation, to test for relational understanding; and COCO & Flickr30k-Order, to test for order sensitivity. ARO is orders of magnitude larger than previous benchmarks of compositionality, with more than 50,000 test cases. We show where state-of-the-art VLMs have poor relational understanding, can blunder when linking objects to their attributes, and demonstrate a severe lack of order sensitivity. VLMs are predominantly trained and evaluated on large datasets with rich compositional structure in the images and captions. Yet, training on these datasets has not been enough to address the lack of compositional understanding, and evaluating on these datasets has failed to surface this deficiency. To understand why these limitations emerge and are not represented in the standard tests, we zoom into the evaluation and training procedures. We demonstrate that it is possible to perform well on retrieval over existing datasets without using the composition and order information. Given that contrastive pretraining optimizes for retrieval on datasets with similar shortcuts, we hypothesize that this can explain why the models do not need to learn to represent compositional information. This finding suggests a natural solution: composition-aware hard negative mining. We show that a simple-to-implement modification of contrastive learning significantly improves the performance on tasks requiring understanding of order and compositionality.

Despite progress in perceptual tasks such as image classification, computers still perform poorly on cognitive tasks such as image description and question answering. Cognition is core to tasks that involve not just recognizing, but reasoning about our visual world. However, models used to tackle the rich content in images for cognitive tasks are still being trained using the same datasets designed for perceptual tasks. To achieve success at cognitive tasks, models need to understand the interactions and relationships between objects in an image. When asked "What vehicle is the person riding?", computers will need to identify the objects in an image as well as the relationships riding(man, carriage) and pulling(horse, carriage) in order to answer correctly that "the person is riding a horse-drawn carriage". In this paper, we present the Visual Genome dataset to enable the modeling of such relationships. We collect dense annotations of objects, attributes, and relationships within each image to learn these models. Specifically, our dataset contains over 100K images where each image has an average of 21 objects, 18 attributes, and 18 pairwise relationships between objects. We canonicalize the objects, attributes, relationships, and noun phrases in region descriptions and questions answer pairs to WordNet synsets. Together, these annotations represent the densest and largest dataset of image descriptions, objects, attributes, relationships, and question answers.

In this work, we seek new insights into the underlying challenges of the Scene Graph Generation (SGG) task. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Visual Genome dataset implies -- 1) Ambiguity: even if inter-object relationship contains the same object (or predicate), they may not be visually or semantically similar, 2) Asymmetry: despite the nature of the relationship that embodied the direction, it was not well addressed in previous studies, and 3) Higher-order contexts: leveraging the identities of certain graph elements can help to generate accurate scene graphs. Motivated by the analysis, we design a novel SGG framework, Local-to-Global Interaction Networks (LOGIN). Locally, interactions extract the essence between three instances of subject, object, and background, while baking direction awareness into the network by explicitly constraining the input order of subject and object. Globally, interactions encode the contexts between every graph component (i.e., nodes and edges). Finally, Attract & Repel loss is utilized to fine-tune the distribution of predicate embeddings. By design, our framework enables predicting the scene graph in a bottom-up manner, leveraging the possible complementariness. To quantify how much LOGIN is aware of relational direction, a new diagnostic task called Bidirectional Relationship Classification (BRC) is also proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that LOGIN can successfully distinguish relational direction than existing methods (in BRC task), while showing state-of-the-art results on the Visual Genome benchmark (in SGG task).

We investigate the problem of producing structured graph representations of visual scenes. Our work analyzes the role of motifs: regularly appearing substructures in scene graphs. We present new quantitative insights on such repeated structures in the Visual Genome dataset. Our analysis shows that object labels are highly predictive of relation labels but not vice-versa. We also find that there are recurring patterns even in larger subgraphs: more than 50% of graphs contain motifs involving at least two relations. Our analysis motivates a new baseline: given object detections, predict the most frequent relation between object pairs with the given labels, as seen in the training set. This baseline improves on the previous state-of-the-art by an average of 3.6% relative improvement across evaluation settings. We then introduce Stacked Motif Networks, a new architecture designed to capture higher order motifs in scene graphs that further improves over our strong baseline by an average 7.1% relative gain. Our code is available at github.com/rowanz/neural-motifs.

While large text-to-image models are able to synthesize "novel" images, these images are necessarily a reflection of the training data. The problem of data attribution in such models -- which of the images in the training set are most responsible for the appearance of a given generated image -- is a difficult yet important one. As an initial step toward this problem, we evaluate attribution through "customization" methods, which tune an existing large-scale model toward a given exemplar object or style. Our key insight is that this allows us to efficiently create synthetic images that are computationally influenced by the exemplar by construction. With our new dataset of such exemplar-influenced images, we are able to evaluate various data attribution algorithms and different possible feature spaces. Furthermore, by training on our dataset, we can tune standard models, such as DINO, CLIP, and ViT, toward the attribution problem. Even though the procedure is tuned towards small exemplar sets, we show generalization to larger sets. Finally, by taking into account the inherent uncertainty of the problem, we can assign soft attribution scores over a set of training images.

Visually linking matching cues is a crucial ability in daily life, such as identifying the same person in multiple photos based on their cues, even without knowing who they are. Despite the extensive knowledge that vision-language models (VLMs) possess, it remains largely unexplored whether they are capable of performing this fundamental task. To address this, we introduce VLM^2-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess whether VLMs can Visually Link Matching cues, with 9 subtasks and over 3,000 test cases. Comprehensive evaluation across eight open-source VLMs and GPT-4o, along with further analysis of various language-side and vision-side prompting methods, leads to a total of eight key findings. We identify critical challenges in models' ability to link visual cues, highlighting a significant performance gap where even GPT-4o lags 34.80% behind humans. Based on these insights, we advocate for (i) enhancing core visual capabilities to improve adaptability and reduce reliance on prior knowledge, (ii) establishing clearer principles for integrating language-based reasoning in vision-centric tasks to prevent unnecessary biases, and (iii) shifting vision-text training paradigms toward fostering models' ability to independently structure and infer relationships among visual cues.

Deep neural networks are very successful on many vision tasks, but hard to interpret due to their black box nature. To overcome this, various post-hoc attribution methods have been proposed to identify image regions most influential to the models' decisions. Evaluating such methods is challenging since no ground truth attributions exist. We thus propose three novel evaluation schemes to more reliably measure the faithfulness of those methods, to make comparisons between them more fair, and to make visual inspection more systematic. To address faithfulness, we propose a novel evaluation setting (DiFull) in which we carefully control which parts of the input can influence the output in order to distinguish possible from impossible attributions. To address fairness, we note that different methods are applied at different layers, which skews any comparison, and so evaluate all methods on the same layers (ML-Att) and discuss how this impacts their performance on quantitative metrics. For more systematic visualizations, we propose a scheme (AggAtt) to qualitatively evaluate the methods on complete datasets. We use these evaluation schemes to study strengths and shortcomings of some widely used attribution methods. Finally, we propose a post-processing smoothing step that significantly improves the performance of some attribution methods, and discuss its applicability.

Recent advances in the development of vision-language models (VLMs) are yielding remarkable success in recognizing visual semantic content, including impressive instances of compositional image understanding. Here, we introduce the novel task of Visual Data-Type Identification, a basic perceptual skill with implications for data curation (e.g., noisy data-removal from large datasets, domain-specific retrieval) and autonomous vision (e.g., distinguishing changing weather conditions from camera lens staining). We develop two datasets consisting of animal images altered across a diverse set of 27 visual data-types, spanning four broad categories. An extensive zero-shot evaluation of 39 VLMs, ranging from 100M to 80B parameters, shows a nuanced performance landscape. While VLMs are reasonably good at identifying certain stylistic data-types, such as cartoons and sketches, they struggle with simpler data-types arising from basic manipulations like image rotations or additive noise. Our findings reveal that (i) model scaling alone yields marginal gains for contrastively-trained models like CLIP, and (ii) there is a pronounced drop in performance for the largest auto-regressively trained VLMs like OpenFlamingo. This finding points to a blind spot in current frontier VLMs: they excel in recognizing semantic content but fail to acquire an understanding of visual data-types through scaling. By analyzing the pre-training distributions of these models and incorporating data-type information into the captions during fine-tuning, we achieve a significant enhancement in performance. By exploring this previously uncharted task, we aim to set the stage for further advancing VLMs to equip them with visual data-type understanding. Code and datasets are released at https://github.com/bethgelab/DataTypeIdentification.

Deep neural networks are very successful on many vision tasks, but hard to interpret due to their black box nature. To overcome this, various post-hoc attribution methods have been proposed to identify image regions most influential to the models' decisions. Evaluating such methods is challenging since no ground truth attributions exist. We thus propose three novel evaluation schemes to more reliably measure the faithfulness of those methods, to make comparisons between them more fair, and to make visual inspection more systematic. To address faithfulness, we propose a novel evaluation setting (DiFull) in which we carefully control which parts of the input can influence the output in order to distinguish possible from impossible attributions. To address fairness, we note that different methods are applied at different layers, which skews any comparison, and so evaluate all methods on the same layers (ML-Att) and discuss how this impacts their performance on quantitative metrics. For more systematic visualizations, we propose a scheme (AggAtt) to qualitatively evaluate the methods on complete datasets. We use these evaluation schemes to study strengths and shortcomings of some widely used attribution methods over a wide range of models. Finally, we propose a post-processing smoothing step that significantly improves the performance of some attribution methods, and discuss its applicability.

Graph-structured scene descriptions can be efficiently used in generative models to control the composition of the generated image. Previous approaches are based on the combination of graph convolutional networks and adversarial methods for layout prediction and image generation, respectively. In this work, we show how employing multi-head attention to encode the graph information, as well as using a transformer-based model in the latent space for image generation can improve the quality of the sampled data, without the need to employ adversarial models with the subsequent advantage in terms of training stability. The proposed approach, specifically, is entirely based on transformer architectures both for encoding scene graphs into intermediate object layouts and for decoding these layouts into images, passing through a lower dimensional space learned by a vector-quantized variational autoencoder. Our approach shows an improved image quality with respect to state-of-the-art methods as well as a higher degree of diversity among multiple generations from the same scene graph. We evaluate our approach on three public datasets: Visual Genome, COCO, and CLEVR. We achieve an Inception Score of 13.7 and 12.8, and an FID of 52.3 and 60.3, on COCO and Visual Genome, respectively. We perform ablation studies on our contributions to assess the impact of each component. Code is available at https://github.com/perceivelab/trf-sg2im

The ability to understand visual concepts and replicate and compose these concepts from images is a central goal for computer vision. Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have lead to high definition and realistic image quality generation by learning from large databases of images and their descriptions. However, the evaluation of T2I models has focused on photorealism and limited qualitative measures of visual understanding. To quantify the ability of T2I models in learning and synthesizing novel visual concepts, we introduce ConceptBed, a large-scale dataset that consists of 284 unique visual concepts, 5K unique concept compositions, and 33K composite text prompts. Along with the dataset, we propose an evaluation metric, Concept Confidence Deviation (CCD), that uses the confidence of oracle concept classifiers to measure the alignment between concepts generated by T2I generators and concepts contained in ground truth images. We evaluate visual concepts that are either objects, attributes, or styles, and also evaluate four dimensions of compositionality: counting, attributes, relations, and actions. Our human study shows that CCD is highly correlated with human understanding of concepts. Our results point to a trade-off between learning the concepts and preserving the compositionality which existing approaches struggle to overcome.

We present Open Images V4, a dataset of 9.2M images with unified annotations for image classification, object detection and visual relationship detection. The images have a Creative Commons Attribution license that allows to share and adapt the material, and they have been collected from Flickr without a predefined list of class names or tags, leading to natural class statistics and avoiding an initial design bias. Open Images V4 offers large scale across several dimensions: 30.1M image-level labels for 19.8k concepts, 15.4M bounding boxes for 600 object classes, and 375k visual relationship annotations involving 57 classes. For object detection in particular, we provide 15x more bounding boxes than the next largest datasets (15.4M boxes on 1.9M images). The images often show complex scenes with several objects (8 annotated objects per image on average). We annotated visual relationships between them, which support visual relationship detection, an emerging task that requires structured reasoning. We provide in-depth comprehensive statistics about the dataset, we validate the quality of the annotations, we study how the performance of several modern models evolves with increasing amounts of training data, and we demonstrate two applications made possible by having unified annotations of multiple types coexisting in the same images. We hope that the scale, quality, and variety of Open Images V4 will foster further research and innovation even beyond the areas of image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection.

Selecting appropriate datasets is critical in modern computer vision. However, no general-purpose tools exist to evaluate the extent to which two datasets differ. For this, we propose representing images - and by extension datasets - using Distributions of Neuron Activations (DNAs). DNAs fit distributions, such as histograms or Gaussians, to activations of neurons in a pre-trained feature extractor through which we pass the image(s) to represent. This extractor is frozen for all datasets, and we rely on its generally expressive power in feature space. By comparing two DNAs, we can evaluate the extent to which two datasets differ with granular control over the comparison attributes of interest, providing the ability to customise the way distances are measured to suit the requirements of the task at hand. Furthermore, DNAs are compact, representing datasets of any size with less than 15 megabytes. We demonstrate the value of DNAs by evaluating their applicability on several tasks, including conditional dataset comparison, synthetic image evaluation, and transfer learning, and across diverse datasets, ranging from synthetic cat images to celebrity faces and urban driving scenes.

We introduce a benchmark to directly evaluate the alignment between human observers and vision models on a 3D shape inference task. We leverage an experimental design from the cognitive sciences which requires zero-shot visual inferences about object shape: given a set of images, participants identify which contain the same/different objects, despite considerable viewpoint variation. We draw from a diverse range of images that include common objects (e.g., chairs) as well as abstract shapes (i.e., procedurally generated `nonsense' objects). After constructing over 2000 unique image sets, we administer these tasks to human participants, collecting 35K trials of behavioral data from over 500 participants. This includes explicit choice behaviors as well as intermediate measures, such as reaction time and gaze data. We then evaluate the performance of common vision models (e.g., DINOv2, MAE, CLIP). We find that humans outperform all models by a wide margin. Using a multi-scale evaluation approach, we identify underlying similarities and differences between models and humans: while human-model performance is correlated, humans allocate more time/processing on challenging trials. All images, data, and code can be accessed via our project page.

Current Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) empowered visual grounding typically rely on <SEG> tokens as a text prompt to jointly optimize the vision-language model (e.g., LLaVA) and the downstream task-specific model (e.g., SAM). However, we observe that little research has looked into how it works.In this work, we first visualize the similarity maps, which are obtained by computing the semantic similarity between the <SEG> token and the image token embeddings derived from the last hidden layer in both the LLaVA encoder and SAM decoder. Intriguingly, we have found that a striking consistency holds in terms of activation responses in the similarity map, which reveals that what the <SEG> token contributes to is semantic similarity within image-text pairs. Specifically, the <SEG> token, a placeholder expanded in text vocabulary, extensively queries among individual tokenized image patches to match the semantics of an object from text to the paired image, while the Large Language Models (LLMs) are being fine-tuned. Upon the above findings, we present READ, which facilitates LMMs' resilient REAsoning capability of where to attenD under the guidance of highly activated points borrowed from similarity maps. Remarkably, READ features an intuitive design, Similarity as Points module (SasP), which can be seamlessly applied to <SEG>-like paradigms in a plug-and-play fashion. Also, extensive experiments have been conducted on ReasonSeg and RefCOCO(+/g) datasets. To validate whether READ suffers from catastrophic forgetting of previous skills after fine-tuning, we further assess its generation ability on an augmented FP-RefCOCO(+/g) dataset. All codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/rui-qian/READ.

Training general-purpose vision models on purely sequential visual data, eschewing linguistic inputs, has heralded a new frontier in visual understanding. These models are intended to not only comprehend but also seamlessly transit to out-of-domain tasks. However, current endeavors are hamstrung by an over-reliance on colossal models, exemplified by models with upwards of 3B parameters, and the necessity for an extensive corpus of visual data, often comprising a staggering 400B tokens. In this paper, we delve into the development of an efficient, autoregression-based vision model, innovatively architected to operate on a limited dataset. We meticulously demonstrate how this model achieves proficiency in a spectrum of visual tasks spanning both high-level and low-level semantic understanding during the testing phase. Our empirical evaluations underscore the model's agility in adapting to various tasks, heralding a significant reduction in the parameter footprint, and a marked decrease in training data requirements, thereby paving the way for more sustainable and accessible advancements in the field of generalist vision models. The code is available at https://github.com/ggjy/DeLVM.

Attribution methods, which employ heatmaps to identify the most influential regions of an image that impact model decisions, have gained widespread popularity as a type of explainability method. However, recent research has exposed the limited practical value of these methods, attributed in part to their narrow focus on the most prominent regions of an image -- revealing "where" the model looks, but failing to elucidate "what" the model sees in those areas. In this work, we try to fill in this gap with CRAFT -- a novel approach to identify both "what" and "where" by generating concept-based explanations. We introduce 3 new ingredients to the automatic concept extraction literature: (i) a recursive strategy to detect and decompose concepts across layers, (ii) a novel method for a more faithful estimation of concept importance using Sobol indices, and (iii) the use of implicit differentiation to unlock Concept Attribution Maps. We conduct both human and computer vision experiments to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach. We show that the proposed concept importance estimation technique is more faithful to the model than previous methods. When evaluating the usefulness of the method for human experimenters on a human-centered utility benchmark, we find that our approach significantly improves on two of the three test scenarios. Our code is freely available at github.com/deel-ai/Craft.

Text-to-Image (TTI) generative models have shown great progress in the past few years in terms of their ability to generate complex and high-quality imagery. At the same time, these models have been shown to suffer from harmful biases, including exaggerated societal biases (e.g., gender, ethnicity), as well as incidental correlations that limit such a model's ability to generate more diverse imagery. In this paper, we propose a general approach to study and quantify a broad spectrum of biases, for any TTI model and for any prompt, using counterfactual reasoning. Unlike other works that evaluate generated images on a predefined set of bias axes, our approach automatically identifies potential biases that might be relevant to the given prompt, and measures those biases. In addition, we complement quantitative scores with post-hoc explanations in terms of semantic concepts in the images generated. We show that our method is uniquely capable of explaining complex multi-dimensional biases through semantic concepts, as well as the intersectionality between different biases for any given prompt. We perform extensive user studies to illustrate that the results of our method and analysis are consistent with human judgements.

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.

While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on ImageNet classification has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new dataset of human perceptual similarity judgments. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by large margins on our dataset. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.

Inferring objects and their relationships from an image in the form of a scene graph is useful in many applications at the intersection of vision and language. We consider a challenging problem of compositional generalization that emerges in this task due to a long tail data distribution. Current scene graph generation models are trained on a tiny fraction of the distribution corresponding to the most frequent compositions, e.g. <cup, on, table>. However, test images might contain zero- and few-shot compositions of objects and relationships, e.g. <cup, on, surfboard>. Despite each of the object categories and the predicate (e.g. 'on') being frequent in the training data, the models often fail to properly understand such unseen or rare compositions. To improve generalization, it is natural to attempt increasing the diversity of the training distribution. However, in the graph domain this is non-trivial. To that end, we propose a method to synthesize rare yet plausible scene graphs by perturbing real ones. We then propose and empirically study a model based on conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) that allows us to generate visual features of perturbed scene graphs and learn from them in a joint fashion. When evaluated on the Visual Genome dataset, our approach yields marginal, but consistent improvements in zero- and few-shot metrics. We analyze the limitations of our approach indicating promising directions for future research.

Image captioning, which generates natural language descriptions of the visual information in an image, is a crucial task in vision-language research. Previous models have typically addressed this task by aligning the generative capabilities of machines with human intelligence through statistical fitting of existing datasets. While effective for normal images, they may struggle to accurately describe those where certain parts of the image are obscured or edited, unlike humans who excel in such cases. These weaknesses they exhibit, including hallucinations and limited interpretability, often hinder performance in scenarios with shifted association patterns. In this paper, we present a generic image captioning framework that employs causal inference to make existing models more capable of interventional tasks, and counterfactually explainable. Our approach includes two variants leveraging either total effect or natural direct effect. Integrating them into the training process enables models to handle counterfactual scenarios, increasing their generalizability. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that our method effectively reduces hallucinations and improves the model's faithfulness to images, demonstrating high portability across both small-scale and large-scale image-to-text models. The code is available at https://github.com/Aman-4-Real/See-or-Guess.

Image attribution algorithms aim to identify important regions that are highly relevant to model decisions. Although existing attribution solutions can effectively assign importance to target elements, they still face the following challenges: 1) existing attribution methods generate inaccurate small regions thus misleading the direction of correct attribution, and 2) the model cannot produce good attribution results for samples with wrong predictions. To address the above challenges, this paper re-models the above image attribution problem as a submodular subset selection problem, aiming to enhance model interpretability using fewer regions. To address the lack of attention to local regions, we construct a novel submodular function to discover more accurate small interpretation regions. To enhance the attribution effect for all samples, we also impose four different constraints on the selection of sub-regions, i.e., confidence, effectiveness, consistency, and collaboration scores, to assess the importance of various subsets. Moreover, our theoretical analysis substantiates that the proposed function is in fact submodular. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms SOTA methods on two face datasets (Celeb-A and VGG-Face2) and one fine-grained dataset (CUB-200-2011). For correctly predicted samples, the proposed method improves the Deletion and Insertion scores with an average of 4.9% and 2.5% gain relative to HSIC-Attribution. For incorrectly predicted samples, our method achieves gains of 81.0% and 18.4% compared to the HSIC-Attribution algorithm in the average highest confidence and Insertion score respectively. The code is released at https://github.com/RuoyuChen10/SMDL-Attribution.

Scene graph generation (SGG) aims to predict graph-structured descriptions of input images, in the form of objects and relationships between them. This task is becoming increasingly useful for progress at the interface of vision and language. Here, it is important - yet challenging - to perform well on novel (zero-shot) or rare (few-shot) compositions of objects and relationships. In this paper, we identify two key issues that limit such generalization. Firstly, we show that the standard loss used in this task is unintentionally a function of scene graph density. This leads to the neglect of individual edges in large sparse graphs during training, even though these contain diverse few-shot examples that are important for generalization. Secondly, the frequency of relationships can create a strong bias in this task, such that a blind model predicting the most frequent relationship achieves good performance. Consequently, some state-of-the-art models exploit this bias to improve results. We show that such models can suffer the most in their ability to generalize to rare compositions, evaluating two different models on the Visual Genome dataset and its more recent, improved version, GQA. To address these issues, we introduce a density-normalized edge loss, which provides more than a two-fold improvement in certain generalization metrics. Compared to other works in this direction, our enhancements require only a few lines of code and no added computational cost. We also highlight the difficulty of accurately evaluating models using existing metrics, especially on zero/few shots, and introduce a novel weighted metric.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional ability in causal reasoning from textual information. However, will these causalities remain straightforward for Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) when only visual hints are provided? Motivated by this, we propose a novel Multimodal Causal Reasoning benchmark, namely MuCR, to challenge VLLMs to infer semantic cause-and-effect relationship when solely relying on visual cues such as action, appearance, clothing, and environment. Specifically, we introduce a prompt-driven image synthesis approach to create siamese images with embedded semantic causality and visual cues, which can effectively evaluate VLLMs' causal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we develop tailored metrics from multiple perspectives, including image-level match, phrase-level understanding, and sentence-level explanation, to comprehensively assess VLLMs' comprehension abilities. Our extensive experiments reveal that the current state-of-the-art VLLMs are not as skilled at multimodal causal reasoning as we might have hoped. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis to understand these models' shortcomings from different views and suggest directions for future research. We hope MuCR can serve as a valuable resource and foundational benchmark in multimodal causal reasoning research. The project is available at: https://github.com/Zhiyuan-Li-John/MuCR

Recent progress in visual generative models enables the generation of high-quality images. To prevent the misuse of generated images, it is important to identify the origin model that generates them. In this work, we study the origin attribution of generated images in a practical setting where only a few images generated by a source model are available and the source model cannot be accessed. The goal is to check if a given image is generated by the source model. We first formulate this problem as a few-shot one-class classification task. To solve the task, we propose OCC-CLIP, a CLIP-based framework for few-shot one-class classification, enabling the identification of an image's source model, even among multiple candidates. Extensive experiments corresponding to various generative models verify the effectiveness of our OCC-CLIP framework. Furthermore, an experiment based on the recently released DALL-E 3 API verifies the real-world applicability of our solution.

Understanding a visual scene goes beyond recognizing individual objects in isolation. Relationships between objects also constitute rich semantic information about the scene. In this work, we explicitly model the objects and their relationships using scene graphs, a visually-grounded graphical structure of an image. We propose a novel end-to-end model that generates such structured scene representation from an input image. The model solves the scene graph inference problem using standard RNNs and learns to iteratively improves its predictions via message passing. Our joint inference model can take advantage of contextual cues to make better predictions on objects and their relationships. The experiments show that our model significantly outperforms previous methods for generating scene graphs using Visual Genome dataset and inferring support relations with NYU Depth v2 dataset.

We systematically study a wide variety of image-based generative models spanning semantically-diverse datasets to understand and improve the feature extractors and metrics used to evaluate them. Using best practices in psychophysics, we measure human perception of image realism for generated samples by conducting the largest experiment evaluating generative models to date, and find that no existing metric strongly correlates with human evaluations. Comparing to 16 modern metrics for evaluating the overall performance, fidelity, diversity, and memorization of generative models, we find that the state-of-the-art perceptual realism of diffusion models as judged by humans is not reflected in commonly reported metrics such as FID. This discrepancy is not explained by diversity in generated samples, though one cause is over-reliance on Inception-V3. We address these flaws through a study of alternative self-supervised feature extractors, find that the semantic information encoded by individual networks strongly depends on their training procedure, and show that DINOv2-ViT-L/14 allows for much richer evaluation of generative models. Next, we investigate data memorization, and find that generative models do memorize training examples on simple, smaller datasets like CIFAR10, but not necessarily on more complex datasets like ImageNet. However, our experiments show that current metrics do not properly detect memorization; none in the literature is able to separate memorization from other phenomena such as underfitting or mode shrinkage. To facilitate further development of generative models and their evaluation we release all generated image datasets, human evaluation data, and a modular library to compute 16 common metrics for 8 different encoders at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/dgm-eval.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending complex visual content. However, the mechanisms underlying how VLMs process visual information remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis, focusing on attention modules across layers. We reveal several key insights about how these models process visual data: (i) the internal representation of the query tokens (e.g., representations of "describe the image"), is utilized by VLMs to store global image information; we demonstrate that these models generate surprisingly descriptive responses solely from these tokens, without direct access to image tokens. (ii) Cross-modal information flow is predominantly influenced by the middle layers (approximately 25% of all layers), while early and late layers contribute only marginally.(iii) Fine-grained visual attributes and object details are directly extracted from image tokens in a spatially localized manner, i.e., the generated tokens associated with a specific object or attribute attend strongly to their corresponding regions in the image. We propose novel quantitative evaluation to validate our observations, leveraging real-world complex visual scenes. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our findings in facilitating efficient visual processing in state-of-the-art VLMs.

We uncover a surprising multilingual bias occurring in a popular class of multimodal vision-language models (VLMs). Including an image in the query to a LLaVA-style VLM significantly increases the likelihood of the model returning an English response, regardless of the language of the query. This paper investigates the causes of this loss with a two-pronged approach that combines extensive ablation of the design space with a mechanistic analysis of the models' internal representations of image and text inputs. Both approaches indicate that the issue stems in the language modelling component of the LLaVA model. Statistically, we find that switching the language backbone for a bilingual language model has the strongest effect on reducing this error. Mechanistically, we provide compelling evidence that visual inputs are not mapped to a similar space as text ones, and that intervening on intermediary attention layers can reduce this bias. Our findings provide important insights to researchers and engineers seeking to understand the crossover between multimodal and multilingual spaces, and contribute to the goal of developing capable and inclusive VLMs for non-English contexts.

The progress in the generation of synthetic images has made it crucial to assess their quality. While several metrics have been proposed to assess the rendering of images, it is crucial for Text-to-Image (T2I) models, which generate images based on a prompt, to consider additional aspects such as to which extent the generated image matches the important content of the prompt. Moreover, although the generated images usually result from a random starting point, the influence of this one is generally not considered. In this article, we propose a new metric based on prompt templates to study the alignment between the content specified in the prompt and the corresponding generated images. It allows us to better characterize the alignment in terms of the type of the specified objects, their number, and their color. We conducted a study on several recent T2I models about various aspects. An additional interesting result we obtained with our approach is that image quality can vary drastically depending on the latent noise used as a seed for the images. We also quantify the influence of the number of concepts in the prompt, their order as well as their (color) attributes. Finally, our method allows us to identify some latent seeds that produce better images than others, opening novel directions of research on this understudied topic.

What does learning to model relationships between strings teach large language models (LLMs) about the visual world? We systematically evaluate LLMs' abilities to generate and recognize an assortment of visual concepts of increasing complexity and then demonstrate how a preliminary visual representation learning system can be trained using models of text. As language models lack the ability to consume or output visual information as pixels, we use code to represent images in our study. Although LLM-generated images do not look like natural images, results on image generation and the ability of models to correct these generated images indicate that precise modeling of strings can teach language models about numerous aspects of the visual world. Furthermore, experiments on self-supervised visual representation learning, utilizing images generated with text models, highlight the potential to train vision models capable of making semantic assessments of natural images using just LLMs.

Humans view the world through many sensory channels, e.g., the long-wavelength light channel, viewed by the left eye, or the high-frequency vibrations channel, heard by the right ear. Each view is noisy and incomplete, but important factors, such as physics, geometry, and semantics, tend to be shared between all views (e.g., a "dog" can be seen, heard, and felt). We investigate the classic hypothesis that a powerful representation is one that models view-invariant factors. We study this hypothesis under the framework of multiview contrastive learning, where we learn a representation that aims to maximize mutual information between different views of the same scene but is otherwise compact. Our approach scales to any number of views, and is view-agnostic. We analyze key properties of the approach that make it work, finding that the contrastive loss outperforms a popular alternative based on cross-view prediction, and that the more views we learn from, the better the resulting representation captures underlying scene semantics. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on image and video unsupervised learning benchmarks. Code is released at: http://github.com/HobbitLong/CMC/.

We consider concept generalization at a large scale in the diverse and natural visual spectrum. Established computational modes (i.e., rule-based or similarity-based) are primarily studied isolated and focus on confined and abstract problem spaces. In this work, we study these two modes when the problem space scales up, and the complexity of concepts becomes diverse. Specifically, at the representational level, we seek to answer how the complexity varies when a visual concept is mapped to the representation space. Prior psychology literature has shown that two types of complexities (i.e., subjective complexity and visual complexity) (Griffiths and Tenenbaum, 2003) build an inverted-U relation (Donderi, 2006; Sun and Firestone, 2021). Leveraging Representativeness of Attribute (RoA), we computationally confirm the following observation: Models use attributes with high RoA to describe visual concepts, and the description length falls in an inverted-U relation with the increment in visual complexity. At the computational level, we aim to answer how the complexity of representation affects the shift between the rule- and similarity-based generalization. We hypothesize that category-conditioned visual modeling estimates the co-occurrence frequency between visual and categorical attributes, thus potentially serving as the prior for the natural visual world. Experimental results show that representations with relatively high subjective complexity outperform those with relatively low subjective complexity in the rule-based generalization, while the trend is the opposite in the similarity-based generalization.

Explaining the decisions of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model is increasingly critical in many real-world, high-stake applications. Hundreds of papers have either proposed new feature attribution methods, discussed or harnessed these tools in their work. However, despite humans being the target end-users, most attribution methods were only evaluated on proxy automatic-evaluation metrics (Zhang et al. 2018; Zhou et al. 2016; Petsiuk et al. 2018). In this paper, we conduct the first user study to measure attribution map effectiveness in assisting humans in ImageNet classification and Stanford Dogs fine-grained classification, and when an image is natural or adversarial (i.e., contains adversarial perturbations). Overall, feature attribution is surprisingly not more effective than showing humans nearest training-set examples. On a harder task of fine-grained dog categorization, presenting attribution maps to humans does not help, but instead hurts the performance of human-AI teams compared to AI alone. Importantly, we found automatic attribution-map evaluation measures to correlate poorly with the actual human-AI team performance. Our findings encourage the community to rigorously test their methods on the downstream human-in-the-loop applications and to rethink the existing evaluation metrics.

Large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP have shown impressive performance on zero-shot image classification and image-to-text retrieval. However, such zero-shot performance of CLIP-based models does not realize in tasks that require a finer-grained correspondence between vision and language, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). We investigate why this is the case, and report an interesting phenomenon of CLIP, which we call the Concept Association Bias (CAB), as a potential cause of the difficulty of applying CLIP to VQA and similar tasks. CAB is especially apparent when two concepts are present in the given image while a text prompt only contains a single concept. In such a case, we find that CLIP tends to treat input as a bag of concepts and attempts to fill in the other missing concept crossmodally, leading to an unexpected zero-shot prediction. For example, when asked for the color of a lemon in an image, CLIP predicts ``purple'' if the image contains a lemon and an eggplant. We demonstrate the Concept Association Bias of CLIP by showing that CLIP's zero-shot classification performance greatly suffers when there is a strong concept association between an object (e.g. lemon) and an attribute (e.g. its color). On the other hand, when the association between object and attribute is weak, we do not see this phenomenon. Furthermore, we show that CAB is significantly mitigated when we enable CLIP to learn deeper structure across image and text embeddings by adding an additional Transformer on top of CLIP and fine-tuning it on VQA. We find that across such fine-tuned variants of CLIP, the strength of CAB in a model predicts how well it performs on VQA.

Originally inspired by game-theory, path attribution framework stands out among the post-hoc model interpretation tools due to its axiomatic nature. However, recent developments show that this framework can still suffer from counter-intuitive results. Moreover, specifically for deep visual models, the existing path-based methods also fall short on conforming to the original intuitions that are the basis of the claimed axiomatic properties of this framework. We address these problems with a systematic investigation, and pinpoint the conditions in which the counter-intuitive results can be avoided for deep visual model interpretation with the path attribution strategy. We also devise a scheme to preclude the conditions in which visual model interpretation can invalidate the axiomatic properties of path attribution. These insights are combined into a method that enables reliable visual model interpretation. Our findings are establish empirically with multiple datasets, models and evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments show a consistent performance gain of our method over the baselines.

The rapid advancement of Large Vision-Language models (LVLMs) has demonstrated a spectrum of emergent capabilities. Nevertheless, current models only focus on the visual content of a single scenario, while their ability to associate instances across different scenes has not yet been explored, which is essential for understanding complex visual content, such as movies with multiple characters and intricate plots. Towards movie understanding, a critical initial step for LVLMs is to unleash the potential of character identities memory and recognition across multiple visual scenarios. To achieve the goal, we propose visual instruction tuning with ID reference and develop an ID-Aware Large Vision-Language Model, IDA-VLM. Furthermore, our research introduces a novel benchmark MM-ID, to examine LVLMs on instance IDs memory and recognition across four dimensions: matching, location, question-answering, and captioning. Our findings highlight the limitations of existing LVLMs in recognizing and associating instance identities with ID reference. This paper paves the way for future artificial intelligence systems to possess multi-identity visual inputs, thereby facilitating the comprehension of complex visual narratives like movies.

We argue that there are many notions of 'similarity' and that models, like humans, should be able to adapt to these dynamically. This contrasts with most representation learning methods, supervised or self-supervised, which learn a fixed embedding function and hence implicitly assume a single notion of similarity. For instance, models trained on ImageNet are biased towards object categories, while a user might prefer the model to focus on colors, textures or specific elements in the scene. In this paper, we propose the GeneCIS ('genesis') benchmark, which measures models' ability to adapt to a range of similarity conditions. Extending prior work, our benchmark is designed for zero-shot evaluation only, and hence considers an open-set of similarity conditions. We find that baselines from powerful CLIP models struggle on GeneCIS and that performance on the benchmark is only weakly correlated with ImageNet accuracy, suggesting that simply scaling existing methods is not fruitful. We further propose a simple, scalable solution based on automatically mining information from existing image-caption datasets. We find our method offers a substantial boost over the baselines on GeneCIS, and further improves zero-shot performance on related image retrieval benchmarks. In fact, though evaluated zero-shot, our model surpasses state-of-the-art supervised models on MIT-States. Project page at https://sgvaze.github.io/genecis/.

Representational analysis explores how input data of a neural system are encoded in high dimensional spaces of its distributed neural activations, and how we can compare different systems, for instance, artificial neural networks and brains, on those grounds. While existing methods offer important insights, they typically do not account for local intrinsic geometrical properties within the high-dimensional representation spaces. To go beyond these limitations, we explore Ollivier-Ricci curvature and Ricci flow as tools to study the alignment of representations between humans and artificial neural systems on a geometric level. As a proof-of-principle study, we compared the representations of face stimuli between VGG-Face, a human-aligned version of VGG-Face, and corresponding human similarity judgments from a large online study. Using this discrete geometric framework, we were able to identify local structural similarities and differences by examining the distributions of node and edge curvature and higher-level properties by detecting and comparing community structure in the representational graphs.

The problem of visual metamerism is defined as finding a family of perceptually indistinguishable, yet physically different images. In this paper, we propose our NeuroFovea metamer model, a foveated generative model that is based on a mixture of peripheral representations and style transfer forward-pass algorithms. Our gradient-descent free model is parametrized by a foveated VGG19 encoder-decoder which allows us to encode images in high dimensional space and interpolate between the content and texture information with adaptive instance normalization anywhere in the visual field. Our contributions include: 1) A framework for computing metamers that resembles a noisy communication system via a foveated feed-forward encoder-decoder network -- We observe that metamerism arises as a byproduct of noisy perturbations that partially lie in the perceptual null space; 2) A perceptual optimization scheme as a solution to the hyperparametric nature of our metamer model that requires tuning of the image-texture tradeoff coefficients everywhere in the visual field which are a consequence of internal noise; 3) An ABX psychophysical evaluation of our metamers where we also find that the rate of growth of the receptive fields in our model match V1 for reference metamers and V2 between synthesized samples. Our model also renders metamers at roughly a second, presenting a times1000 speed-up compared to the previous work, which allows for tractable data-driven metamer experiments.

Text-to-Image Diffusion Models such as Stable-Diffusion and Imagen have achieved unprecedented quality of photorealism with state-of-the-art FID scores on MS-COCO and other generation benchmarks. Given a caption, image generation requires fine-grained knowledge about attributes such as object structure, style, and viewpoint amongst others. Where does this information reside in text-to-image generative models? In our paper, we tackle this question and understand how knowledge corresponding to distinct visual attributes is stored in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. We adapt Causal Mediation Analysis for text-to-image models and trace knowledge about distinct visual attributes to various (causal) components in the (i) UNet and (ii) text-encoder of the diffusion model. In particular, we show that unlike generative large-language models, knowledge about different attributes is not localized in isolated components, but is instead distributed amongst a set of components in the conditional UNet. These sets of components are often distinct for different visual attributes. Remarkably, we find that the CLIP text-encoder in public text-to-image models such as Stable-Diffusion contains only one causal state across different visual attributes, and this is the first self-attention layer corresponding to the last subject token of the attribute in the caption. This is in stark contrast to the causal states in other language models which are often the mid-MLP layers. Based on this observation of only one causal state in the text-encoder, we introduce a fast, data-free model editing method Diff-QuickFix which can effectively edit concepts in text-to-image models. DiffQuickFix can edit (ablate) concepts in under a second with a closed-form update, providing a significant 1000x speedup and comparable editing performance to existing fine-tuning based editing methods.

We propose an experimental method for measuring bias in face recognition systems. Existing methods to measure bias depend on benchmark datasets that are collected in the wild and annotated for protected (e.g., race, gender) and non-protected (e.g., pose, lighting) attributes. Such observational datasets only permit correlational conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is different on female and male faces in dataset X.". By contrast, experimental methods manipulate attributes individually and thus permit causal conclusions, e.g., "Algorithm A's accuracy is affected by gender and skin color." Our method is based on generating synthetic faces using a neural face generator, where each attribute of interest is modified independently while leaving all other attributes constant. Human observers crucially provide the ground truth on perceptual identity similarity between synthetic image pairs. We validate our method quantitatively by evaluating race and gender biases of three research-grade face recognition models. Our synthetic pipeline reveals that for these algorithms, accuracy is lower for Black and East Asian population subgroups. Our method can also quantify how perceptual changes in attributes affect face identity distances reported by these models. Our large synthetic dataset, consisting of 48,000 synthetic face image pairs (10,200 unique synthetic faces) and 555,000 human annotations (individual attributes and pairwise identity comparisons) is available to researchers in this important area.

We explore social perception of human faces in CLIP, a widely used open-source vision-language model. To this end, we compare the similarity in CLIP embeddings between different textual prompts and a set of face images. Our textual prompts are constructed from well-validated social psychology terms denoting social perception. The face images are synthetic and are systematically and independently varied along six dimensions: the legally protected attributes of age, gender, and race, as well as facial expression, lighting, and pose. Independently and systematically manipulating face attributes allows us to study the effect of each on social perception and avoids confounds that can occur in wild-collected data due to uncontrolled systematic correlations between attributes. Thus, our findings are experimental rather than observational. Our main findings are three. First, while CLIP is trained on the widest variety of images and texts, it is able to make fine-grained human-like social judgments on face images. Second, age, gender, and race do systematically impact CLIP's social perception of faces, suggesting an undesirable bias in CLIP vis-a-vis legally protected attributes. Most strikingly, we find a strong pattern of bias concerning the faces of Black women, where CLIP produces extreme values of social perception across different ages and facial expressions. Third, facial expression impacts social perception more than age and lighting as much as age. The last finding predicts that studies that do not control for unprotected visual attributes may reach the wrong conclusions on bias. Our novel method of investigation, which is founded on the social psychology literature and on the experiments involving the manipulation of individual attributes, yields sharper and more reliable observations than previous observational methods and may be applied to study biases in any vision-language model.

Every day, the human brain processes an immense volume of visual information, relying on intricate neural mechanisms to perceive and interpret these stimuli. Recent breakthroughs in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have enabled scientists to extract visual information from human brain activity patterns. In this study, we present an innovative method for decoding brain activity into meaningful images and captions, with a specific focus on brain captioning due to its enhanced flexibility as compared to brain decoding into images. Our approach takes advantage of cutting-edge image captioning models and incorporates a unique image reconstruction pipeline that utilizes latent diffusion models and depth estimation. We utilized the Natural Scenes Dataset, a comprehensive fMRI dataset from eight subjects who viewed images from the COCO dataset. We employed the Generative Image-to-text Transformer (GIT) as our backbone for captioning and propose a new image reconstruction pipeline based on latent diffusion models. The method involves training regularized linear regression models between brain activity and extracted features. Additionally, we incorporated depth maps from the ControlNet model to further guide the reconstruction process. We evaluate our methods using quantitative metrics for both generated captions and images. Our brain captioning approach outperforms existing methods, while our image reconstruction pipeline generates plausible images with improved spatial relationships. In conclusion, we demonstrate significant progress in brain decoding, showcasing the enormous potential of integrating vision and language to better understand human cognition. Our approach provides a flexible platform for future research, with potential applications in various fields, including neural art, style transfer, and portable devices.

Do different neural networks, trained for various vision tasks, share some common representations? In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of common features we call "Rosetta Neurons" across a range of models with different architectures, different tasks (generative and discriminative), and different types of supervision (class-supervised, text-supervised, self-supervised). We present an algorithm for mining a dictionary of Rosetta Neurons across several popular vision models: Class Supervised-ResNet50, DINO-ResNet50, DINO-ViT, MAE, CLIP-ResNet50, BigGAN, StyleGAN-2, StyleGAN-XL. Our findings suggest that certain visual concepts and structures are inherently embedded in the natural world and can be learned by different models regardless of the specific task or architecture, and without the use of semantic labels. We can visualize shared concepts directly due to generative models included in our analysis. The Rosetta Neurons facilitate model-to-model translation enabling various inversion-based manipulations, including cross-class alignments, shifting, zooming, and more, without the need for specialized training.

Vision Transformers (ViT), when paired with large-scale pretraining, have shown remarkable performance across various computer vision tasks, primarily due to their weak inductive bias. However, while such weak inductive bias aids in pretraining scalability, this may hinder the effective adaptation of ViTs for visuo-motor control tasks as a result of the absence of control-centric inductive biases. Such absent inductive biases include spatial locality and translation equivariance bias which convolutions naturally offer. To this end, we introduce Convolution Injector (CoIn), an add-on module that injects convolutions which are rich in locality and equivariance biases into a pretrained ViT for effective adaptation in visuo-motor control. We evaluate CoIn with three distinct types of pretrained ViTs (CLIP, MVP, VC-1) across 12 varied control tasks within three separate domains (Adroit, MetaWorld, DMC), and demonstrate that CoIn consistently enhances control task performance across all experimented environments and models, validating the effectiveness of providing pretrained ViTs with control-centric biases.

Quantifying similarity between neural representations -- e.g. hidden layer activation vectors -- is a perennial problem in deep learning and neuroscience research. Existing methods compare deterministic responses (e.g. artificial networks that lack stochastic layers) or averaged responses (e.g., trial-averaged firing rates in biological data). However, these measures of _deterministic_ representational similarity ignore the scale and geometric structure of noise, both of which play important roles in neural computation. To rectify this, we generalize previously proposed shape metrics (Williams et al. 2021) to quantify differences in _stochastic_ representations. These new distances satisfy the triangle inequality, and thus can be used as a rigorous basis for many supervised and unsupervised analyses. Leveraging this novel framework, we find that the stochastic geometries of neurobiological representations of oriented visual gratings and naturalistic scenes respectively resemble untrained and trained deep network representations. Further, we are able to more accurately predict certain network attributes (e.g. training hyperparameters) from its position in stochastic (versus deterministic) shape space.

Generative models are now widely used by graphic designers and artists. Prior works have shown that these models remember and often replicate content from their training data during generation. Hence as their proliferation increases, it has become important to perform a database search to determine whether the properties of the image are attributable to specific training data, every time before a generated image is used for professional purposes. Existing tools for this purpose focus on retrieving images of similar semantic content. Meanwhile, many artists are concerned with style replication in text-to-image models. We present a framework for understanding and extracting style descriptors from images. Our framework comprises a new dataset curated using the insight that style is a subjective property of an image that captures complex yet meaningful interactions of factors including but not limited to colors, textures, shapes, etc. We also propose a method to extract style descriptors that can be used to attribute style of a generated image to the images used in the training dataset of a text-to-image model. We showcase promising results in various style retrieval tasks. We also quantitatively and qualitatively analyze style attribution and matching in the Stable Diffusion model. Code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/learn2phoenix/CSD.

Recent advances in machine learning leverage massive datasets of unlabeled images from the web to learn general-purpose image representations for tasks from image classification to face recognition. But do unsupervised computer vision models automatically learn implicit patterns and embed social biases that could have harmful downstream effects? We develop a novel method for quantifying biased associations between representations of social concepts and attributes in images. We find that state-of-the-art unsupervised models trained on ImageNet, a popular benchmark image dataset curated from internet images, automatically learn racial, gender, and intersectional biases. We replicate 8 previously documented human biases from social psychology, from the innocuous, as with insects and flowers, to the potentially harmful, as with race and gender. Our results closely match three hypotheses about intersectional bias from social psychology. For the first time in unsupervised computer vision, we also quantify implicit human biases about weight, disabilities, and several ethnicities. When compared with statistical patterns in online image datasets, our findings suggest that machine learning models can automatically learn bias from the way people are stereotypically portrayed on the web.

Recently, large language and vision models (LLVMs) have received significant attention and development efforts due to their remarkable generalization performance across a wide range of tasks requiring perception and cognitive abilities. A key factor behind their success is their simple architecture, which consists of a vision encoder, a projector, and a large language model (LLM). Despite their achievements in advanced reasoning tasks, their performance on fundamental perception-related tasks (e.g., MMVP) remains surprisingly low. This discrepancy raises the question of how LLVMs truly perceive images and exploit the advantages of the vision encoder. To address this, we systematically investigate this question regarding several aspects: permutation invariance, robustness, math reasoning, alignment preserving and importance, by evaluating the most common LLVM's families (i.e., LLaVA) across 10 evaluation benchmarks. Our extensive experiments reveal several intriguing properties of current LLVMs: (1) they internally process the image in a global manner, even when the order of visual patch sequences is randomly permuted; (2) they are sometimes able to solve math problems without fully perceiving detailed numerical information; (3) the cross-modal alignment is overfitted to complex reasoning tasks, thereby, causing them to lose some of the original perceptual capabilities of their vision encoder; (4) the representation space in the lower layers (<25%) plays a crucial role in determining performance and enhancing visual understanding. Lastly, based on the above observations, we suggest potential future directions for building better LLVMs and constructing more challenging evaluation benchmarks.

A large body of recent work has identified transformations in the latent spaces of generative adversarial networks (GANs) that consistently and interpretably transform generated images. But existing techniques for identifying these transformations rely on either a fixed vocabulary of pre-specified visual concepts, or on unsupervised disentanglement techniques whose alignment with human judgments about perceptual salience is unknown. This paper introduces a new method for building open-ended vocabularies of primitive visual concepts represented in a GAN's latent space. Our approach is built from three components: (1) automatic identification of perceptually salient directions based on their layer selectivity; (2) human annotation of these directions with free-form, compositional natural language descriptions; and (3) decomposition of these annotations into a visual concept vocabulary, consisting of distilled directions labeled with single words. Experiments show that concepts learned with our approach are reliable and composable -- generalizing across classes, contexts, and observers, and enabling fine-grained manipulation of image style and content.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are expected to be capable of reasoning with commonsense knowledge as human beings. One example is that humans can reason where and when an image is taken based on their knowledge. This makes us wonder if, based on visual cues, Vision-Language Models that are pre-trained with large-scale image-text resources can achieve and even outperform human's capability in reasoning times and location. To address this question, we propose a two-stage \recognition\space and \reasoning\space probing task, applied to discriminative and generative VLMs to uncover whether VLMs can recognize times and location-relevant features and further reason about it. To facilitate the investigation, we introduce WikiTiLo, a well-curated image dataset compromising images with rich socio-cultural cues. In the extensive experimental studies, we find that although VLMs can effectively retain relevant features in visual encoders, they still fail to make perfect reasoning. We will release our dataset and codes to facilitate future studies.

Neural decoding, the process of understanding how brain activity corresponds to different stimuli, has been a primary objective in cognitive sciences. Over the past three decades, advancements in functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and machine learning have greatly improved our ability to map visual stimuli to brain activity, especially in the visual cortex. Concurrently, research has expanded into decoding more complex processes like language and memory across the whole brain, utilizing techniques to handle greater variability and improve signal accuracy. We argue that "seeing" involves more than just mapping visual stimuli onto the visual cortex; it engages the entire brain, as various emotions and cognitive states can emerge from observing different scenes. In this paper, we develop algorithms to enhance our understanding of visual processes by incorporating whole-brain activation maps while individuals are exposed to visual stimuli. We utilize large-scale fMRI encoders and Image generative models pre-trained on large public datasets, which are then fine-tuned through Image-fMRI contrastive learning. Our models hence can decode visual experience across the entire cerebral cortex, surpassing the traditional confines of the visual cortex. We first compare our method with state-of-the-art approaches to decoding visual processing and show improved predictive semantic accuracy by 43%. A network ablation analysis suggests that beyond the visual cortex, the default mode network contributes most to decoding stimuli, in line with the proposed role of this network in sense-making and semantic processing. Additionally, we implemented zero-shot imagination decoding on an extra validation dataset, achieving a p-value of 0.0206 for mapping the reconstructed images and ground-truth text stimuli, which substantiates the model's capability to capture semantic meanings across various scenarios.

There is a surge of interest in image scene graph generation (object, attribute and relationship detection) due to the need of building fine-grained image understanding models that go beyond object detection. Due to the lack of a good benchmark, the reported results of different scene graph generation models are not directly comparable, impeding the research progress. We have developed a much-needed scene graph generation benchmark based on the maskrcnn-benchmark and several popular models. This paper presents main features of our benchmark and a comprehensive ablation study of scene graph generation models using the Visual Genome and OpenImages Visual relationship detection datasets. Our codebase is made publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/scene_graph_benchmark.

This paper demonstrates how to use generative models trained for image synthesis as tools for visual data mining. Our insight is that since contemporary generative models learn an accurate representation of their training data, we can use them to summarize the data by mining for visual patterns. Concretely, we show that after finetuning conditional diffusion models to synthesize images from a specific dataset, we can use these models to define a typicality measure on that dataset. This measure assesses how typical visual elements are for different data labels, such as geographic location, time stamps, semantic labels, or even the presence of a disease. This analysis-by-synthesis approach to data mining has two key advantages. First, it scales much better than traditional correspondence-based approaches since it does not require explicitly comparing all pairs of visual elements. Second, while most previous works on visual data mining focus on a single dataset, our approach works on diverse datasets in terms of content and scale, including a historical car dataset, a historical face dataset, a large worldwide street-view dataset, and an even larger scene dataset. Furthermore, our approach allows for translating visual elements across class labels and analyzing consistent changes.

The increasing complexity of AI systems has made understanding their behavior a critical challenge. Numerous methods have been developed to attribute model behavior to three key aspects: input features, training data, and internal model components. However, these attribution methods are studied and applied rather independently, resulting in a fragmented landscape of approaches and terminology. This position paper argues that feature, data, and component attribution methods share fundamental similarities, and bridging them can benefit interpretability research. We conduct a detailed analysis of successful methods across three domains and present a unified view to demonstrate that these seemingly distinct methods employ similar approaches, such as perturbations, gradients, and linear approximations, differing primarily in their perspectives rather than core techniques. Our unified perspective enhances understanding of existing attribution methods, identifies shared concepts and challenges, makes this field more accessible to newcomers, and highlights new directions not only for attribution and interpretability but also for broader AI research, including model editing, steering, and regulation.

Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown great promise in language-guided perceptual tasks such as recognition, segmentation, and object detection. However, their effectiveness in addressing visual cognition problems that require high-level reasoning is not well-established. One such challenge is abstract visual reasoning (AVR) -- the cognitive ability to discern relationships among patterns in a set of images and extrapolate to predict subsequent patterns. This skill is crucial during the early neurodevelopmental stages of children. Inspired by the AVR tasks in Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), we propose a new dataset MaRs-VQA and a new benchmark VCog-Bench containing three datasets to evaluate the zero-shot AVR capability of MLLMs and compare their performance with existing human intelligent investigation. Our comparative experiments with different open-source and closed-source MLLMs on the VCog-Bench revealed a gap between MLLMs and human intelligence, highlighting the visual cognitive limitations of current MLLMs. We believe that the public release of VCog-Bench, consisting of MaRs-VQA, and the inference pipeline will drive progress toward the next generation of MLLMs with human-like visual cognition abilities.

Warning: This paper contains several contents that may be toxic, harmful, or offensive. In the last few years, text-to-image generative models have gained remarkable success in generating images with unprecedented quality accompanied by a breakthrough of inference speed. Despite their rapid progress, human biases that manifest in the training examples, particularly with regard to common stereotypical biases, like gender and skin tone, still have been found in these generative models. In this work, we seek to measure more complex human biases exist in the task of text-to-image generations. Inspired by the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT) from social psychology, we propose a novel Text-to-Image Association Test (T2IAT) framework that quantifies the implicit stereotypes between concepts and valence, and those in the images. We replicate the previously documented bias tests on generative models, including morally neutral tests on flowers and insects as well as demographic stereotypical tests on diverse social attributes. The results of these experiments demonstrate the presence of complex stereotypical behaviors in image generations.

We present DualFocus, a novel framework for integrating macro and micro perspectives within multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to enhance vision-language task performance. Current MLLMs typically singularly focus on inputs at a predefined resolution, resulting in deficiencies in detailed questions involving local regions. We introduced a DualFocus mechanism where the model concentrates on the image from a macro perspective, responses to the question, and identifies suitable sub-regions to zoom in for subsequent micro perspective analysis. Via the integration of answers from both macro and micro perspectives, the model is adept at addressing tasks that encompass global, detailed, and combined considerations. To endows the DualFocus mechanism in MLLMs, we curated a tailored dataset derived from the Visual Genome (VG) and adapted it to align with the training regimen of DualFocus. Through comparative studies across different model sizes and benchmarks, we demonstrate DualFocus's superiority in balancing detailed examination with holistic insight, significantly reducing hallucination instances in MLLMs and improving their performance in various vision-language tasks.

The development of vision-language models (VLMs) is driven by large-scale and diverse multimodal datasets. However, progress toward generalist biomedical VLMs is limited by the lack of annotated, publicly accessible datasets across biology and medicine. Existing efforts are restricted to narrow domains, missing the full diversity of biomedical knowledge encoded in scientific literature. To address this gap, we introduce BIOMEDICA, a scalable, open-source framework to extract, annotate, and serialize the entirety of the PubMed Central Open Access subset into an easy-to-use, publicly accessible dataset.Our framework produces a comprehensive archive with over 24 million unique image-text pairs from over 6 million articles. Metadata and expert-guided annotations are also provided. We demonstrate the utility and accessibility of our resource by releasing BMCA-CLIP, a suite of CLIP-style models continuously pre-trained on the BIOMEDICA dataset via streaming, eliminating the need to download 27 TB of data locally.On average, our models achieve state-of-the-art performance across 40 tasks - spanning pathology, radiology, ophthalmology, dermatology, surgery, molecular biology, parasitology, and cell biology - excelling in zero-shot classification with a 6.56% average improvement (as high as 29.8% and 17.5% in dermatology and ophthalmology, respectively), and stronger image-text retrieval, all while using 10x less compute. To foster reproducibility and collaboration, we release our codebase and dataset for the broader research community.

Computer vision technology is being used by many but remains representative of only a few. People have reported misbehavior of computer vision models, including offensive prediction results and lower performance for underrepresented groups. Current computer vision models are typically developed using datasets consisting of manually annotated images or videos; the data and label distributions in these datasets are critical to the models' behavior. In this paper, we examine ImageNet, a large-scale ontology of images that has spurred the development of many modern computer vision methods. We consider three key factors within the "person" subtree of ImageNet that may lead to problematic behavior in downstream computer vision technology: (1) the stagnant concept vocabulary of WordNet, (2) the attempt at exhaustive illustration of all categories with images, and (3) the inequality of representation in the images within concepts. We seek to illuminate the root causes of these concerns and take the first steps to mitigate them constructively.

Current captioning datasets, focus on object-centric captions, describing the visible objects in the image, often ending up stating the obvious (for humans), e.g. "people eating food in a park". Although these datasets are useful to evaluate the ability of Vision & Language models to recognize the visual content, they lack in expressing trivial abstract concepts, e.g. "people having a picnic". Such concepts are licensed by human's personal experience and contribute to forming common sense assumptions. We present the High-Level Dataset; a dataset extending 14997 images of the COCO dataset with 134973 human-annotated (high-level) abstract captions collected along three axes: scenes, actions and rationales. We describe and release such dataset and we show how it can be used to assess models' multimodal grounding of abstract concepts and enrich models' visio-lingusitic representations. Moreover, we describe potential tasks enabled by this dataset involving high- and low-level concepts interactions.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are powerful tools for processing and understanding text and images. We study the processing of visual tokens in the language model component of LLaVA, a prominent VLM. Our approach focuses on analyzing the localization of object information, the evolution of visual token representations across layers, and the mechanism of integrating visual information for predictions. Through ablation studies, we demonstrated that object identification accuracy drops by over 70\% when object-specific tokens are removed. We observed that visual token representations become increasingly interpretable in the vocabulary space across layers, suggesting an alignment with textual tokens corresponding to image content. Finally, we found that the model extracts object information from these refined representations at the last token position for prediction, mirroring the process in text-only language models for factual association tasks. These findings provide crucial insights into how VLMs process and integrate visual information, bridging the gap between our understanding of language and vision models, and paving the way for more interpretable and controllable multimodal systems.

Interpreting the inner function of neural networks is crucial for the trustworthy development and deployment of these black-box models. Prior interpretability methods focus on correlation-based measures to attribute model decisions to individual examples. However, these measures are susceptible to noise and spurious correlations encoded in the model during the training phase (e.g., biased inputs, model overfitting, or misspecification). Moreover, this process has proven to result in noisy and unstable attributions that prevent any transparent understanding of the model's behavior. In this paper, we develop a robust interventional-based method grounded by causal analysis to capture cause-effect mechanisms in pre-trained neural networks and their relation to the prediction. Our novel approach relies on path interventions to infer the causal mechanisms within hidden layers and isolate relevant and necessary information (to model prediction), avoiding noisy ones. The result is task-specific causal explanatory graphs that can audit model behavior and express the actual causes underlying its performance. We apply our method to vision models trained on classification tasks. On image classification tasks, we provide extensive quantitative experiments to show that our approach can capture more stable and faithful explanations than standard attribution-based methods. Furthermore, the underlying causal graphs reveal the neural interactions in the model, making it a valuable tool in other applications (e.g., model repair).

Given the remarkable success that large visual language models (LVLMs) have achieved in image perception tasks, the endeavor to make LVMLs perceive the world like humans is drawing increasing attention. Current multi-modal benchmarks mainly focus on the objective fact or certain topic related potential knowledge within a image, but overlook the associative relations between multiple images. Therefore, we define a multi-image relation association task, and meticulously curate MMRA benchmark, a Multi-granularity Multi-image Relational Association benchmark, consisted of 1026 samples. In order to systematically and comprehensively evaluate mainstream LVLMs, we establish an associational relation system among images that contain 11 subtasks (e.g, UsageSimilarity, SubEvent, etc.) at two granularity levels (i.e., "image" and "entity") according to the relations in ConceptNet. Our experiments demonstrate that, on our MMRA benchmark, current mainstream LVLMs all have their own advantages and disadvantages across different subtasks. It is worth noting that, at the entity level, the performance of all models is worse than that of them at the image level, indicating that the fine-grained multi-image perception task is still challenging for LVLMs. The tasks related to spatial perception are relatively difficult for LVLMs to handle. Furthermore, we find that LVMLs exhibit a good ability to perceive image details, and the key to enhancing their multi-image association capability is to strengthen the reasoning ability of their language model component. All our codes and data are released at htthttps://github.com/Wusiwei0410/MMRA.

In visual decision making, high-level features, such as object categories, have a strong influence on choice. However, the impact of low-level features on behavior is less understood partly due to the high correlation between high- and low-level features in the stimuli presented (e.g., objects of the same category are more likely to share low-level features). To disentangle these effects, we propose a method that de-correlates low- and high-level visual properties in a novel set of stimuli. Our method uses two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as candidate models of the ventral visual stream: the CORnet-S that has high neural predictivity in high-level, IT-like responses and the VGG-16 that has high neural predictivity in low-level responses. Triplets (root, image1, image2) of stimuli are parametrized by the level of low- and high-level similarity of images extracted from the different layers. These stimuli are then used in a decision-making task where participants are tasked to choose the most similar-to-the-root image. We found that different networks show differing abilities to predict the effects of low-versus-high-level similarity: while CORnet-S outperforms VGG-16 in explaining human choices based on high-level similarity, VGG-16 outperforms CORnet-S in explaining human choices based on low-level similarity. Using Brain-Score, we observed that the behavioral prediction abilities of different layers of these networks qualitatively corresponded to their ability to explain neural activity at different levels of the visual hierarchy. In summary, our algorithm for stimulus set generation enables the study of how different representations in the visual stream affect high-level cognitive behaviors.

Recently, DALL-E, a multimodal transformer language model, and its variants (including diffusion models) have shown high-quality text-to-image generation capabilities. However, despite the interesting image generation results, there has not been a detailed analysis on how to evaluate such models. In this work, we investigate the visual reasoning capabilities and social biases of different text-to-image models, covering both multimodal transformer language models and diffusion models. First, we measure three visual reasoning skills: object recognition, object counting, and spatial relation understanding. For this, we propose PaintSkills, a compositional diagnostic dataset and evaluation toolkit that measures these skills. In our experiments, there exists a large gap between the performance of recent text-to-image models and the upper bound accuracy in object counting and spatial relation understanding skills. Second, we assess gender and skin tone biases by measuring the variance of the gender/skin tone distribution based on automated and human evaluation. We demonstrate that recent text-to-image models learn specific gender/skin tone biases from web image-text pairs. We hope that our work will help guide future progress in improving text-to-image generation models on visual reasoning skills and learning socially unbiased representations. Code and data: https://github.com/j-min/DallEval

Current computer vision models, unlike the human visual system, cannot yet achieve general-purpose visual understanding. Existing efforts to create a general vision model are limited in the scope of assessed tasks and offer no overarching framework to perform them holistically. We present a new comprehensive benchmark, General-purpose Visual Understanding Evaluation (G-VUE), covering the full spectrum of visual cognitive abilities with four functional domains x2014 Perceive, Ground, Reason, and Act. The four domains are embodied in 11 carefully curated tasks, from 3D reconstruction to visual reasoning and manipulation. Along with the benchmark, we provide a general encoder-decoder framework to allow for the evaluation of arbitrary visual representation on all 11 tasks. We evaluate various pre-trained visual representations with our framework and observe that (1) Transformer-based visual backbone generally outperforms CNN-based backbone on G-VUE, (2) visual representations from vision-language pre-training are superior to those with vision-only pre-training across visual tasks. With G-VUE, we provide a holistic evaluation standard to motivate research toward building general-purpose visual systems via obtaining more general-purpose visual representations.

The proliferation of machine learning models in critical decision making processes has underscored the need for bias discovery and mitigation strategies. Identifying the reasons behind a biased system is not straightforward, since in many occasions they are associated with hidden spurious correlations which are not easy to spot. Standard approaches rely on bias audits performed by analyzing model performance in pre-defined subgroups of data samples, usually characterized by common attributes like gender or ethnicity when it comes to people, or other specific attributes defining semantically coherent groups of images. However, it is not always possible to know a-priori the specific attributes defining the failure modes of visual recognition systems. Recent approaches propose to discover these groups by leveraging large vision language models, which enable the extraction of cross-modal embeddings and the generation of textual descriptions to characterize the subgroups where a certain model is underperforming. In this work, we argue that incorporating visual explanations (e.g. heatmaps generated via GradCAM or other approaches) can boost the performance of such bias discovery and mitigation frameworks. To this end, we introduce Visually Grounded Bias Discovery and Mitigation (ViG-Bias), a simple yet effective technique which can be integrated to a variety of existing frameworks to improve both, discovery and mitigation performance. Our comprehensive evaluation shows that incorporating visual explanations enhances existing techniques like DOMINO, FACTS and Bias-to-Text, across several challenging datasets, including CelebA, Waterbirds, and NICO++.

In natural language processing, most models try to learn semantic representations merely from texts. The learned representations encode the distributional semantics but fail to connect to any knowledge about the physical world. In contrast, humans learn language by grounding concepts in perception and action and the brain encodes grounded semantics for cognition. Inspired by this notion and recent work in vision-language learning, we design a two-stream model for grounding language learning in vision. The model includes a VGG-based visual stream and a Bert-based language stream. The two streams merge into a joint representational space. Through cross-modal contrastive learning, the model first learns to align visual and language representations with the MS COCO dataset. The model further learns to retrieve visual objects with language queries through a cross-modal attention module and to infer the visual relations between the retrieved objects through a bilinear operator with the Visual Genome dataset. After training, the language stream of this model is a stand-alone language model capable of embedding concepts in a visually grounded semantic space. This semantic space manifests principal dimensions explainable with human intuition and neurobiological knowledge. Word embeddings in this semantic space are predictive of human-defined norms of semantic features and are segregated into perceptually distinctive clusters. Furthermore, the visually grounded language model also enables compositional language understanding based on visual knowledge and multimodal image search with queries based on images, texts, or their combinations.

We propose a novel VQA dataset, based on picture stories designed for educating young children, that aims to facilitate comprehensive evaluation and characterization of vision-language models on comprehension tasks. Unlike current VQA datasets that often focus on fact-based memorization and simple reasoning tasks without principled scientific grounding, we collect data containing tasks reflecting different levels of comprehension and underlying cognitive processes, as laid out in Bloom's Taxonomy, a classic framework widely adopted in education research. The proposed BloomVQA dataset can be mapped to a hierarchical graph-based representation of visual stories, enabling automatic data augmentation and novel measures characterizing model consistency across the underlying taxonomy. We demonstrate graded evaluation and reliability analysis based on our proposed consistency metrics on state-of-the-art vision-language models. Our results suggest that, while current models achieve the most gain on low-level comprehension tasks, they generally fall short on high-level tasks requiring more advanced comprehension and cognitive skills, as 38.0% drop in VQA accuracy is observed comparing lowest and highest level tasks. Furthermore, current models show consistency patterns misaligned with human comprehension in various scenarios, suggesting emergent structures of model behaviors.

Reconstructing 3D visuals from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, introduced as Recon3DMind in our conference work, is of significant interest to both cognitive neuroscience and computer vision. To advance this task, we present the fMRI-3D dataset, which includes data from 15 participants and showcases a total of 4768 3D objects. The dataset comprises two components: fMRI-Shape, previously introduced and accessible at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fudan-fMRI/fMRI-Shape, and fMRI-Objaverse, proposed in this paper and available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Fudan-fMRI/fMRI-Objaverse. fMRI-Objaverse includes data from 5 subjects, 4 of whom are also part of the Core set in fMRI-Shape, with each subject viewing 3142 3D objects across 117 categories, all accompanied by text captions. This significantly enhances the diversity and potential applications of the dataset. Additionally, we propose MinD-3D, a novel framework designed to decode 3D visual information from fMRI signals. The framework first extracts and aggregates features from fMRI data using a neuro-fusion encoder, then employs a feature-bridge diffusion model to generate visual features, and finally reconstructs the 3D object using a generative transformer decoder. We establish new benchmarks by designing metrics at both semantic and structural levels to evaluate model performance. Furthermore, we assess our model's effectiveness in an Out-of-Distribution setting and analyze the attribution of the extracted features and the visual ROIs in fMRI signals. Our experiments demonstrate that MinD-3D not only reconstructs 3D objects with high semantic and spatial accuracy but also deepens our understanding of how human brain processes 3D visual information. Project page at: https://jianxgao.github.io/MinD-3D.

A unique aspect of human visual understanding is the ability to flexibly interpret abstract concepts: acquiring lifted rules explaining what they symbolize, grounding them across familiar and unfamiliar contexts, and making predictions or reasoning about them. While off-the-shelf vision-language models excel at making literal interpretations of images (e.g., recognizing object categories such as tree branches), they still struggle to make sense of such visual abstractions (e.g., how an arrangement of tree branches may form the walls of a maze). To address this challenge, we introduce Deep Schema Grounding (DSG), a framework that leverages explicit structured representations of visual abstractions for grounding and reasoning. At the core of DSG are schemas--dependency graph descriptions of abstract concepts that decompose them into more primitive-level symbols. DSG uses large language models to extract schemas, then hierarchically grounds concrete to abstract components of the schema onto images with vision-language models. The grounded schema is used to augment visual abstraction understanding. We systematically evaluate DSG and different methods in reasoning on our new Visual Abstractions Dataset, which consists of diverse, real-world images of abstract concepts and corresponding question-answer pairs labeled by humans. We show that DSG significantly improves the abstract visual reasoning performance of vision-language models, and is a step toward human-aligned understanding of visual abstractions.

While text-to-visual models now produce photo-realistic images and videos, they struggle with compositional text prompts involving attributes, relationships, and higher-order reasoning such as logic and comparison. In this work, we conduct an extensive human study on GenAI-Bench to evaluate the performance of leading image and video generation models in various aspects of compositional text-to-visual generation. We also compare automated evaluation metrics against our collected human ratings and find that VQAScore -- a metric measuring the likelihood that a VQA model views an image as accurately depicting the prompt -- significantly outperforms previous metrics such as CLIPScore. In addition, VQAScore can improve generation in a black-box manner (without finetuning) via simply ranking a few (3 to 9) candidate images. Ranking by VQAScore is 2x to 3x more effective than other scoring methods like PickScore, HPSv2, and ImageReward at improving human alignment ratings for DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion, especially on compositional prompts that require advanced visio-linguistic reasoning. We will release a new GenAI-Rank benchmark with over 40,000 human ratings to evaluate scoring metrics on ranking images generated from the same prompt. Lastly, we discuss promising areas for improvement in VQAScore, such as addressing fine-grained visual details. We will release all human ratings (over 80,000) to facilitate scientific benchmarking of both generative models and automated metrics.

Large-scale diffusion neural networks represent a substantial milestone in text-to-image generation, but they remain poorly understood, lacking interpretability analyses. In this paper, we perform a text-image attribution analysis on Stable Diffusion, a recently open-sourced model. To produce pixel-level attribution maps, we upscale and aggregate cross-attention word-pixel scores in the denoising subnetwork, naming our method DAAM. We evaluate its correctness by testing its semantic segmentation ability on nouns, as well as its generalized attribution quality on all parts of speech, rated by humans. We then apply DAAM to study the role of syntax in the pixel space, characterizing head--dependent heat map interaction patterns for ten common dependency relations. Finally, we study several semantic phenomena using DAAM, with a focus on feature entanglement, where we find that cohyponyms worsen generation quality and descriptive adjectives attend too broadly. To our knowledge, we are the first to interpret large diffusion models from a visuolinguistic perspective, which enables future lines of research. Our code is at https://github.com/castorini/daam.

Most prior art in visual understanding relies solely on analyzing the "what" (e.g., event recognition) and "where" (e.g., event localization), which in some cases, fails to describe correct contextual relationships between events or leads to incorrect underlying visual attention. Part of what defines us as human and fundamentally different from machines is our instinct to seek causality behind any association, say an event Y that happened as a direct result of event X. To this end, we propose iPerceive, a framework capable of understanding the "why" between events in a video by building a common-sense knowledge base using contextual cues to infer causal relationships between objects in the video. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique using the dense video captioning (DVC) and video question answering (VideoQA) tasks. Furthermore, while most prior work in DVC and VideoQA relies solely on visual information, other modalities such as audio and speech are vital for a human observer's perception of an environment. We formulate DVC and VideoQA tasks as machine translation problems that utilize multiple modalities. By evaluating the performance of iPerceive DVC and iPerceive VideoQA on the ActivityNet Captions and TVQA datasets respectively, we show that our approach furthers the state-of-the-art. Code and samples are available at: iperceive.amanchadha.com.

Visual similarities discovery (VSD) is an important task with broad e-commerce applications. Given an image of a certain object, the goal of VSD is to retrieve images of different objects with high perceptual visual similarity. Although being a highly addressed problem, the evaluation of proposed methods for VSD is often based on a proxy of an identification-retrieval task, evaluating the ability of a model to retrieve different images of the same object. We posit that evaluating VSD methods based on identification tasks is limited, and faithful evaluation must rely on expert annotations. In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale fashion visual similarity benchmark dataset, consisting of more than 110K expert-annotated image pairs. Besides this major contribution, we share insight from the challenges we faced while curating this dataset. Based on these insights, we propose a novel and efficient labeling procedure that can be applied to any dataset. Our analysis examines its limitations and inductive biases, and based on these findings, we propose metrics to mitigate those limitations. Though our primary focus lies on visual similarity, the methodologies we present have broader applications for discovering and evaluating perceptual similarity across various domains.

Image captioning models tend to describe images in an object-centric way, emphasising visible objects. But image descriptions can also abstract away from objects and describe the type of scene depicted. In this paper, we explore the potential of a state-of-the-art Vision and Language model, VinVL, to caption images at the scene level using (1) a novel dataset which pairs images with both object-centric and scene descriptions. Through (2) an in-depth analysis of the effect of the fine-tuning, we show (3) that a small amount of curated data suffices to generate scene descriptions without losing the capability to identify object-level concepts in the scene; the model acquires a more holistic view of the image compared to when object-centric descriptions are generated. We discuss the parallels between these results and insights from computational and cognitive science research on scene perception.

Humans describe complex scenes with compositionality, using simple text descriptions enriched with links and relationships. While vision-language research has aimed to develop models with compositional understanding capabilities, this is not reflected yet in existing datasets which, for the most part, still use plain text to describe images. In this work, we propose a new annotation strategy, graph-based captioning (GBC) that describes an image using a labelled graph structure, with nodes of various types. The nodes in GBC are created using, in a first stage, object detection and dense captioning tools nested recursively to uncover and describe entity nodes, further linked together in a second stage by highlighting, using new types of nodes, compositions and relations among entities. Since all GBC nodes hold plain text descriptions, GBC retains the flexibility found in natural language, but can also encode hierarchical information in its edges. We demonstrate that GBC can be produced automatically, using off-the-shelf multimodal LLMs and open-vocabulary detection models, by building a new dataset, GBC10M, gathering GBC annotations for about 10M images of the CC12M dataset. We use GBC10M to showcase the wealth of node captions uncovered by GBC, as measured with CLIP training. We show that using GBC nodes' annotations -- notably those stored in composition and relation nodes -- results in significant performance boost on downstream models when compared to other dataset formats. To further explore the opportunities provided by GBC, we also propose a new attention mechanism that can leverage the entire GBC graph, with encouraging experimental results that show the extra benefits of incorporating the graph structure. Our datasets are released at https://huggingface.co/graph-based-captions.

Vision-language models (VLMs) discriminatively pre-trained with contrastive image-text matching losses such as P(match|text, image) have been criticized for lacking compositional understanding. This means they might output similar scores even if the original caption is rearranged into a different semantic statement. To address this, we propose to use the {bf V}isual {bf G}enerative {bf P}re-{bf T}raining Score ({bf VisualGPTScore}) of P(text|image), a multimodal generative score that captures the likelihood of a text caption conditioned on an image using an image-conditioned language model. Contrary to the belief that VLMs are mere bag-of-words models, our off-the-shelf VisualGPTScore demonstrates top-tier performance on recently proposed image-text retrieval benchmarks like ARO and Crepe that assess compositional reasoning. Furthermore, we factorize VisualGPTScore into a product of the marginal P(text) and the Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI). This helps to (a) diagnose datasets with strong language bias, and (b) debias results on other benchmarks like Winoground using an information-theoretic framework. VisualGPTScore provides valuable insights and serves as a strong baseline for future evaluation of visio-linguistic compositionality.

In this paper we introduce a novel, unified, open-source model interpretability library for PyTorch [12]. The library contains generic implementations of a number of gradient and perturbation-based attribution algorithms, also known as feature, neuron and layer importance algorithms, as well as a set of evaluation metrics for these algorithms. It can be used for both classification and non-classification models including graph-structured models built on Neural Networks (NN). In this paper we give a high-level overview of supported attribution algorithms and show how to perform memory-efficient and scalable computations. We emphasize that the three main characteristics of the library are multimodality, extensibility and ease of use. Multimodality supports different modality of inputs such as image, text, audio or video. Extensibility allows adding new algorithms and features. The library is also designed for easy understanding and use. Besides, we also introduce an interactive visualization tool called Captum Insights that is built on top of Captum library and allows sample-based model debugging and visualization using feature importance metrics.

Dramatic progress has been witnessed in basic vision tasks involving low-level perception, such as object recognition, detection, and tracking. Unfortunately, there is still an enormous performance gap between artificial vision systems and human intelligence in terms of higher-level vision problems, especially ones involving reasoning. Earlier attempts in equipping machines with high-level reasoning have hovered around Visual Question Answering (VQA), one typical task associating vision and language understanding. In this work, we propose a new dataset, built in the context of Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) and aimed at lifting machine intelligence by associating vision with structural, relational, and analogical reasoning in a hierarchical representation. Unlike previous works in measuring abstract reasoning using RPM, we establish a semantic link between vision and reasoning by providing structure representation. This addition enables a new type of abstract reasoning by jointly operating on the structure representation. Machine reasoning ability using modern computer vision is evaluated in this newly proposed dataset. Additionally, we also provide human performance as a reference. Finally, we show consistent improvement across all models by incorporating a simple neural module that combines visual understanding and structure reasoning.

We consider the visual disambiguation task of determining whether a pair of visually similar images depict the same or distinct 3D surfaces (e.g., the same or opposite sides of a symmetric building). Illusory image matches, where two images observe distinct but visually similar 3D surfaces, can be challenging for humans to differentiate, and can also lead 3D reconstruction algorithms to produce erroneous results. We propose a learning-based approach to visual disambiguation, formulating it as a binary classification task on image pairs. To that end, we introduce a new dataset for this problem, Doppelgangers, which includes image pairs of similar structures with ground truth labels. We also design a network architecture that takes the spatial distribution of local keypoints and matches as input, allowing for better reasoning about both local and global cues. Our evaluation shows that our method can distinguish illusory matches in difficult cases, and can be integrated into SfM pipelines to produce correct, disambiguated 3D reconstructions. See our project page for our code, datasets, and more results: http://doppelgangers-3d.github.io/.

Understanding the functional organization of higher visual cortex is a central focus in neuroscience. Past studies have primarily mapped the visual and semantic selectivity of neural populations using hand-selected stimuli, which may potentially bias results towards pre-existing hypotheses of visual cortex functionality. Moving beyond conventional approaches, we introduce a data-driven method that generates natural language descriptions for images predicted to maximally activate individual voxels of interest. Our method -- Semantic Captioning Using Brain Alignments ("BrainSCUBA") -- builds upon the rich embedding space learned by a contrastive vision-language model and utilizes a pre-trained large language model to generate interpretable captions. We validate our method through fine-grained voxel-level captioning across higher-order visual regions. We further perform text-conditioned image synthesis with the captions, and show that our images are semantically coherent and yield high predicted activations. Finally, to demonstrate how our method enables scientific discovery, we perform exploratory investigations on the distribution of "person" representations in the brain, and discover fine-grained semantic selectivity in body-selective areas. Unlike earlier studies that decode text, our method derives voxel-wise captions of semantic selectivity. Our results show that BrainSCUBA is a promising means for understanding functional preferences in the brain, and provides motivation for further hypothesis-driven investigation of visual cortex.

Rigorousness and clarity are both essential for interpretations of DNNs to engender human trust. Path methods are commonly employed to generate rigorous attributions that satisfy three axioms. However, the meaning of attributions remains ambiguous due to distinct path choices. To address the ambiguity, we introduce Concentration Principle, which centrally allocates high attributions to indispensable features, thereby endowing aesthetic and sparsity. We then present SAMP, a model-agnostic interpreter, which efficiently searches the near-optimal path from a pre-defined set of manipulation paths. Moreover, we propose the infinitesimal constraint (IC) and momentum strategy (MS) to improve the rigorousness and optimality. Visualizations show that SAMP can precisely reveal DNNs by pinpointing salient image pixels. We also perform quantitative experiments and observe that our method significantly outperforms the counterparts. Code: https://github.com/zbr17/SAMP.

Vision foundation models, particularly the ViT family, have revolutionized image understanding by providing rich semantic features. However, despite their success in 2D comprehension, their abilities on grasping 3D spatial relationships are still unclear. In this work, we evaluate and enhance the 3D awareness of ViT-based models. We begin by systematically assessing their ability to learn 3D equivariant features, specifically examining the consistency of semantic embeddings across different viewpoints. Our findings indicate that improved 3D equivariance leads to better performance on various downstream tasks, including pose estimation, tracking, and semantic transfer. Building on this insight, we propose a simple yet effective finetuning strategy based on 3D correspondences, which significantly enhances the 3D correspondence understanding of existing vision models. Remarkably, even finetuning on a single object for just one iteration results in substantial performance gains. All code and resources will be made publicly available to support further advancements in 3D-aware vision models. Our code is available at https://github.com/qq456cvb/3DCorrEnhance.

Errors in understanding visual information in images (i.e., visual perception errors) remain a major source of mistakes in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs). While further analysis is essential, there is a deficiency in datasets for evaluating the visual perception of LVLMs. In this work, we introduce VisOnlyQA, a new dataset designed to directly evaluate the visual perception capabilities of LVLMs on questions about geometric and numerical information in scientific figures. Our dataset enables us to analyze the visual perception of LVLMs for fine-grained visual information, independent of other capabilities such as reasoning. The evaluation set of VisOnlyQA includes 1,200 multiple-choice questions in 12 tasks on four categories of figures. We also provide synthetic training data consisting of 70k instances. Our experiments on VisOnlyQA highlight the following findings: (i) 20 LVLMs we evaluate, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, work poorly on the visual perception tasks in VisOnlyQA, while human performance is nearly perfect. (ii) Fine-tuning on synthetic training data demonstrates the potential for enhancing the visual perception of LVLMs, but observed improvements are limited to certain tasks and specific models. (iii) Stronger language models improve the visual perception of LVLMs. In summary, our experiments suggest that both training data and model architectures should be improved to enhance the visual perception capabilities of LVLMs. The datasets, code, and model responses are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/VisOnlyQA.

Recent advances in human preference alignment have significantly enhanced multimodal generation and understanding. A key approach is training reward models to guide preference optimization. However, existing models are often task-specific, limiting their adaptability across diverse visual applications. We also argue that jointly learning to assess multiple tasks may foster a synergistic effect, where improved image understanding enhances image generation assessment, and refined image evaluation benefits video assessment through better frame analysis. To this end, this paper proposes UnifiedReward, the first unified reward model for multimodal understanding and generation assessment, enabling both pairwise ranking and pointwise scoring, which can be employed for vision model preference alignment. Specifically, (1) we first develop UnifiedReward on our constructed large-scale human preference dataset, including both image and video generation/understanding tasks. (2) Then, it is utilized to automatically construct high-quality preference pair data based on the vision models, fine-gradually filtering their outputs through pair ranking and point sifting. (3) Finally, these data are used for their preference alignment through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Experimental results demonstrate that joint learning to assess diverse visual tasks can lead to substantial mutual benefits and we apply our pipeline to both image and video understanding/generation tasks, significantly improving the performance in each domain.

Text-to-Image (T2I) generation is enabling new applications that support creators, designers, and general end users of productivity software by generating illustrative content with high photorealism starting from a given descriptive text as a prompt. Such models are however trained on massive amounts of web data, which surfaces the peril of potential harmful biases that may leak in the generation process itself. In this paper, we take a multi-dimensional approach to studying and quantifying common social biases as reflected in the generated images, by focusing on how occupations, personality traits, and everyday situations are depicted across representations of (perceived) gender, age, race, and geographical location. Through an extensive set of both automated and human evaluation experiments we present findings for two popular T2I models: DALLE-v2 and Stable Diffusion. Our results reveal that there exist severe occupational biases of neutral prompts majorly excluding groups of people from results for both models. Such biases can get mitigated by increasing the amount of specification in the prompt itself, although the prompting mitigation will not address discrepancies in image quality or other usages of the model or its representations in other scenarios. Further, we observe personality traits being associated with only a limited set of people at the intersection of race, gender, and age. Finally, an analysis of geographical location representations on everyday situations (e.g., park, food, weddings) shows that for most situations, images generated through default location-neutral prompts are closer and more similar to images generated for locations of United States and Germany.

Modern high-scoring models of vision in the brain score competition do not stem from Vision Transformers. However, in this paper, we provide evidence against the unexpected trend of Vision Transformers (ViT) being not perceptually aligned with human visual representations by showing how a dual-stream Transformer, a CrossViT~a la Chen et al. (2021), under a joint rotationally-invariant and adversarial optimization procedure yields 2nd place in the aggregate Brain-Score 2022 competition(Schrimpf et al., 2020b) averaged across all visual categories, and at the time of the competition held 1st place for the highest explainable variance of area V4. In addition, our current Transformer-based model also achieves greater explainable variance for areas V4, IT and Behaviour than a biologically-inspired CNN (ResNet50) that integrates a frontal V1-like computation module (Dapello et al.,2020). To assess the contribution of the optimization scheme with respect to the CrossViT architecture, we perform several additional experiments on differently optimized CrossViT's regarding adversarial robustness, common corruption benchmarks, mid-ventral stimuli interpretation and feature inversion. Against our initial expectations, our family of results provides tentative support for an "All roads lead to Rome" argument enforced via a joint optimization rule even for non biologically-motivated models of vision such as Vision Transformers. Code is available at https://github.com/williamberrios/BrainScore-Transformers

The embedding spaces of image models have been shown to encode a range of social biases such as racism and sexism. Here, we investigate specific factors that contribute to the emergence of these biases in Vision Transformers (ViT). Therefore, we measure the impact of training data, model architecture, and training objectives on social biases in the learned representations of ViTs. Our findings indicate that counterfactual augmentation training using diffusion-based image editing can mitigate biases, but does not eliminate them. Moreover, we find that larger models are less biased than smaller models, and that models trained using discriminative objectives are less biased than those trained using generative objectives. In addition, we observe inconsistencies in the learned social biases. To our surprise, ViTs can exhibit opposite biases when trained on the same data set using different self-supervised objectives. Our findings give insights into the factors that contribute to the emergence of social biases and suggests that we could achieve substantial fairness improvements based on model design choices.

Spatial relations are a basic part of human cognition. However, they are expressed in natural language in a variety of ways, and previous work has suggested that current vision-and-language models (VLMs) struggle to capture relational information. In this paper, we present Visual Spatial Reasoning (VSR), a dataset containing more than 10k natural text-image pairs with 65 types of spatial relations in English (such as: under, in front of, and facing). While using a seemingly simple annotation format, we show how the dataset includes challenging linguistic phenomena, such as varying reference frames. We demonstrate a large gap between human and model performance: the human ceiling is above 95%, while state-of-the-art models only achieve around 70%. We observe that VLMs' by-relation performances have little correlation with the number of training examples and the tested models are in general incapable of recognising relations concerning the orientations of objects.

Images of the natural world, collected by a variety of cameras, from drones to individual phones, are increasingly abundant sources of biological information. There is an explosion of computational methods and tools, particularly computer vision, for extracting biologically relevant information from images for science and conservation. Yet most of these are bespoke approaches designed for a specific task and are not easily adaptable or extendable to new questions, contexts, and datasets. A vision model for general organismal biology questions on images is of timely need. To approach this, we curate and release TreeOfLife-10M, the largest and most diverse ML-ready dataset of biology images. We then develop BioCLIP, a foundation model for the tree of life, leveraging the unique properties of biology captured by TreeOfLife-10M, namely the abundance and variety of images of plants, animals, and fungi, together with the availability of rich structured biological knowledge. We rigorously benchmark our approach on diverse fine-grained biology classification tasks, and find that BioCLIP consistently and substantially outperforms existing baselines (by 17% to 20% absolute). Intrinsic evaluation reveals that BioCLIP has learned a hierarchical representation conforming to the tree of life, shedding light on its strong generalizability. Our code, models and data will be made available at https://github.com/Imageomics/bioclip.

Understanding the performance of machine learning models across diverse data distributions is critically important for reliable applications. Motivated by this, there is a growing focus on curating benchmark datasets that capture distribution shifts. While valuable, the existing benchmarks are limited in that many of them only contain a small number of shifts and they lack systematic annotation about what is different across different shifts. We present MetaShift--a collection of 12,868 sets of natural images across 410 classes--to address this challenge. We leverage the natural heterogeneity of Visual Genome and its annotations to construct MetaShift. The key construction idea is to cluster images using its metadata, which provides context for each image (e.g. "cats with cars" or "cats in bathroom") that represent distinct data distributions. MetaShift has two important benefits: first, it contains orders of magnitude more natural data shifts than previously available. Second, it provides explicit explanations of what is unique about each of its data sets and a distance score that measures the amount of distribution shift between any two of its data sets. We demonstrate the utility of MetaShift in benchmarking several recent proposals for training models to be robust to data shifts. We find that the simple empirical risk minimization performs the best when shifts are moderate and no method had a systematic advantage for large shifts. We also show how MetaShift can help to visualize conflicts between data subsets during model training.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in multimodal tasks, yet they often struggle with visual arithmetic, seemingly simple capabilities like object counting or length comparison, which are essential for relevant complex tasks like chart understanding and geometric reasoning. In this work, we first investigate the root causes of this deficiency through a suite of probing tasks focusing on basic visual arithmetic. Our analysis reveals that while pre-trained vision encoders typically capture sufficient information, the text decoder often fails to decode it correctly for arithmetic reasoning. To address this, we propose CogAlign, a novel post-training strategy inspired by Piaget's theory of cognitive development. CogAlign trains VLMs to recognize invariant properties under visual transformations. We demonstrate that this approach significantly improves the performance of three diverse VLMs on our proposed probing tasks. Furthermore, CogAlign enhances performance by an average of 4.6% on CHOCOLATE and 2.9% on MATH-VISION, outperforming or matching supervised fine-tuning methods while requiring only 60% less training data. These results highlight the effectiveness and generalizability of CogAlign in improving fundamental visual arithmetic capabilities and their transfer to downstream tasks.

Pretrained visual-language models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot abilities in image captioning, when accompanied by hand-crafted prompts. Meanwhile, hand-crafted prompts utilize human prior knowledge to guide the model. However, due to the diversity between different domains, such hand-crafted prompt that provide invariant prior knowledge may result in mode collapse for some domains. Some researches attempted to incorporate expert knowledge and instruction datasets, but the results were costly and led to hallucinations. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised prompt learning method to improve Generalization of Image Captioning (GeneIC), which learns a domain-specific prompt vector for the target domain without requiring annotated data. GeneIC aligns visual and language modalities with a pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, thus optimizing the domain-specific prompt vector from two aspects: attribute and semantic consistency. Specifically, GeneIC first generates attribute-transferred images with differing attributes, while retaining semantic similarity with original images. Then, GeneIC uses CLIP to measure the similarity between the images and the generated sentences. By exploring the variable and invariant features in the original images and attribute-transferred images, attribute consistency constrains the attribute change direction of both images and sentences to learn domain-specific knowledge. The semantic consistency directly measures the similarity between the generated sentences and images to ensure the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the generated sentences. Consequently, GeneIC only optimizes the prompt vectors, which effectively retains the knowledge in the large model and introduces domain-specific knowledge.

Vision Transformer models exhibit immense power yet remain opaque to human understanding, posing challenges and risks for practical applications. While prior research has attempted to demystify these models through input attribution and neuron role analysis, there's been a notable gap in considering layer-level information and the holistic path of information flow across layers. In this paper, we investigate the significance of influential neuron paths within vision Transformers, which is a path of neurons from the model input to output that impacts the model inference most significantly. We first propose a joint influence measure to assess the contribution of a set of neurons to the model outcome. And we further provide a layer-progressive neuron locating approach that efficiently selects the most influential neuron at each layer trying to discover the crucial neuron path from input to output within the target model. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method finding the most influential neuron path along which the information flows, over the existing baseline solutions. Additionally, the neuron paths have illustrated that vision Transformers exhibit some specific inner working mechanism for processing the visual information within the same image category. We further analyze the key effects of these neurons on the image classification task, showcasing that the found neuron paths have already preserved the model capability on downstream tasks, which may also shed some lights on real-world applications like model pruning. The project website including implementation code is available at https://foundation-model-research.github.io/NeuronPath/.

As deep vision models' popularity rapidly increases, there is a growing emphasis on explanations for model predictions. The inherently explainable attribution method aims to enhance the understanding of model behavior by identifying the important regions in images that significantly contribute to predictions. It is achieved by cooperatively training a selector (generating an attribution map to identify important features) and a predictor (making predictions using the identified features). Despite many advancements, existing methods suffer from the incompleteness problem, where discriminative features are masked out, and the interlocking problem, where the non-optimized selector initially selects noise, causing the predictor to fit on this noise and perpetuate the cycle. To address these problems, we introduce a new objective that discourages the presence of discriminative features in the masked-out regions thus enhancing the comprehensiveness of feature selection. A pre-trained detector is introduced to detect discriminative features in the masked-out region. If the selector selects noise instead of discriminative features, the detector can observe and break the interlocking situation by penalizing the selector. Extensive experiments show that our model makes accurate predictions with higher accuracy than the regular black-box model, and produces attribution maps with high feature coverage, localization ability, fidelity and robustness. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Zood123/COMET{https://github.com/Zood123/COMET}.

There has been a growing interest in interpreting the underlying dynamics of Transformers. While self-attention patterns were initially deemed as the primary option, recent studies have shown that integrating other components can yield more accurate explanations. This paper introduces a novel token attribution analysis method that incorporates all the components in the encoder block and aggregates this throughout layers. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments, we demonstrate that our method can produce faithful and meaningful global token attributions. Our experiments reveal that incorporating almost every encoder component results in increasingly more accurate analysis in both local (single layer) and global (the whole model) settings. Our global attribution analysis significantly outperforms previous methods on various tasks regarding correlation with gradient-based saliency scores. Our code is freely available at https://github.com/mohsenfayyaz/GlobEnc.

We study the intriguing connection between visual data, deep networks, and the brain. Our method creates a universal channel alignment by using brain voxel fMRI response prediction as the training objective. We discover that deep networks, trained with different objectives, share common feature channels across various models. These channels can be clustered into recurring sets, corresponding to distinct brain regions, indicating the formation of visual concepts. Tracing the clusters of channel responses onto the images, we see semantically meaningful object segments emerge, even without any supervised decoder. Furthermore, the universal feature alignment and the clustering of channels produce a picture and quantification of how visual information is processed through the different network layers, which produces precise comparisons between the networks.

The class activation mapping, or CAM, has been the cornerstone of feature attribution methods for multiple vision tasks. Its simplicity and effectiveness have led to wide applications in the explanation of visual predictions and weakly-supervised localization tasks. However, CAM has its own shortcomings. The computation of attribution maps relies on ad-hoc calibration steps that are not part of the training computational graph, making it difficult for us to understand the real meaning of the attribution values. In this paper, we improve CAM by explicitly incorporating a latent variable encoding the location of the cue for recognition in the formulation, thereby subsuming the attribution map into the training computational graph. The resulting model, class activation latent mapping, or CALM, is trained with the expectation-maximization algorithm. Our experiments show that CALM identifies discriminative attributes for image classifiers more accurately than CAM and other visual attribution baselines. CALM also shows performance improvements over prior arts on the weakly-supervised object localization benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/calm.

Human sketch has already proved its worth in various visual understanding tasks (e.g., retrieval, segmentation, image-captioning, etc). In this paper, we reveal a new trait of sketches - that they are also salient. This is intuitive as sketching is a natural attentive process at its core. More specifically, we aim to study how sketches can be used as a weak label to detect salient objects present in an image. To this end, we propose a novel method that emphasises on how "salient object" could be explained by hand-drawn sketches. To accomplish this, we introduce a photo-to-sketch generation model that aims to generate sequential sketch coordinates corresponding to a given visual photo through a 2D attention mechanism. Attention maps accumulated across the time steps give rise to salient regions in the process. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments prove our hypothesis and delineate how our sketch-based saliency detection model gives a competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art.

Causality knowledge is vital to building robust AI systems. Deep learning models often perform poorly on tasks that require causal reasoning, which is often derived using some form of commonsense knowledge not immediately available in the input but implicitly inferred by humans. Prior work has unraveled spurious observational biases that models fall prey to in the absence of causality. While language representation models preserve contextual knowledge within learned embeddings, they do not factor in causal relationships during training. By blending causal relationships with the input features to an existing model that performs visual cognition tasks (such as scene understanding, video captioning, video question-answering, etc.), better performance can be achieved owing to the insight causal relationships bring about. Recently, several models have been proposed that have tackled the task of mining causal data from either the visual or textual modality. However, there does not exist widespread research that mines causal relationships by juxtaposing the visual and language modalities. While images offer a rich and easy-to-process resource for us to mine causality knowledge from, videos are denser and consist of naturally time-ordered events. Also, textual information offers details that could be implicit in videos. We propose iReason, a framework that infers visual-semantic commonsense knowledge using both videos and natural language captions. Furthermore, iReason's architecture integrates a causal rationalization module to aid the process of interpretability, error analysis and bias detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of iReason using a two-pronged comparative analysis with language representation learning models (BERT, GPT-2) as well as current state-of-the-art multimodal causality models.

Multi-modality foundation models, as represented by GPT-4V, have brought a new paradigm for low-level visual perception and understanding tasks, that can respond to a broad range of natural human instructions in a model. While existing foundation models have shown exciting potentials on low-level visual tasks, their related abilities are still preliminary and need to be improved. In order to enhance these models, we conduct a large-scale subjective experiment collecting a vast number of real human feedbacks on low-level vision. Each feedback follows a pathway that starts with a detailed description on the low-level visual appearance (*e.g. clarity, color, brightness* of an image, and ends with an overall conclusion, with an average length of 45 words. The constructed **Q-Pathway** dataset includes 58K detailed human feedbacks on 18,973 images with diverse low-level appearance. Moreover, to enable foundation models to robustly respond to diverse types of questions, we design a GPT-participated conversion to process these feedbacks into diverse-format 200K instruction-response pairs. Experimental results indicate that the **Q-Instruct** consistently elevates low-level perception and understanding abilities across several foundational models. We anticipate that our datasets can pave the way for a future that general intelligence can perceive, understand low-level visual appearance and evaluate visual quality like a human. Our dataset, model zoo, and demo is published at: https://q-future.github.io/Q-Instruct.

Hallucination is a common issue in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), yet the underlying principles remain poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate which components of MLLMs contribute to object hallucinations. To analyze image representations while completely avoiding the influence of all other factors other than the image representation itself, we propose a parametric-free representation alignment metric (Pfram) that can measure the similarities between any two representation systems without requiring additional training parameters. Notably, Pfram can also assess the alignment of a neural representation system with the human representation system, represented by ground-truth annotations of images. By evaluating the alignment with object annotations, we demonstrate that this metric shows strong and consistent correlations with object hallucination across a wide range of state-of-the-art MLLMs, spanning various model architectures and sizes. Furthermore, using this metric, we explore other key issues related to image representations in MLLMs, such as the role of different modules, the impact of textual instructions, and potential improvements including the use of alternative visual encoders. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/Pfram.

This work explores the visual explanation for deep metric learning and its applications. As an important problem for learning representation, metric learning has attracted much attention recently, while the interpretation of such model is not as well studied as classification. To this end, we propose an intuitive idea to show where contributes the most to the overall similarity of two input images by decomposing the final activation. Instead of only providing the overall activation map of each image, we propose to generate point-to-point activation intensity between two images so that the relationship between different regions is uncovered. We show that the proposed framework can be directly deployed to a large range of metric learning applications and provides valuable information for understanding the model. Furthermore, our experiments show its effectiveness on two potential applications, i.e. cross-view pattern discovery and interactive retrieval. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jeff-Zilence/Explain_Metric_Learning.

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.

What is the right supervisory signal to train visual representations? Current approaches in computer vision use category labels from datasets such as ImageNet to train ConvNets. However, in case of biological agents, visual representation learning does not require millions of semantic labels. We argue that biological agents use physical interactions with the world to learn visual representations unlike current vision systems which just use passive observations (images and videos downloaded from web). For example, babies push objects, poke them, put them in their mouth and throw them to learn representations. Towards this goal, we build one of the first systems on a Baxter platform that pushes, pokes, grasps and observes objects in a tabletop environment. It uses four different types of physical interactions to collect more than 130K datapoints, with each datapoint providing supervision to a shared ConvNet architecture allowing us to learn visual representations. We show the quality of learned representations by observing neuron activations and performing nearest neighbor retrieval on this learned representation. Quantitatively, we evaluate our learned ConvNet on image classification tasks and show improvements compared to learning without external data. Finally, on the task of instance retrieval, our network outperforms the ImageNet network on recall@1 by 3%

Vision transformers (ViTs) are quickly becoming the de-facto architecture for computer vision, yet we understand very little about why they work and what they learn. While existing studies visually analyze the mechanisms of convolutional neural networks, an analogous exploration of ViTs remains challenging. In this paper, we first address the obstacles to performing visualizations on ViTs. Assisted by these solutions, we observe that neurons in ViTs trained with language model supervision (e.g., CLIP) are activated by semantic concepts rather than visual features. We also explore the underlying differences between ViTs and CNNs, and we find that transformers detect image background features, just like their convolutional counterparts, but their predictions depend far less on high-frequency information. On the other hand, both architecture types behave similarly in the way features progress from abstract patterns in early layers to concrete objects in late layers. In addition, we show that ViTs maintain spatial information in all layers except the final layer. In contrast to previous works, we show that the last layer most likely discards the spatial information and behaves as a learned global pooling operation. Finally, we conduct large-scale visualizations on a wide range of ViT variants, including DeiT, CoaT, ConViT, PiT, Swin, and Twin, to validate the effectiveness of our method.

With the growing popularity of text-to-image generative models, there has been increasing focus on understanding their risks and biases. Recent work has found that state-of-the-art models struggle to depict everyday objects with the true diversity of the real world and have notable gaps between geographic regions. In this work, we aim to increase the diversity of generated images of common objects such that per-region variations are representative of the real world. We introduce an inference time intervention, contextualized Vendi Score Guidance (c-VSG), that guides the backwards steps of latent diffusion models to increase the diversity of a sample as compared to a "memory bank" of previously generated images while constraining the amount of variation within that of an exemplar set of real-world contextualizing images. We evaluate c-VSG with two geographically representative datasets and find that it substantially increases the diversity of generated images, both for the worst performing regions and on average, while simultaneously maintaining or improving image quality and consistency. Additionally, qualitative analyses reveal that diversity of generated images is significantly improved, including along the lines of reductive region portrayals present in the original model. We hope that this work is a step towards text-to-image generative models that reflect the true geographic diversity of the world.

Language models demonstrate remarkable capacity to generalize representations learned in one modality to downstream tasks in other modalities. Can we trace this ability to individual neurons? We study the case where a frozen text transformer is augmented with vision using a self-supervised visual encoder and a single linear projection learned on an image-to-text task. Outputs of the projection layer are not immediately decodable into language describing image content; instead, we find that translation between modalities occurs deeper within the transformer. We introduce a procedure for identifying "multimodal neurons" that convert visual representations into corresponding text, and decoding the concepts they inject into the model's residual stream. In a series of experiments, we show that multimodal neurons operate on specific visual concepts across inputs, and have a systematic causal effect on image captioning.

Artificial neural networks typically struggle in generalizing to out-of-context examples. One reason for this limitation is caused by having datasets that incorporate only partial information regarding the potential correlational structure of the world. In this work, we propose TIDA (Targeted Image-editing Data Augmentation), a targeted data augmentation method focused on improving models' human-like abilities (e.g., gender recognition) by filling the correlational structure gap using a text-to-image generative model. More specifically, TIDA identifies specific skills in captions describing images (e.g., the presence of a specific gender in the image), changes the caption (e.g., "woman" to "man"), and then uses a text-to-image model to edit the image in order to match the novel caption (e.g., uniquely changing a woman to a man while maintaining the context identical). Based on the Flickr30K benchmark, we show that, compared with the original data set, a TIDA-enhanced dataset related to gender, color, and counting abilities induces better performance in several image captioning metrics. Furthermore, on top of relying on the classical BLEU metric, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of the improvements of our models against the baseline in different ways. We compared text-to-image generative models and found different behaviors of the image captioning models in terms of encoding visual encoding and textual decoding.

Vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP and ALIGN, are generally trained on datasets consisting of image-caption pairs obtained from the web. However, real-world multimodal datasets, such as healthcare data, are significantly more complex: each image (e.g. X-ray) is often paired with text (e.g. physician report) that describes many distinct attributes occurring in fine-grained regions of the image. We refer to these samples as exhibiting high pairwise complexity, since each image-text pair can be decomposed into a large number of region-attribute pairings. The extent to which VLMs can capture fine-grained relationships between image regions and textual attributes when trained on such data has not been previously evaluated. The first key contribution of this work is to demonstrate through systematic evaluations that as the pairwise complexity of the training dataset increases, standard VLMs struggle to learn region-attribute relationships, exhibiting performance degradations of up to 37% on retrieval tasks. In order to address this issue, we introduce ViLLA as our second key contribution. ViLLA, which is trained to capture fine-grained region-attribute relationships from complex datasets, involves two components: (a) a lightweight, self-supervised mapping model to decompose image-text samples into region-attribute pairs, and (b) a contrastive VLM to learn representations from generated region-attribute pairs. We demonstrate with experiments across four domains (synthetic, product, medical, and natural images) that ViLLA outperforms comparable VLMs on fine-grained reasoning tasks, such as zero-shot object detection (up to 3.6 AP50 points on COCO and 0.6 mAP points on LVIS) and retrieval (up to 14.2 R-Precision points).

Semantic correspondence, the task of determining relationships between different parts of images, underpins various applications including 3D reconstruction, image-to-image translation, object tracking, and visual place recognition. Recent studies have begun to explore representations learned in large generative image models for semantic correspondence, demonstrating promising results. Building on this progress, current state-of-the-art methods rely on combining multiple large models, resulting in high computational demands and reduced efficiency. In this work, we address this challenge by proposing a more computationally efficient approach. We propose a novel knowledge distillation technique to overcome the problem of reduced efficiency. We show how to use two large vision foundation models and distill the capabilities of these complementary models into one smaller model that maintains high accuracy at reduced computational cost. Furthermore, we demonstrate that by incorporating 3D data, we are able to further improve performance, without the need for human-annotated correspondences. Overall, our empirical results demonstrate that our distilled model with 3D data augmentation achieves performance superior to current state-of-the-art methods while significantly reducing computational load and enhancing practicality for real-world applications, such as semantic video correspondence. Our code and weights are publicly available on our project page.

Images are increasingly becoming the currency for documenting biodiversity on the planet, providing novel opportunities for accelerating scientific discoveries in the field of organismal biology, especially with the advent of large vision-language models (VLMs). We ask if pre-trained VLMs can aid scientists in answering a range of biologically relevant questions without any additional fine-tuning. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of 12 state-of-the-art (SOTA) VLMs in the field of organismal biology using a novel dataset, VLM4Bio, consisting of 469K question-answer pairs involving 30K images from three groups of organisms: fishes, birds, and butterflies, covering five biologically relevant tasks. We also explore the effects of applying prompting techniques and tests for reasoning hallucination on the performance of VLMs, shedding new light on the capabilities of current SOTA VLMs in answering biologically relevant questions using images. The code and datasets for running all the analyses reported in this paper can be found at https://github.com/sammarfy/VLM4Bio.

Is vision good enough for language? Recent advancements in multimodal models primarily stem from the powerful reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the visual component typically depends only on the instance-level contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP). Our research reveals that the visual capabilities in recent multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still exhibit systematic shortcomings. To understand the roots of these errors, we explore the gap between the visual embedding space of CLIP and vision-only self-supervised learning. We identify ''CLIP-blind pairs'' - images that CLIP perceives as similar despite their clear visual differences. With these pairs, we construct the Multimodal Visual Patterns (MMVP) benchmark. MMVP exposes areas where state-of-the-art systems, including GPT-4V, struggle with straightforward questions across nine basic visual patterns, often providing incorrect answers and hallucinated explanations. We further evaluate various CLIP-based vision-and-language models and found a notable correlation between visual patterns that challenge CLIP models and those problematic for multimodal LLMs. As an initial effort to address these issues, we propose a Mixture of Features (MoF) approach, demonstrating that integrating vision self-supervised learning features with MLLMs can significantly enhance their visual grounding capabilities. Together, our research suggests visual representation learning remains an open challenge, and accurate visual grounding is crucial for future successful multimodal systems.

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.

Vision language models (VLMs) have drastically changed the computer vision model landscape in only a few years, opening an exciting array of new applications from zero-shot image classification, over to image captioning, and visual question answering. Unlike pure vision models, they offer an intuitive way to access visual content through language prompting. The wide applicability of such models encourages us to ask whether they also align with human vision - specifically, how far they adopt human-induced visual biases through multimodal fusion, or whether they simply inherit biases from pure vision models. One important visual bias is the texture vs. shape bias, or the dominance of local over global information. In this paper, we study this bias in a wide range of popular VLMs. Interestingly, we find that VLMs are often more shape-biased than their vision encoders, indicating that visual biases are modulated to some extent through text in multimodal models. If text does indeed influence visual biases, this suggests that we may be able to steer visual biases not just through visual input but also through language: a hypothesis that we confirm through extensive experiments. For instance, we are able to steer shape bias from as low as 49% to as high as 72% through prompting alone. For now, the strong human bias towards shape (96%) remains out of reach for all tested VLMs.

Recent advancements in multimodal models have shown a strong ability in visual perception, reasoning abilities, and vision-language understanding. However, studies on visual matching ability are missing, where finding the visual correspondence of objects is essential in vision research. Our research reveals that the matching capabilities in recent multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still exhibit systematic shortcomings, even with current strong MLLMs models, GPT-4o. In particular, we construct a Multimodal Visual Matching (MMVM) benchmark to fairly benchmark over 30 different MLLMs. The MMVM benchmark is built from 15 open-source datasets and Internet videos with manual annotation. We categorize the data samples of MMVM benchmark into eight aspects based on the required cues and capabilities to more comprehensively evaluate and analyze current MLLMs. In addition, we have designed an automatic annotation pipeline to generate the MMVM SFT dataset, including 220K visual matching data with reasoning annotation. Finally, we present CoLVA, a novel contrastive MLLM with two novel technical designs: fine-grained vision expert with object-level contrastive learning and instruction augmentation strategy. CoLVA achieves 51.06\% overall accuracy (OA) on the MMVM benchmark, surpassing GPT-4o and baseline by 8.41\% and 23.58\% OA, respectively. The results show the effectiveness of our MMVM SFT dataset and our novel technical designs. Code, benchmark, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/zhouyiks/CoLVA.

Text-to-image generative models often reflect the biases of the training data, leading to unequal representations of underrepresented groups. This study investigates inclusive text-to-image generative models that generate images based on human-written prompts and ensure the resulting images are uniformly distributed across attributes of interest. Unfortunately, directly expressing the desired attributes in the prompt often leads to sub-optimal results due to linguistic ambiguity or model misrepresentation. Hence, this paper proposes a drastically different approach that adheres to the maxim that "a picture is worth a thousand words". We show that, for some attributes, images can represent concepts more expressively than text. For instance, categories of skin tones are typically hard to specify by text but can be easily represented by example images. Building upon these insights, we propose a novel approach, ITI-GEN, that leverages readily available reference images for Inclusive Text-to-Image GENeration. The key idea is learning a set of prompt embeddings to generate images that can effectively represent all desired attribute categories. More importantly, ITI-GEN requires no model fine-tuning, making it computationally efficient to augment existing text-to-image models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ITI-GEN largely improves over state-of-the-art models to generate inclusive images from a prompt. Project page: https://czhang0528.github.io/iti-gen.

This study addresses the issue observed in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), where excessive attention on a few image tokens, referred to as blind tokens, leads to hallucinatory responses in tasks requiring fine-grained understanding of visual objects. We found that tokens receiving lower attention weights often hold essential information for identifying nuanced object details -- ranging from merely recognizing object existence to identifying their attributes (color, position, etc.) and understanding their relationships. To counteract the over-emphasis on blind tokens and to accurately respond to user queries, we introduce a technique called Attentional Vision Calibration (AVC). During the decoding phase, AVC identifies blind tokens by analyzing the image-related attention distribution. It then dynamically adjusts the logits for the next token prediction by contrasting the logits conditioned on the original visual tokens with those conditioned on the blind tokens. This effectively lowers the dependency on blind tokens and promotes a more balanced consideration of all tokens. We validate AVC on benchmarks such as POPE, MME, and AMBER, where it consistently outperforms existing decoding techniques in mitigating object hallucinations in LVLMs.

Despite the longstanding adage "an image is worth a thousand words," creating accurate and hyper-detailed image descriptions for training Vision-Language models remains challenging. Current datasets typically have web-scraped descriptions that are short, low-granularity, and often contain details unrelated to the visual content. As a result, models trained on such data generate descriptions replete with missing information, visual inconsistencies, and hallucinations. To address these issues, we introduce ImageInWords (IIW), a carefully designed human-in-the-loop annotation framework for curating hyper-detailed image descriptions and a new dataset resulting from this process. We validate the framework through evaluations focused on the quality of the dataset and its utility for fine-tuning with considerations for readability, comprehensiveness, specificity, hallucinations, and human-likeness. Our dataset significantly improves across these dimensions compared to recently released datasets (+66%) and GPT-4V outputs (+48%). Furthermore, models fine-tuned with IIW data excel by +31% against prior work along the same human evaluation dimensions. Given our fine-tuned models, we also evaluate text-to-image generation and vision-language reasoning. Our model's descriptions can generate images closest to the original, as judged by both automated and human metrics. We also find our model produces more compositionally rich descriptions, outperforming the best baseline by up to 6% on ARO, SVO-Probes, and Winoground datasets.

Recent work has raised concerns about the inherent limitations of text-only pretraining. In this paper, we first demonstrate that reporting bias, the tendency of people to not state the obvious, is one of the causes of this limitation, and then investigate to what extent multimodal training can mitigate this issue. To accomplish this, we 1) generate the Color Dataset (CoDa), a dataset of human-perceived color distributions for 521 common objects; 2) use CoDa to analyze and compare the color distribution found in text, the distribution captured by language models, and a human's perception of color; and 3) investigate the performance differences between text-only and multimodal models on CoDa. Our results show that the distribution of colors that a language model recovers correlates more strongly with the inaccurate distribution found in text than with the ground-truth, supporting the claim that reporting bias negatively impacts and inherently limits text-only training. We then demonstrate that multimodal models can leverage their visual training to mitigate these effects, providing a promising avenue for future research.

Vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a significant area of focus, particularly for their capacity to be jointly trained with large language models and to serve as robust vision foundation models. Yet, the development of trustworthy explanation methods for ViTs has lagged, particularly in the context of post-hoc interpretations of ViT predictions. Existing sub-image selection approaches, such as feature-attribution and conceptual models, fall short in this regard. This paper proposes five desiderata for explaining ViTs -- faithfulness, stability, sparsity, multi-level structure, and parsimony -- and demonstrates the inadequacy of current methods in meeting these criteria comprehensively. We introduce a variational Bayesian explanation framework, dubbed ProbAbilistic Concept Explainers (PACE), which models the distributions of patch embeddings to provide trustworthy post-hoc conceptual explanations. Our qualitative analysis reveals the distributions of patch-level concepts, elucidating the effectiveness of ViTs by modeling the joint distribution of patch embeddings and ViT's predictions. Moreover, these patch-level explanations bridge the gap between image-level and dataset-level explanations, thus completing the multi-level structure of PACE. Through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that PACE surpasses state-of-the-art methods in terms of the defined desiderata.

Text-conditioned image generation models often generate incorrect associations between entities and their visual attributes. This reflects an impaired mapping between linguistic binding of entities and modifiers in the prompt and visual binding of the corresponding elements in the generated image. As one notable example, a query like ``a pink sunflower and a yellow flamingo'' may incorrectly produce an image of a yellow sunflower and a pink flamingo. To remedy this issue, we propose SynGen, an approach which first syntactically analyses the prompt to identify entities and their modifiers, and then uses a novel loss function that encourages the cross-attention maps to agree with the linguistic binding reflected by the syntax. Specifically, we encourage large overlap between attention maps of entities and their modifiers, and small overlap with other entities and modifier words. The loss is optimized during inference, without retraining or fine-tuning the model. Human evaluation on three datasets, including one new and challenging set, demonstrate significant improvements of SynGen compared with current state of the art methods. This work highlights how making use of sentence structure during inference can efficiently and substantially improve the faithfulness of text-to-image generation.

We present the "Law of Vision Representation" in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). It reveals a strong correlation between the combination of cross-modal alignment, correspondence in vision representation, and MLLM performance. We quantify the two factors using the cross-modal Alignment and Correspondence score (AC score). Through extensive experiments involving thirteen different vision representation settings and evaluations across eight benchmarks, we find that the AC score is linearly correlated to model performance. By leveraging this relationship, we are able to identify and train the optimal vision representation only, which does not require finetuning the language model every time, resulting in a 99.7% reduction in computational cost.

Inferring biological relationships from cellular phenotypes in high-content microscopy screens provides significant opportunity and challenge in biological research. Prior results have shown that deep vision models can capture biological signal better than hand-crafted features. This work explores how self-supervised deep learning approaches scale when training larger models on larger microscopy datasets. Our results show that both CNN- and ViT-based masked autoencoders significantly outperform weakly supervised baselines. At the high-end of our scale, a ViT-L/8 trained on over 3.5-billion unique crops sampled from 93-million microscopy images achieves relative improvements as high as 28% over our best weakly supervised baseline at inferring known biological relationships curated from public databases. Relevant code and select models released with this work can be found at: https://github.com/recursionpharma/maes_microscopy.

Recent advances in microscopy have enabled the rapid generation of terabytes of image data in cell biology and biomedical research. Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising solution for large-scale biological image analysis, enhancing researchers' efficiency, identifying new image biomarkers, and accelerating hypothesis generation and scientific discovery. However, there is a lack of standardized, diverse, and large-scale vision-language benchmarks to evaluate VLMs' perception and cognition capabilities in biological image understanding. To address this gap, we introduce {\mu}-Bench, an expert-curated benchmark encompassing 22 biomedical tasks across various scientific disciplines (biology, pathology), microscopy modalities (electron, fluorescence, light), scales (subcellular, cellular, tissue), and organisms in both normal and abnormal states. We evaluate state-of-the-art biomedical, pathology, and general VLMs on {\mu}-Bench and find that: i) current models struggle on all categories, even for basic tasks such as distinguishing microscopy modalities; ii) current specialist models fine-tuned on biomedical data often perform worse than generalist models; iii) fine-tuning in specific microscopy domains can cause catastrophic forgetting, eroding prior biomedical knowledge encoded in their base model. iv) weight interpolation between fine-tuned and pre-trained models offers one solution to forgetting and improves general performance across biomedical tasks. We release {\mu}-Bench under a permissive license to accelerate the research and development of microscopy foundation models.

Describing images with text is a fundamental problem in vision-language research. Current studies in this domain mostly focus on single image captioning. However, in various real applications (e.g., image editing, difference interpretation, and retrieval), generating relational captions for two images, can also be very useful. This important problem has not been explored mostly due to lack of datasets and effective models. To push forward the research in this direction, we first introduce a new language-guided image editing dataset that contains a large number of real image pairs with corresponding editing instructions. We then propose a new relational speaker model based on an encoder-decoder architecture with static relational attention and sequential multi-head attention. We also extend the model with dynamic relational attention, which calculates visual alignment while decoding. Our models are evaluated on our newly collected and two public datasets consisting of image pairs annotated with relationship sentences. Experimental results, based on both automatic and human evaluation, demonstrate that our model outperforms all baselines and existing methods on all the datasets.

Discovering evolutionary traits that are heritable across species on the tree of life (also referred to as a phylogenetic tree) is of great interest to biologists to understand how organisms diversify and evolve. However, the measurement of traits is often a subjective and labor-intensive process, making trait discovery a highly label-scarce problem. We present a novel approach for discovering evolutionary traits directly from images without relying on trait labels. Our proposed approach, Phylo-NN, encodes the image of an organism into a sequence of quantized feature vectors -- or codes -- where different segments of the sequence capture evolutionary signals at varying ancestry levels in the phylogeny. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in producing biologically meaningful results in a number of downstream tasks including species image generation and species-to-species image translation, using fish species as a target example.

The steady improvement of Diffusion Models for visual synthesis has given rise to many new and interesting use cases of synthetic images but also has raised concerns about their potential abuse, which poses significant societal threats. To address this, fake images need to be detected and attributed to their source model, and given the frequent release of new generators, realistic applications need to consider an Open-Set scenario where some models are unseen at training time. Existing forensic techniques are either limited to Closed-Set settings or to GAN-generated images, relying on fragile frequency-based "fingerprint" features. By contrast, we propose a simple yet effective framework that incorporates features from large pre-trained foundation models to perform Open-Set origin attribution of synthetic images produced by various generative models, including Diffusion Models. We show that our method leads to remarkable attribution performance, even in the low-data regime, exceeding the performance of existing methods and generalizes better on images obtained from a diverse set of architectures. We make the code publicly available at: https://github.com/ciodar/UniversalAttribution.

Visual text evokes an image in a person's mind, while non-visual text fails to do so. A method to automatically detect visualness in text will unlock the ability to augment text with relevant images, as neural text-to-image generation and retrieval models operate on the implicit assumption that the input text is visual in nature. We curate a dataset of 3,620 English sentences and their visualness scores provided by multiple human annotators. Additionally, we use documents that contain text and visual assets to create a distantly supervised corpus of document text and associated images. We also propose a fine-tuning strategy that adapts large vision-language models like CLIP that assume a one-to-one correspondence between text and image to the task of scoring text visualness from text input alone. Our strategy involves modifying the model's contrastive learning objective to map text identified as non-visual to a common NULL image while matching visual text to their corresponding images in the document. We evaluate the proposed approach on its ability to (i) classify visual and non-visual text accurately, and (ii) attend over words that are identified as visual in psycholinguistic studies. Empirical evaluation indicates that our approach performs better than several heuristics and baseline models for the proposed task. Furthermore, to highlight the importance of modeling the visualness of text, we conduct qualitative analyses of text-to-image generation systems like DALL-E.

Establishing visual correspondences under large intra-class variations, which is often referred to as semantic correspondence or semantic matching, remains a challenging problem in computer vision. Despite its significance, however, most of the datasets for semantic correspondence are limited to a small amount of image pairs with similar viewpoints and scales. In this paper, we present a new large-scale benchmark dataset of semantically paired images, SPair-71k, which contains 70,958 image pairs with diverse variations in viewpoint and scale. Compared to previous datasets, it is significantly larger in number and contains more accurate and richer annotations. We believe this dataset will provide a reliable testbed to study the problem of semantic correspondence and will help to advance research in this area. We provide the results of recent methods on our new dataset as baselines for further research. Our benchmark is available online at http://cvlab.postech.ac.kr/research/SPair-71k/.

Human perception of similarity across uni- and multimodal inputs is highly complex, making it challenging to develop automated metrics that accurately mimic it. General purpose vision-language models, such as CLIP and large multi-modal models (LMMs), can be applied as zero-shot perceptual metrics, and several recent works have developed models specialized in narrow perceptual tasks. However, the extent to which existing perceptual metrics align with human perception remains unclear. To investigate this question, we introduce UniSim-Bench, a benchmark encompassing 7 multi-modal perceptual similarity tasks, with a total of 25 datasets. Our evaluation reveals that while general-purpose models perform reasonably well on average, they often lag behind specialized models on individual tasks. Conversely, metrics fine-tuned for specific tasks fail to generalize well to unseen, though related, tasks. As a first step towards a unified multi-task perceptual similarity metric, we fine-tune both encoder-based and generative vision-language models on a subset of the UniSim-Bench tasks. This approach yields the highest average performance, and in some cases, even surpasses taskspecific models. Nevertheless, these models still struggle with generalization to unseen tasks, highlighting the ongoing challenge of learning a robust, unified perceptual similarity metric capable of capturing the human notion of similarity. The code and models are available at https://github.com/SaraGhazanfari/UniSim.

Vision-language models (VLMs) can respond to queries about images in many languages. However, beyond language, culture affects how we see things. For example, individuals from Western cultures focus more on the central figure in an image while individuals from Eastern cultures attend more to scene context. In this work, we present a novel investigation that demonstrates and localizes VLMs' Western bias in image understanding. We evaluate large VLMs across subjective and objective visual tasks with culturally diverse images and annotations. We find that VLMs perform better on the Western subset than the Eastern subset of each task. Controlled experimentation tracing the source of this bias highlights the importance of a diverse language mix in text-only pre-training for building equitable VLMs, even when inference is performed in English. Moreover, while prompting in the language of a target culture can lead to reductions in bias, it is not a substitute for building AI more representative of the world's languages.

The success of deep learning in vision can be attributed to: (a) models with high capacity; (b) increased computational power; and (c) availability of large-scale labeled data. Since 2012, there have been significant advances in representation capabilities of the models and computational capabilities of GPUs. But the size of the biggest dataset has surprisingly remained constant. What will happen if we increase the dataset size by 10x or 100x? This paper takes a step towards clearing the clouds of mystery surrounding the relationship between `enormous data' and visual deep learning. By exploiting the JFT-300M dataset which has more than 375M noisy labels for 300M images, we investigate how the performance of current vision tasks would change if this data was used for representation learning. Our paper delivers some surprising (and some expected) findings. First, we find that the performance on vision tasks increases logarithmically based on volume of training data size. Second, we show that representation learning (or pre-training) still holds a lot of promise. One can improve performance on many vision tasks by just training a better base model. Finally, as expected, we present new state-of-the-art results for different vision tasks including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation and human pose estimation. Our sincere hope is that this inspires vision community to not undervalue the data and develop collective efforts in building larger datasets.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have witnessed significant progress on visual understanding tasks. However, they often prioritize language knowledge over image information on visual reasoning tasks, incurring performance degradation. To tackle this issue, we first identify the drawbacks of existing solutions (i.e., insufficient and irrelevant visual descriptions, and limited multi-modal capacities). We then decompose visual reasoning process into two stages: visual perception (i.e., eyesight) and textual reasoning (i.e., wisdom), and introduce a novel visual reasoning framework named ProReason. This framework features multi-run proactive perception and decoupled vision-reasoning capabilities. Briefly, given a multi-modal question, ProReason iterates proactive information collection and reasoning until the answer can be concluded with necessary and sufficient visual descriptions. Notably, the disassociation of capabilities allows seamless integration of existing large language models (LLMs) to compensate for the reasoning deficits of LVLMs. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ProReason outperforms both existing multi-step reasoning frameworks and passive peer methods on a wide range of benchmarks for both open-source and closed-source models. In addition, with the assistance of LLMs, ProReason achieves a performance improvement of up to 15% on MMMU benchmark. Our insights into existing solutions and the decoupled perspective for feasible integration of LLMs illuminate future research on visual reasoning techniques, especially LLM-assisted ones.

Advancing machine visual reasoning requires a deeper understanding of how Vision-Language Models (VLMs) process and interpret complex visual patterns. This work introduces a novel, cognitively-inspired evaluation framework to systematically analyze VLM reasoning on natural image-based Bongard Problems. We propose three structured paradigms -- Direct Visual Rule Learning, Deductive Rule Learning, and Componential Analysis -- designed to progressively enforce step-wise reasoning and disentangle the interplay between perception and reasoning. Our evaluation shows that advanced, closed-source VLMs (GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0) achieve near-superhuman performance, particularly when provided with high-quality image descriptions, while open-source models exhibit a significant performance bottleneck due to deficiencies in perception. An ablation study further confirms that perception, rather than reasoning, is the primary limiting factor, as open-source models apply extracted rules effectively when given accurate descriptions. These findings underscore the critical role of robust multimodal perception in enhancing generalizable visual reasoning and highlight the importance of structured, step-wise reasoning paradigms for advancing machine intelligence.

Deep networks are increasingly being applied to problems involving image synthesis, e.g., generating images from textual descriptions and reconstructing an input image from a compact representation. Supervised training of image-synthesis networks typically uses a pixel-wise loss (PL) to indicate the mismatch between a generated image and its corresponding target image. We propose instead to use a loss function that is better calibrated to human perceptual judgments of image quality: the multiscale structural-similarity score (MS-SSIM). Because MS-SSIM is differentiable, it is easily incorporated into gradient-descent learning. We compare the consequences of using MS-SSIM versus PL loss on training deterministic and stochastic autoencoders. For three different architectures, we collected human judgments of the quality of image reconstructions. Observers reliably prefer images synthesized by MS-SSIM-optimized models over those synthesized by PL-optimized models, for two distinct PL measures (ell_1 and ell_2 distances). We also explore the effect of training objective on image encoding and analyze conditions under which perceptually-optimized representations yield better performance on image classification. Finally, we demonstrate the superiority of perceptually-optimized networks for super-resolution imaging. Just as computer vision has advanced through the use of convolutional architectures that mimic the structure of the mammalian visual system, we argue that significant additional advances can be made in modeling images through the use of training objectives that are well aligned to characteristics of human perception.

A core process in human cognition is analogical mapping: the ability to identify a similar relational structure between different situations. We introduce a novel task, Visual Analogies of Situation Recognition, adapting the classical word-analogy task into the visual domain. Given a triplet of images, the task is to select an image candidate B' that completes the analogy (A to A' is like B to what?). Unlike previous work on visual analogy that focused on simple image transformations, we tackle complex analogies requiring understanding of scenes. We leverage situation recognition annotations and the CLIP model to generate a large set of 500k candidate analogies. Crowdsourced annotations for a sample of the data indicate that humans agree with the dataset label ~80% of the time (chance level 25%). Furthermore, we use human annotations to create a gold-standard dataset of 3,820 validated analogies. Our experiments demonstrate that state-of-the-art models do well when distractors are chosen randomly (~86%), but struggle with carefully chosen distractors (~53%, compared to 90% human accuracy). We hope our dataset will encourage the development of new analogy-making models. Website: https://vasr-dataset.github.io/

Recent text-to-image generative models have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to generate diverse and creative imagery guided by a target text prompt. While revolutionary, current state-of-the-art diffusion models may still fail in generating images that fully convey the semantics in the given text prompt. We analyze the publicly available Stable Diffusion model and assess the existence of catastrophic neglect, where the model fails to generate one or more of the subjects from the input prompt. Moreover, we find that in some cases the model also fails to correctly bind attributes (e.g., colors) to their corresponding subjects. To help mitigate these failure cases, we introduce the concept of Generative Semantic Nursing (GSN), where we seek to intervene in the generative process on the fly during inference time to improve the faithfulness of the generated images. Using an attention-based formulation of GSN, dubbed Attend-and-Excite, we guide the model to refine the cross-attention units to attend to all subject tokens in the text prompt and strengthen - or excite - their activations, encouraging the model to generate all subjects described in the text prompt. We compare our approach to alternative approaches and demonstrate that it conveys the desired concepts more faithfully across a range of text prompts.

With the introduction of transformer-based models for vision and language tasks, such as LLaVA and Chameleon, there has been renewed interest in the discrete tokenized representation of images. These models often treat image patches as discrete tokens, analogous to words in natural language, learning joint alignments between visual and human languages. However, little is known about the statistical behavior of these visual languages - whether they follow similar frequency distributions, grammatical structures, or topologies as natural languages. In this paper, we take a natural-language-centric approach to analyzing discrete visual languages and uncover striking similarities and fundamental differences. We demonstrate that, although visual languages adhere to Zipfian distributions, higher token innovation drives greater entropy and lower compression, with tokens predominantly representing object parts, indicating intermediate granularity. We also show that visual languages lack cohesive grammatical structures, leading to higher perplexity and weaker hierarchical organization compared to natural languages. Finally, we demonstrate that, while vision models align more closely with natural languages than other models, this alignment remains significantly weaker than the cohesion found within natural languages. Through these experiments, we demonstrate how understanding the statistical properties of discrete visual languages can inform the design of more effective computer vision models.

We show how perceptual embeddings of the visual system can be constructed at inference-time with no training data or deep neural network features. Our perceptual embeddings are solutions to a weighted least squares (WLS) problem, defined at the pixel-level, and solved at inference-time, that can capture global and local image characteristics. The distance in embedding space is used to define a perceptual similarity metric which we call LASI: Linear Autoregressive Similarity Index. Experiments on full-reference image quality assessment datasets show LASI performs competitively with learned deep feature based methods like LPIPS (Zhang et al., 2018) and PIM (Bhardwaj et al., 2020), at a similar computational cost to hand-crafted methods such as MS-SSIM (Wang et al., 2003). We found that increasing the dimensionality of the embedding space consistently reduces the WLS loss while increasing performance on perceptual tasks, at the cost of increasing the computational complexity. LASI is fully differentiable, scales cubically with the number of embedding dimensions, and can be parallelized at the pixel-level. A Maximum Differentiation (MAD) competition (Wang & Simoncelli, 2008) between LASI and LPIPS shows that both methods are capable of finding failure points for the other, suggesting these metrics can be combined.

Synthetic image generation has recently experienced significant improvements in domains such as natural image or art generation. However, the problem of figure and diagram generation remains unexplored. A challenging aspect of generating figures and diagrams is effectively rendering readable texts within the images. To alleviate this problem, we present OCR-VQGAN, an image encoder, and decoder that leverages OCR pre-trained features to optimize a text perceptual loss, encouraging the architecture to preserve high-fidelity text and diagram structure. To explore our approach, we introduce the Paper2Fig100k dataset, with over 100k images of figures and texts from research papers. The figures show architecture diagrams and methodologies of articles available at arXiv.org from fields like artificial intelligence and computer vision. Figures usually include text and discrete objects, e.g., boxes in a diagram, with lines and arrows that connect them. We demonstrate the effectiveness of OCR-VQGAN by conducting several experiments on the task of figure reconstruction. Additionally, we explore the qualitative and quantitative impact of weighting different perceptual metrics in the overall loss function. We release code, models, and dataset at https://github.com/joanrod/ocr-vqgan.

The advent of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced multimodal understanding, enabling more sophisticated and accurate integration of visual and textual information across various tasks, including image and video captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. Despite VLMs' superior capabilities, researchers lack a comprehensive understanding of their compositionality -- the ability to understand and produce novel combinations of known visual and textual components. Prior benchmarks provide only a relatively rough compositionality evaluation from the perspectives of objects, relations, and attributes while neglecting deeper reasoning about object interactions, counting, and complex compositions. However, compositionality is a critical ability that facilitates coherent reasoning and understanding across modalities for VLMs. To address this limitation, we propose MMCOMPOSITION, a novel human-annotated benchmark for comprehensively and accurately evaluating VLMs' compositionality. Our proposed benchmark serves as a complement to these earlier works. With MMCOMPOSITION, we can quantify and explore the compositionality of the mainstream VLMs. Surprisingly, we find GPT-4o's compositionality inferior to the best open-source model, and we analyze the underlying reasons. Our experimental analysis reveals the limitations of VLMs in fine-grained compositional perception and reasoning, and points to areas for improvement in VLM design and training. Resources available at: https://hanghuacs.github.io/MMComposition/

The ability to accurately interpret complex visual information is a crucial topic of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Recent work indicates that enhanced visual perception significantly reduces hallucinations and improves performance on resolution-sensitive tasks, such as optical character recognition and document analysis. A number of recent MLLMs achieve this goal using a mixture of vision encoders. Despite their success, there is a lack of systematic comparisons and detailed ablation studies addressing critical aspects, such as expert selection and the integration of multiple vision experts. This study provides an extensive exploration of the design space for MLLMs using a mixture of vision encoders and resolutions. Our findings reveal several underlying principles common to various existing strategies, leading to a streamlined yet effective design approach. We discover that simply concatenating visual tokens from a set of complementary vision encoders is as effective as more complex mixing architectures or strategies. We additionally introduce Pre-Alignment to bridge the gap between vision-focused encoders and language tokens, enhancing model coherence. The resulting family of MLLMs, Eagle, surpasses other leading open-source models on major MLLM benchmarks. Models and code: https://github.com/NVlabs/Eagle

How can we verify whether copyrighted content was used to train a large vision-language model (VLM) without direct access to its training data? Motivated by the hypothesis that a VLM is able to recognize images from its training corpus, we propose DIS-CO, a novel approach to infer the inclusion of copyrighted content during the model's development. By repeatedly querying a VLM with specific frames from targeted copyrighted material, DIS-CO extracts the content's identity through free-form text completions. To assess its effectiveness, we introduce MovieTection, a benchmark comprising 14,000 frames paired with detailed captions, drawn from films released both before and after a model's training cutoff. Our results show that DIS-CO significantly improves detection performance, nearly doubling the average AUC of the best prior method on models with logits available. Our findings also highlight a broader concern: all tested models appear to have been exposed to some extent to copyrighted content. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/avduarte333/DIS-CO

Our understanding of the visual world is centered around various concept axes, characterizing different aspects of visual entities. While different concept axes can be easily specified by language, e.g. color, the exact visual nuances along each axis often exceed the limitations of linguistic articulations, e.g. a particular style of painting. In this work, our goal is to learn a language-informed visual concept representation, by simply distilling large pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, we train a set of concept encoders to encode the information pertinent to a set of language-informed concept axes, with an objective of reproducing the input image through a pre-trained Text-to-Image (T2I) model. To encourage better disentanglement of different concept encoders, we anchor the concept embeddings to a set of text embeddings obtained from a pre-trained Visual Question Answering (VQA) model. At inference time, the model extracts concept embeddings along various axes from new test images, which can be remixed to generate images with novel compositions of visual concepts. With a lightweight test-time finetuning procedure, it can also generalize to novel concepts unseen at training.

Recent text-to-image (T2I) generative models allow for high-quality synthesis following either text instructions or visual examples. Despite their capabilities, these models face limitations in creating new, detailed creatures within specific categories (e.g., virtual dog or bird species), which are valuable in digital asset creation and biodiversity analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task, Virtual Creatures Generation: Given a set of unlabeled images of the target concepts (e.g., 200 bird species), we aim to train a T2I model capable of creating new, hybrid concepts within diverse backgrounds and contexts. We propose a new method called DreamCreature, which identifies and extracts the underlying sub-concepts (e.g., body parts of a specific species) in an unsupervised manner. The T2I thus adapts to generate novel concepts (e.g., new bird species) with faithful structures and photorealistic appearance by seamlessly and flexibly composing learned sub-concepts. To enhance sub-concept fidelity and disentanglement, we extend the textual inversion technique by incorporating an additional projector and tailored attention loss regularization. Extensive experiments on two fine-grained image benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DreamCreature over prior methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Ultimately, the learned sub-concepts facilitate diverse creative applications, including innovative consumer product designs and nuanced property modifications.

Existing perceptual similarity metrics assume an image and its reference are well aligned. As a result, these metrics are often sensitive to a small alignment error that is imperceptible to the human eyes. This paper studies the effect of small misalignment, specifically a small shift between the input and reference image, on existing metrics, and accordingly develops a shift-tolerant similarity metric. This paper builds upon LPIPS, a widely used learned perceptual similarity metric, and explores architectural design considerations to make it robust against imperceptible misalignment. Specifically, we study a wide spectrum of neural network elements, such as anti-aliasing filtering, pooling, striding, padding, and skip connection, and discuss their roles in making a robust metric. Based on our studies, we develop a new deep neural network-based perceptual similarity metric. Our experiments show that our metric is tolerant to imperceptible shifts while being consistent with the human similarity judgment.

Seeing is believing, however, the underlying mechanism of how human visual perceptions are intertwined with our cognitions is still a mystery. Thanks to the recent advances in both neuroscience and artificial intelligence, we have been able to record the visually evoked brain activities and mimic the visual perception ability through computational approaches. In this paper, we pay attention to visual stimuli reconstruction by reconstructing the observed images based on portably accessible brain signals, i.e., electroencephalography (EEG) data. Since EEG signals are dynamic in the time-series format and are notorious to be noisy, processing and extracting useful information requires more dedicated efforts; In this paper, we propose a comprehensive pipeline, named NeuroImagen, for reconstructing visual stimuli images from EEG signals. Specifically, we incorporate a novel multi-level perceptual information decoding to draw multi-grained outputs from the given EEG data. A latent diffusion model will then leverage the extracted information to reconstruct the high-resolution visual stimuli images. The experimental results have illustrated the effectiveness of image reconstruction and superior quantitative performance of our proposed method.

The advancement of visual intelligence is intrinsically tethered to the availability of large-scale data. In parallel, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has unlocked the potential to create synthetic images that closely resemble real-world photographs. This prompts a compelling inquiry: how much visual intelligence could benefit from the advance of generative AI? This paper explores the innovative concept of harnessing these AI-generated images as new data sources, reshaping traditional modeling paradigms in visual intelligence. In contrast to real data, AI-generated data exhibit remarkable advantages, including unmatched abundance and scalability, the rapid generation of vast datasets, and the effortless simulation of edge cases. Built on the success of generative AI models, we examine the potential of their generated data in a range of applications, from training machine learning models to simulating scenarios for computational modeling, testing, and validation. We probe the technological foundations that support this groundbreaking use of generative AI, engaging in an in-depth discussion on the ethical, legal, and practical considerations that accompany this transformative paradigm shift. Through an exhaustive survey of current technologies and applications, this paper presents a comprehensive view of the synthetic era in visual intelligence. A project associated with this paper can be found at https://github.com/mwxely/AIGS .

Recent studies have demonstrated the exceptional potentials of leveraging human preference datasets to refine text-to-image generative models, enhancing the alignment between generated images and textual prompts. Despite these advances, current human preference datasets are either prohibitively expensive to construct or suffer from a lack of diversity in preference dimensions, resulting in limited applicability for instruction tuning in open-source text-to-image generative models and hinder further exploration. To address these challenges and promote the alignment of generative models through instruction tuning, we leverage multimodal large language models to create VisionPrefer, a high-quality and fine-grained preference dataset that captures multiple preference aspects. We aggregate feedback from AI annotators across four aspects: prompt-following, aesthetic, fidelity, and harmlessness to construct VisionPrefer. To validate the effectiveness of VisionPrefer, we train a reward model VP-Score over VisionPrefer to guide the training of text-to-image generative models and the preference prediction accuracy of VP-Score is comparable to human annotators. Furthermore, we use two reinforcement learning methods to supervised fine-tune generative models to evaluate the performance of VisionPrefer, and extensive experimental results demonstrate that VisionPrefer significantly improves text-image alignment in compositional image generation across diverse aspects, e.g., aesthetic, and generalizes better than previous human-preference metrics across various image distributions. Moreover, VisionPrefer indicates that the integration of AI-generated synthetic data as a supervisory signal is a promising avenue for achieving improved alignment with human preferences in vision generative models.

Reconstructing human dynamic vision from brain activity is a challenging task with great scientific significance. The difficulty stems from two primary issues: (1) vision-processing mechanisms in the brain are highly intricate and not fully revealed, making it challenging to directly learn a mapping between fMRI and video; (2) the temporal resolution of fMRI is significantly lower than that of natural videos. To overcome these issues, this paper propose a two-stage model named Mind-Animator, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets. Specifically, during the fMRI-to-feature stage, we decouple semantic, structural, and motion features from fMRI through fMRI-vision-language tri-modal contrastive learning and sparse causal attention. In the feature-to-video stage, these features are merged to videos by an inflated Stable Diffusion. We substantiate that the reconstructed video dynamics are indeed derived from fMRI, rather than hallucinations of the generative model, through permutation tests. Additionally, the visualization of voxel-wise and ROI-wise importance maps confirms the neurobiological interpretability of our model.

Image-Text matching (ITM) is a common task for evaluating the quality of Vision and Language (VL) models. However, existing ITM benchmarks have a significant limitation. They have many missing correspondences, originating from the data construction process itself. For example, a caption is only matched with one image although the caption can be matched with other similar images and vice versa. To correct the massive false negatives, we construct the Extended COCO Validation (ECCV) Caption dataset by supplying the missing associations with machine and human annotators. We employ five state-of-the-art ITM models with diverse properties for our annotation process. Our dataset provides x3.6 positive image-to-caption associations and x8.5 caption-to-image associations compared to the original MS-COCO. We also propose to use an informative ranking-based metric mAP@R, rather than the popular Recall@K (R@K). We re-evaluate the existing 25 VL models on existing and proposed benchmarks. Our findings are that the existing benchmarks, such as COCO 1K R@K, COCO 5K R@K, CxC R@1 are highly correlated with each other, while the rankings change when we shift to the ECCV mAP@R. Lastly, we delve into the effect of the bias introduced by the choice of machine annotator. Source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/eccv-caption

One of the key shortcomings in current text-to-image (T2I) models is their inability to consistently generate images which faithfully follow the spatial relationships specified in the text prompt. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive investigation of this limitation, while also developing datasets and methods that achieve state-of-the-art performance. First, we find that current vision-language datasets do not represent spatial relationships well enough; to alleviate this bottleneck, we create SPRIGHT, the first spatially-focused, large scale dataset, by re-captioning 6 million images from 4 widely used vision datasets. Through a 3-fold evaluation and analysis pipeline, we find that SPRIGHT largely improves upon existing datasets in capturing spatial relationships. To demonstrate its efficacy, we leverage only ~0.25% of SPRIGHT and achieve a 22% improvement in generating spatially accurate images while also improving the FID and CMMD scores. Secondly, we find that training on images containing a large number of objects results in substantial improvements in spatial consistency. Notably, we attain state-of-the-art on T2I-CompBench with a spatial score of 0.2133, by fine-tuning on <500 images. Finally, through a set of controlled experiments and ablations, we document multiple findings that we believe will enhance the understanding of factors that affect spatial consistency in text-to-image models. We publicly release our dataset and model to foster further research in this area.

Measuring concept generalization, i.e., the extent to which models trained on a set of (seen) visual concepts can be leveraged to recognize a new set of (unseen) concepts, is a popular way of evaluating visual representations, especially in a self-supervised learning framework. Nonetheless, the choice of unseen concepts for such an evaluation is usually made arbitrarily, and independently from the seen concepts used to train representations, thus ignoring any semantic relationships between the two. In this paper, we argue that the semantic relationships between seen and unseen concepts affect generalization performance and propose ImageNet-CoG, a novel benchmark on the ImageNet-21K (IN-21K) dataset that enables measuring concept generalization in a principled way. Our benchmark leverages expert knowledge that comes from WordNet in order to define a sequence of unseen IN-21K concept sets that are semantically more and more distant from the ImageNet-1K (IN-1K) subset, a ubiquitous training set. This allows us to benchmark visual representations learned on IN-1K out-of-the box. We conduct a large-scale study encompassing 31 convolution and transformer-based models and show how different architectures, levels of supervision, regularization techniques and use of web data impact the concept generalization performance.

We present VPN - a content attribution method for recovering provenance information from videos shared online. Platforms, and users, often transform video into different quality, codecs, sizes, shapes, etc. or slightly edit its content such as adding text or emoji, as they are redistributed online. We learn a robust search embedding for matching such video, invariant to these transformations, using full-length or truncated video queries. Once matched against a trusted database of video clips, associated information on the provenance of the clip is presented to the user. We use an inverted index to match temporal chunks of video using late-fusion to combine both visual and audio features. In both cases, features are extracted via a deep neural network trained using contrastive learning on a dataset of original and augmented video clips. We demonstrate high accuracy recall over a corpus of 100,000 videos.

Large language models have recently shown human level performance on a variety of reasoning tasks. However, the ability of these models to perform complex visual reasoning has not been studied in detail yet. A key challenge in many visual reasoning tasks is that the visual information needs to be tightly integrated in the reasoning process. We propose to address this challenge by drawing inspiration from human visual problem solving which depends on a variety of low-level visual capabilities. It can often be cast as the three step-process of ``Look, Remember, Reason'': visual information is incrementally extracted using low-level visual routines in a step-by-step fashion until a final answer is reached. We follow the same paradigm to enable existing large language models, with minimal changes to the architecture, to solve visual reasoning problems. To this end, we introduce rationales over the visual input that allow us to integrate low-level visual capabilities, such as object recognition and tracking, as surrogate tasks. We show competitive performance on diverse visual reasoning tasks from the CLEVR, CATER, and ACRE datasets over state-of-the-art models designed specifically for these tasks.

We describe a novel attribution method which is grounded in Sensitivity Analysis and uses Sobol indices. Beyond modeling the individual contributions of image regions, Sobol indices provide an efficient way to capture higher-order interactions between image regions and their contributions to a neural network's prediction through the lens of variance. We describe an approach that makes the computation of these indices efficient for high-dimensional problems by using perturbation masks coupled with efficient estimators to handle the high dimensionality of images. Importantly, we show that the proposed method leads to favorable scores on standard benchmarks for vision (and language models) while drastically reducing the computing time compared to other black-box methods -- even surpassing the accuracy of state-of-the-art white-box methods which require access to internal representations. Our code is freely available: https://github.com/fel-thomas/Sobol-Attribution-Method

Image-to-text tasks, such as open-ended image captioning and controllable image description, have received extensive attention for decades. Here, we further advance this line of work by presenting Visual Spatial Description (VSD), a new perspective for image-to-text toward spatial semantics. Given an image and two objects inside it, VSD aims to produce one description focusing on the spatial perspective between the two objects. Accordingly, we manually annotate a dataset to facilitate the investigation of the newly-introduced task and build several benchmark encoder-decoder models by using VL-BART and VL-T5 as backbones. In addition, we investigate pipeline and joint end-to-end architectures for incorporating visual spatial relationship classification (VSRC) information into our model. Finally, we conduct experiments on our benchmark dataset to evaluate all our models. Results show that our models are impressive, providing accurate and human-like spatial-oriented text descriptions. Meanwhile, VSRC has great potential for VSD, and the joint end-to-end architecture is the better choice for their integration. We make the dataset and codes public for research purposes.

Foundation vision-language models are currently transforming computer vision, and are on the rise in medical imaging fueled by their very promising generalization capabilities. However, the initial attempts to transfer this new paradigm to medical imaging have shown less impressive performances than those observed in other domains, due to the significant domain shift and the complex, expert domain knowledge inherent to medical-imaging tasks. Motivated by the need for domain-expert foundation models, we present FLAIR, a pre-trained vision-language model for universal retinal fundus image understanding. To this end, we compiled 37 open-access, mostly categorical fundus imaging datasets from various sources, with up to 97 different target conditions and 284,660 images. We integrate the expert's domain knowledge in the form of descriptive textual prompts, during both pre-training and zero-shot inference, enhancing the less-informative categorical supervision of the data. Such a textual expert's knowledge, which we compiled from the relevant clinical literature and community standards, describes the fine-grained features of the pathologies as well as the hierarchies and dependencies between them. We report comprehensive evaluations, which illustrate the benefit of integrating expert knowledge and the strong generalization capabilities of FLAIR under difficult scenarios with domain shifts or unseen categories. When adapted with a lightweight linear probe, FLAIR outperforms fully-trained, dataset-focused models, more so in the few-shot regimes. Interestingly, FLAIR outperforms by a large margin more generalist, larger-scale image-language models, which emphasizes the potential of embedding experts' domain knowledge and the limitations of generalist models in medical imaging.

Human vision can distinguish between a vast spectrum of colours, estimated to be between 2 to 7 million discernible shades. However, this impressive range does not inherently imply that all these colours have been precisely named and described within our lexicon. We often associate colours with familiar objects and concepts in our daily lives. This research endeavors to bridge the gap between our visual perception of countless shades and our ability to articulate and name them accurately. A novel model has been developed to achieve this goal, leveraging Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks with Active learning. This model operates on a proprietary dataset meticulously curated for this study. The primary objective of this research is to create a versatile tool for categorizing and naming previously unnamed colours or identifying intermediate shades that elude traditional colour terminology. The findings underscore the potential of this innovative approach in revolutionizing our understanding of colour perception and language. Through rigorous experimentation and analysis, this study illuminates a promising avenue for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications in diverse industries. By facilitating the exploration of the vast colour spectrum the potential applications of NLP are extended beyond conventional boundaries.

Vision and Language (VL) models offer an effective method for aligning representation spaces of images and text, leading to numerous applications such as cross-modal retrieval, visual question answering, captioning, and more. However, the aligned image-text spaces learned by all the popular VL models are still suffering from the so-called `object bias' - their representations behave as `bags of nouns', mostly ignoring or downsizing the attributes, relations, and states of objects described/appearing in texts/images. Although some great attempts at fixing these `compositional reasoning' issues were proposed in the recent literature, the problem is still far from being solved. In this paper, we uncover two factors limiting the VL models' compositional reasoning performance. These two factors are properties of the paired VL dataset used for finetuning and pre-training the VL model: (i) the caption quality, or in other words `image-alignment', of the texts; and (ii) the `density' of the captions in the sense of mentioning all the details appearing on the image. We propose a fine-tuning approach for automatically treating these factors leveraging a standard VL dataset (CC3M). Applied to CLIP, we demonstrate its significant compositional reasoning performance increase of up to sim27% over the base model, up to sim20% over the strongest baseline, and by 6.7% on average.

Training Large Multimodality Models (LMMs) relies on descriptive image caption that connects image and language. Existing methods either distill the caption from the LMM models or construct the captions from the internet images or by human. We propose to leverage off-the-shelf visual specialists, which were trained from annotated images initially not for image captioning, for enhancing the image caption. Our approach, named DCE, explores object low-level and fine-grained attributes (e.g., depth, emotion and fine-grained categories) and object relations (e.g., relative location and human-object-interaction (HOI)), and combine the attributes into the descriptive caption. Experiments demonstrate that such visual specialists are able to improve the performance for visual understanding tasks as well as reasoning that benefits from more accurate visual understanding. We will release the source code and the pipeline so that other visual specialists are easily combined into the pipeline. The complete source code of DCE pipeline and datasets will be available at https://github.com/syp2ysy/DCE.

Recent advancements in audio-visual generative modeling have been propelled by progress in deep learning and the availability of data-rich benchmarks. However, the growth is not attributed solely to models and benchmarks. Universally accepted evaluation metrics also play an important role in advancing the field. While there are many metrics available to evaluate audio and visual content separately, there is a lack of metrics that offer a quantitative and interpretable measure of audio-visual synchronization for videos "in the wild". To address this gap, we first created a large scale human annotated dataset (100+ hrs) representing nine types of synchronization errors in audio-visual content and how human perceive them. We then developed a PEAVS (Perceptual Evaluation of Audio-Visual Synchrony) score, a novel automatic metric with a 5-point scale that evaluates the quality of audio-visual synchronization. We validate PEAVS using a newly generated dataset, achieving a Pearson correlation of 0.79 at the set level and 0.54 at the clip level when compared to human labels. In our experiments, we observe a relative gain 50% over a natural extension of Fr\'echet based metrics for Audio-Visual synchrony, confirming PEAVS efficacy in objectively modeling subjective perceptions of audio-visual synchronization for videos "in the wild".

Large-scale diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art results on text-to-image synthesis (T2I) tasks. Despite their ability to generate high-quality yet creative images, we observe that attribution-binding and compositional capabilities are still considered major challenging issues, especially when involving multiple objects. In this work, we improve the compositional skills of T2I models, specifically more accurate attribute binding and better image compositions. To do this, we incorporate linguistic structures with the diffusion guidance process based on the controllable properties of manipulating cross-attention layers in diffusion-based T2I models. We observe that keys and values in cross-attention layers have strong semantic meanings associated with object layouts and content. Therefore, we can better preserve the compositional semantics in the generated image by manipulating the cross-attention representations based on linguistic insights. Built upon Stable Diffusion, a SOTA T2I model, our structured cross-attention design is efficient that requires no additional training samples. We achieve better compositional skills in qualitative and quantitative results, leading to a 5-8% advantage in head-to-head user comparison studies. Lastly, we conduct an in-depth analysis to reveal potential causes of incorrect image compositions and justify the properties of cross-attention layers in the generation process.

Recent advancements in Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have revolutionized how machines understand and generate textual responses based on visual inputs. Despite their impressive capabilities, they often produce "hallucinatory" outputs that do not accurately reflect the visual information, posing challenges in reliability and trustworthiness. Current methods such as contrastive decoding have made strides in addressing these issues by contrasting the original probability distribution of generated tokens with distorted counterparts; yet, generating visually-faithful outputs remains a challenge. In this work, we shift our focus to the opposite: What could serve as a complementary enhancement to the original probability distribution? We propose a simple, training-free method termed RITUAL to enhance robustness against hallucinations in LVLMs. Our approach employs random image transformations as complements to the original probability distribution, aiming to mitigate the likelihood of hallucinatory visual explanations by enriching the model's exposure to varied visual scenarios. Our empirical results show that while the isolated use of transformed images initially degrades performance, strategic implementation of these transformations can indeed serve as effective complements. Notably, our method is compatible with current contrastive decoding methods and does not require external models or costly self-feedback mechanisms, making it a practical addition. In experiments, RITUAL significantly outperforms existing contrastive decoding methods across several object hallucination benchmarks, including POPE, CHAIR, and MME.

Computer vision systems have witnessed rapid progress over the past two decades due to multiple advances in the field. As these systems are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes real-world applications, there is a dire need to ensure that they do not propagate or amplify any discriminatory tendencies in historical or human-curated data or inadvertently learn biases from spurious correlations. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on fairness that summarizes and sheds light on ongoing trends and successes in the context of computer vision. The topics we discuss include 1) The origin and technical definitions of fairness drawn from the wider fair machine learning literature and adjacent disciplines. 2) Work that sought to discover and analyze biases in computer vision systems. 3) A summary of methods proposed to mitigate bias in computer vision systems in recent years. 4) A comprehensive summary of resources and datasets produced by researchers to measure, analyze, and mitigate bias and enhance fairness. 5) Discussion of the field's success, continuing trends in the context of multimodal foundation and generative models, and gaps that still need to be addressed. The presented characterization should help researchers understand the importance of identifying and mitigating bias in computer vision and the state of the field and identify potential directions for future research.

Recent interest in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for practical applications is moderated by the significant challenge of hallucination or the inconsistency between the factual information and the generated text. In this paper, we first perform an in-depth analysis of hallucinations and discover several novel insights about how and when LVLMs hallucinate. From our analysis, we show that: (1) The community's efforts have been primarily targeted towards reducing hallucinations related to visual recognition (VR) prompts (e.g., prompts that only require describing the image), thereby ignoring hallucinations for cognitive prompts (e.g., prompts that require additional skills like reasoning on contents of the image). (2) LVLMs lack visual perception, i.e., they can see but not necessarily understand or perceive the input image. We analyze responses to cognitive prompts and show that LVLMs hallucinate due to a perception gap: although LVLMs accurately recognize visual elements in the input image and possess sufficient cognitive skills, they struggle to respond accurately and hallucinate. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose Visual Description Grounded Decoding (VDGD), a simple, robust, and training-free method for alleviating hallucinations. Specifically, we first describe the image and add it as a prefix to the instruction. Next, during auto-regressive decoding, we sample from the plausible candidates according to their KL-Divergence (KLD) to the description, where lower KLD is given higher preference. Experimental results on several benchmarks and LVLMs show that VDGD improves significantly over other baselines in reducing hallucinations. We also propose VaLLu, a benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of the cognitive capabilities of LVLMs.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs), exemplified by GPT-4V, excel across diverse tasks involving concrete images from natural scenes. However, their ability to interpret abstract figures, such as geometry shapes and scientific plots, remains limited due to a scarcity of training datasets in scientific domains. To fill this gap, we introduce Multimodal ArXiv, consisting of ArXivCap and ArXivQA, for enhancing LVLMs scientific comprehension. ArXivCap is a figure-caption dataset comprising 6.4M images and 3.9M captions sourced from 572K ArXiv papers spanning various scientific domains. Drawing from ArXivCap, we introduce ArXivQA, a question-answering dataset generated by prompting GPT-4V based on scientific figures. ArXivQA greatly enhances LVLMs' mathematical reasoning capabilities, achieving a 10.4% absolute accuracy gain on a multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, employing ArXivCap, we devise four vision-to-text tasks for benchmarking LVLMs. Evaluation results with state-of-the-art LVLMs underscore their struggle with the nuanced semantics of academic figures, with domain-specific training yielding substantial performance gains. Our error analysis uncovers misinterpretations of visual context, recognition errors, and the production of overly simplified captions by current LVLMs, shedding light on future improvements.

To truly understand vision models, we must not only interpret their learned features but also validate these interpretations through controlled experiments. Current approaches either provide interpretable features without the ability to test their causal influence, or enable model editing without interpretable controls. We present a unified framework using sparse autoencoders (SAEs) that bridges this gap, allowing us to discover human-interpretable visual features and precisely manipulate them to test hypotheses about model behavior. By applying our method to state-of-the-art vision models, we reveal key differences in the semantic abstractions learned by models with different pre-training objectives. We then demonstrate the practical usage of our framework through controlled interventions across multiple vision tasks. We show that SAEs can reliably identify and manipulate interpretable visual features without model re-training, providing a powerful tool for understanding and controlling vision model behavior. We provide code, demos and models on our project website: https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/SAE-V.

This paper propels creative control in generative visual AI by allowing users to "select". Departing from traditional text or sketch-based methods, we for the first time allow users to choose visual concepts by parts for their creative endeavors. The outcome is fine-grained generation that precisely captures selected visual concepts, ensuring a holistically faithful and plausible result. To achieve this, we first parse objects into parts through unsupervised feature clustering. Then, we encode parts into text tokens and introduce an entropy-based normalized attention loss that operates on them. This loss design enables our model to learn generic prior topology knowledge about object's part composition, and further generalize to novel part compositions to ensure the generation looks holistically faithful. Lastly, we employ a bottleneck encoder to project the part tokens. This not only enhances fidelity but also accelerates learning, by leveraging shared knowledge and facilitating information exchange among instances. Visual results in the paper and supplementary material showcase the compelling power of PartCraft in crafting highly customized, innovative creations, exemplified by the "charming" and creative birds. Code is released at https://github.com/kamwoh/partcraft.

Transformers have recently emerged as a powerful tool for learning visual representations. In this paper, we identify and characterize artifacts in feature maps of both supervised and self-supervised ViT networks. The artifacts correspond to high-norm tokens appearing during inference primarily in low-informative background areas of images, that are repurposed for internal computations. We propose a simple yet effective solution based on providing additional tokens to the input sequence of the Vision Transformer to fill that role. We show that this solution fixes that problem entirely for both supervised and self-supervised models, sets a new state of the art for self-supervised visual models on dense visual prediction tasks, enables object discovery methods with larger models, and most importantly leads to smoother feature maps and attention maps for downstream visual processing.

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR), induced by diabetes, poses a significant risk of visual impairment. Accurate and effective grading of DR aids in the treatment of this condition. Yet existing models experience notable performance degradation on unseen domains due to domain shifts. Previous methods address this issue by simulating domain style through simple visual transformation and mitigating domain noise via learning robust representations. However, domain shifts encompass more than image styles. They overlook biases caused by implicit factors such as ethnicity, age, and diagnostic criteria. In our work, we propose a novel framework where representations of paired data from different domains are decoupled into semantic features and domain noise. The resulting augmented representation comprises original retinal semantics and domain noise from other domains, aiming to generate enhanced representations aligned with real-world clinical needs, incorporating rich information from diverse domains. Subsequently, to improve the robustness of the decoupled representations, class and domain prototypes are employed to interpolate the disentangled representations while data-aware weights are designed to focus on rare classes and domains. Finally, we devise a robust pixel-level semantic alignment loss to align retinal semantics decoupled from features, maintaining a balance between intra-class diversity and dense class features. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on unseen domains. The code implementations are accessible on https://github.com/richard-peng-xia/DECO.

Large multimodal models extend the impressive capabilities of large language models by integrating multimodal understanding abilities. However, it is not clear how they can emulate the general intelligence and reasoning ability of humans. As recognizing patterns and abstracting concepts are key to general intelligence, we introduce PuzzleVQA, a collection of puzzles based on abstract patterns. With this dataset, we evaluate large multimodal models with abstract patterns based on fundamental concepts, including colors, numbers, sizes, and shapes. Through our experiments on state-of-the-art large multimodal models, we find that they are not able to generalize well to simple abstract patterns. Notably, even GPT-4V cannot solve more than half of the puzzles. To diagnose the reasoning challenges in large multimodal models, we progressively guide the models with our ground truth reasoning explanations for visual perception, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning. Our systematic analysis finds that the main bottlenecks of GPT-4V are weaker visual perception and inductive reasoning abilities. Through this work, we hope to shed light on the limitations of large multimodal models and how they can better emulate human cognitive processes in the future (Our data and code will be released publicly at https://github.com/declare-lab/LLM-PuzzleTest).

Inverse graphics -- the task of inverting an image into physical variables that, when rendered, enable reproduction of the observed scene -- is a fundamental challenge in computer vision and graphics. Disentangling an image into its constituent elements, such as the shape, color, and material properties of the objects of the 3D scene that produced it, requires a comprehensive understanding of the environment. This requirement limits the ability of existing carefully engineered approaches to generalize across domains. Inspired by the zero-shot ability of large language models (LLMs) to generalize to novel contexts, we investigate the possibility of leveraging the broad world knowledge encoded in such models in solving inverse-graphics problems. To this end, we propose the Inverse-Graphics Large Language Model (IG-LLM), an inverse-graphics framework centered around an LLM, that autoregressively decodes a visual embedding into a structured, compositional 3D-scene representation. We incorporate a frozen pre-trained visual encoder and a continuous numeric head to enable end-to-end training. Through our investigation, we demonstrate the potential of LLMs to facilitate inverse graphics through next-token prediction, without the use of image-space supervision. Our analysis opens up new possibilities for precise spatial reasoning about images that exploit the visual knowledge of LLMs. We will release our code and data to ensure the reproducibility of our investigation and to facilitate future research at https://ig-llm.is.tue.mpg.de/

Understanding the property of neural populations (or voxels) in the human brain can advance our comprehension of human perceptual and cognitive processing capabilities and contribute to developing brain-inspired computer models. Recent encoding models using deep neural networks (DNNs) have successfully predicted voxel-wise activity. However, interpreting the properties that explain voxel responses remains challenging because of the black-box nature of DNNs. As a solution, we propose LLM-assisted Visual Cortex Captioning (LaVCa), a data-driven approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate natural-language captions for images to which voxels are selective. By applying LaVCa for image-evoked brain activity, we demonstrate that LaVCa generates captions that describe voxel selectivity more accurately than the previously proposed method. Furthermore, the captions generated by LaVCa quantitatively capture more detailed properties than the existing method at both the inter-voxel and intra-voxel levels. Furthermore, a more detailed analysis of the voxel-specific properties generated by LaVCa reveals fine-grained functional differentiation within regions of interest (ROIs) in the visual cortex and voxels that simultaneously represent multiple distinct concepts. These findings offer profound insights into human visual representations by assigning detailed captions throughout the visual cortex while highlighting the potential of LLM-based methods in understanding brain representations. Please check out our webpage at https://sites.google.com/view/lavca-llm/

Evaluating the quality of automatically generated image descriptions is challenging, requiring metrics that capture various aspects such as grammaticality, coverage, correctness, and truthfulness. While human evaluation offers valuable insights, its cost and time-consuming nature pose limitations. Existing automated metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR, and CIDEr aim to bridge this gap but often show weak correlations with human judgment. We address this challenge by introducing a novel evaluation framework rooted in a modern large language model (LLM), such as GPT-4 or Gemini, capable of image generation. In our proposed framework, we begin by feeding an input image into a designated image captioning model, chosen for evaluation, to generate a textual description. Using this description, an LLM then creates a new image. By extracting features from both the original and LLM-created images, we measure their similarity using a designated similarity metric. A high similarity score suggests that the image captioning model has accurately generated textual descriptions, while a low similarity score indicates discrepancies, revealing potential shortcomings in the model's performance. Human-annotated reference captions are not required in our proposed evaluation framework, which serves as a valuable tool for evaluating the effectiveness of image captioning models. Its efficacy is confirmed through human evaluation.

Video descriptions are crucial for blind and low vision (BLV) users to access visual content. However, current artificial intelligence models for generating descriptions often fall short due to limitations in the quality of human annotations within training datasets, resulting in descriptions that do not fully meet BLV users' needs. To address this gap, we introduce VideoA11y, an approach that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and video accessibility guidelines to generate descriptions tailored for BLV individuals. Using this method, we have curated VideoA11y-40K, the largest and most comprehensive dataset of 40,000 videos described for BLV users. Rigorous experiments across 15 video categories, involving 347 sighted participants, 40 BLV participants, and seven professional describers, showed that VideoA11y descriptions outperform novice human annotations and are comparable to trained human annotations in clarity, accuracy, objectivity, descriptiveness, and user satisfaction. We evaluated models on VideoA11y-40K using both standard and custom metrics, demonstrating that MLLMs fine-tuned on this dataset produce high-quality accessible descriptions. Code and dataset are available at https://people-robots.github.io/VideoA11y.

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper

AI alignment refers to models acting towards human-intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles. Given that most large-scale deep learning models act as black boxes and cannot be manually controlled, analyzing the similarity between models and humans can be a proxy measure for ensuring AI safety. In this paper, we focus on the models' visual perception alignment with humans, further referred to as AI-human visual alignment. Specifically, we propose a new dataset for measuring AI-human visual alignment in terms of image classification, a fundamental task in machine perception. In order to evaluate AI-human visual alignment, a dataset should encompass samples with various scenarios that may arise in the real world and have gold human perception labels. Our dataset consists of three groups of samples, namely Must-Act (i.e., Must-Classify), Must-Abstain, and Uncertain, based on the quantity and clarity of visual information in an image and further divided into eight categories. All samples have a gold human perception label; even Uncertain (severely blurry) sample labels were obtained via crowd-sourcing. The validity of our dataset is verified by sampling theory, statistical theories related to survey design, and experts in the related fields. Using our dataset, we analyze the visual alignment and reliability of five popular visual perception models and seven abstention methods. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/jiyounglee-0523/VisAlign.

We present a general strategy to aligning visual generation models -- both image and video generation -- with human preference. To start with, we build VisionReward -- a fine-grained and multi-dimensional reward model. We decompose human preferences in images and videos into multiple dimensions, each represented by a series of judgment questions, linearly weighted and summed to an interpretable and accurate score. To address the challenges of video quality assessment, we systematically analyze various dynamic features of videos, which helps VisionReward surpass VideoScore by 17.2% and achieve top performance for video preference prediction. Based on VisionReward, we develop a multi-objective preference learning algorithm that effectively addresses the issue of confounding factors within preference data. Our approach significantly outperforms existing image and video scoring methods on both machine metrics and human evaluation. All code and datasets are provided at https://github.com/THUDM/VisionReward.

Few images on the Web receive alt-text descriptions that would make them accessible to blind and low vision (BLV) users. Image-based NLG systems have progressed to the point where they can begin to address this persistent societal problem, but these systems will not be fully successful unless we evaluate them on metrics that guide their development correctly. Here, we argue against current referenceless metrics -- those that don't rely on human-generated ground-truth descriptions -- on the grounds that they do not align with the needs of BLV users. The fundamental shortcoming of these metrics is that they do not take context into account, whereas contextual information is highly valued by BLV users. To substantiate these claims, we present a study with BLV participants who rated descriptions along a variety of dimensions. An in-depth analysis reveals that the lack of context-awareness makes current referenceless metrics inadequate for advancing image accessibility. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a contextual version of the referenceless metric CLIPScore which begins to address the disconnect to the BLV data. An accessible HTML version of this paper is available at https://elisakreiss.github.io/contextual-description-evaluation/paper/reflessmetrics.html

Recent advancements in text-to-image models, particularly diffusion models, have shown significant promise. However, compositional text-to-image models frequently encounter difficulties in generating high-quality images that accurately align with input texts describing multiple objects, variable attributes, and intricate spatial relationships. To address this limitation, we employ large vision-language models (LVLMs) for multi-dimensional assessment of the alignment between generated images and their corresponding input texts. Utilizing this assessment, we fine-tune the diffusion model to enhance its alignment capabilities. During the inference phase, an initial image is produced using the fine-tuned diffusion model. The LVLM is then employed to pinpoint areas of misalignment in the initial image, which are subsequently corrected using the image editing algorithm until no further misalignments are detected by the LVLM. The resultant image is consequently more closely aligned with the input text. Our experimental results validate that the proposed methodology significantly improves text-image alignment in compositional image generation, particularly with respect to object number, attribute binding, spatial relationships, and aesthetic quality.

The goal of this work is to characterize the representational impact that foveation operations have for machine vision systems, inspired by the foveated human visual system, which has higher acuity at the center of gaze and texture-like encoding in the periphery. To do so, we introduce models consisting of a first-stage fixed image transform followed by a second-stage learnable convolutional neural network, and we varied the first stage component. The primary model has a foveated-textural input stage, which we compare to a model with foveated-blurred input and a model with spatially-uniform blurred input (both matched for perceptual compression), and a final reference model with minimal input-based compression. We find that: 1) the foveated-texture model shows similar scene classification accuracy as the reference model despite its compressed input, with greater i.i.d. generalization than the other models; 2) the foveated-texture model has greater sensitivity to high-spatial frequency information and greater robustness to occlusion, w.r.t the comparison models; 3) both the foveated systems, show a stronger center image-bias relative to the spatially-uniform systems even with a weight sharing constraint. Critically, these results are preserved over different classical CNN architectures throughout their learning dynamics. Altogether, this suggests that foveation with peripheral texture-based computations yields an efficient, distinct, and robust representational format of scene information, and provides symbiotic computational insight into the representational consequences that texture-based peripheral encoding may have for processing in the human visual system, while also potentially inspiring the next generation of computer vision models via spatially-adaptive computation. Code + Data available here: https://github.com/ArturoDeza/EmergentProperties

As we consider entrusting Large Language Models (LLMs) with key societal and decision-making roles, measuring their alignment with human cognition becomes critical. This requires methods that can assess how these systems represent information and facilitate comparisons to human understanding across diverse tasks. To meet this need, we developed Turing Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA), a method that uses pairwise similarity ratings to quantify alignment between AIs and humans. We tested this approach on semantic alignment across text and image modalities, measuring how different Large Language and Vision Language Model (LLM and VLM) similarity judgments aligned with human responses at both group and individual levels. GPT-4o showed the strongest alignment with human performance among the models we tested, particularly when leveraging its text processing capabilities rather than image processing, regardless of the input modality. However, no model we studied adequately captured the inter-individual variability observed among human participants. This method helped uncover certain hyperparameters and prompts that could steer model behavior to have more or less human-like qualities at an inter-individual or group level. Turing RSA enables the efficient and flexible quantification of human-AI alignment and complements existing accuracy-based benchmark tasks. We demonstrate its utility across multiple modalities (words, sentences, images) for understanding how LLMs encode knowledge and for examining representational alignment with human cognition.

Representation learning promises to unlock deep learning for the long tail of vision tasks without expensive labelled datasets. Yet, the absence of a unified evaluation for general visual representations hinders progress. Popular protocols are often too constrained (linear classification), limited in diversity (ImageNet, CIFAR, Pascal-VOC), or only weakly related to representation quality (ELBO, reconstruction error). We present the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB), which defines good representations as those that adapt to diverse, unseen tasks with few examples. With VTAB, we conduct a large-scale study of many popular publicly-available representation learning algorithms. We carefully control confounders such as architecture and tuning budget. We address questions like: How effective are ImageNet representations beyond standard natural datasets? How do representations trained via generative and discriminative models compare? To what extent can self-supervision replace labels? And, how close are we to general visual representations?