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Zhengyuan Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhengyuan Yang.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

SGFormer: Semantic Graph Transformer for Point Cloud-based 3D Scene Graph Generation

In this paper, we propose a novel model called SGFormer, Semantic Graph TransFormer for point cloud-based 3D scene graph generation. The task aims to parse a point cloud-based scene into a semantic structural graph, with the core challenge of modeling the complex global structure. Existing methods based on graph convolutional networks (GCNs) suffer from the over-smoothing dilemma and can only propagate information from limited neighboring nodes. In contrast, SGFormer uses Transformer layers as the base building block to allow global information passing, with two types of newly-designed layers tailored for the 3D scene graph generation task. Specifically, we introduce the graph embedding layer to best utilize the global information in graph edges while maintaining comparable computation costs. Furthermore, we propose the semantic injection layer to leverage linguistic knowledge from large-scale language model (i.e., ChatGPT), to enhance objects' visual features. We benchmark our SGFormer on the established 3DSSG dataset and achieve a 40.94% absolute improvement in relationship prediction's R@50 and an 88.36% boost on the subset with complex scenes over the state-of-the-art. Our analyses further show SGFormer's superiority in the long-tail and zero-shot scenarios. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Andy20178/SGFormer.

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MM-Narrator: Narrating Long-form Videos with Multimodal In-Context Learning

We present MM-Narrator, a novel system leveraging GPT-4 with multimodal in-context learning for the generation of audio descriptions (AD). Unlike previous methods that primarily focused on downstream fine-tuning with short video clips, MM-Narrator excels in generating precise audio descriptions for videos of extensive lengths, even beyond hours, in an autoregressive manner. This capability is made possible by the proposed memory-augmented generation process, which effectively utilizes both the short-term textual context and long-term visual memory through an efficient register-and-recall mechanism. These contextual memories compile pertinent past information, including storylines and character identities, ensuring an accurate tracking and depicting of story-coherent and character-centric audio descriptions. Maintaining the training-free design of MM-Narrator, we further propose a complexity-based demonstration selection strategy to largely enhance its multi-step reasoning capability via few-shot multimodal in-context learning (MM-ICL). Experimental results on MAD-eval dataset demonstrate that MM-Narrator consistently outperforms both the existing fine-tuning-based approaches and LLM-based approaches in most scenarios, as measured by standard evaluation metrics. Additionally, we introduce the first segment-based evaluator for recurrent text generation. Empowered by GPT-4, this evaluator comprehensively reasons and marks AD generation performance in various extendable dimensions.

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MMSum: A Dataset for Multimodal Summarization and Thumbnail Generation of Videos

Multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) has emerged as a promising research direction. Nonetheless, numerous limitations exist within existing public MSMO datasets, including insufficient maintenance, data inaccessibility, limited size, and the absence of proper categorization, which pose significant challenges. To address these challenges and provide a comprehensive dataset for this new direction, we have meticulously curated the \textbf{MMSum} dataset. Our new dataset features (1) Human-validated summaries for both video and textual content, providing superior human instruction and labels for multimodal learning. (2) Comprehensively and meticulously arranged categorization, spanning 17 principal categories and 170 subcategories to encapsulate a diverse array of real-world scenarios. (3) Benchmark tests performed on the proposed dataset to assess various tasks and methods, including \textit{video summarization}, \textit{text summarization}, and \textit{multimodal summarization}. To champion accessibility and collaboration, we will release the \textbf{MMSum} dataset and the data collection tool as fully open-source resources, fostering transparency and accelerating future developments. Our project website can be found at~\url{https://mmsum-dataset.github.io/}

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GPT-4V(ision) as A Social Media Analysis Engine

Recent research has offered insights into the extraordinary capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in various general vision and language tasks. There is growing interest in how LMMs perform in more specialized domains. Social media content, inherently multimodal, blends text, images, videos, and sometimes audio. Understanding social multimedia content remains a challenging problem for contemporary machine learning frameworks. In this paper, we explore GPT-4V(ision)'s capabilities for social multimedia analysis. We select five representative tasks, including sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, fake news identification, demographic inference, and political ideology detection, to evaluate GPT-4V. Our investigation begins with a preliminary quantitative analysis for each task using existing benchmark datasets, followed by a careful review of the results and a selection of qualitative samples that illustrate GPT-4V's potential in understanding multimodal social media content. GPT-4V demonstrates remarkable efficacy in these tasks, showcasing strengths such as joint understanding of image-text pairs, contextual and cultural awareness, and extensive commonsense knowledge. Despite the overall impressive capacity of GPT-4V in the social media domain, there remain notable challenges. GPT-4V struggles with tasks involving multilingual social multimedia comprehension and has difficulties in generalizing to the latest trends in social media. Additionally, it exhibits a tendency to generate erroneous information in the context of evolving celebrity and politician knowledge, reflecting the known hallucination problem. The insights gleaned from our findings underscore a promising future for LMMs in enhancing our comprehension of social media content and its users through the analysis of multimodal information.

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GPT-4V in Wonderland: Large Multimodal Models for Zero-Shot Smartphone GUI Navigation

We present MM-Navigator, a GPT-4V-based agent for the smartphone graphical user interface (GUI) navigation task. MM-Navigator can interact with a smartphone screen as human users, and determine subsequent actions to fulfill given instructions. Our findings demonstrate that large multimodal models (LMMs), specifically GPT-4V, excel in zero-shot GUI navigation through its advanced screen interpretation, action reasoning, and precise action localization capabilities. We first benchmark MM-Navigator on our collected iOS screen dataset. According to human assessments, the system exhibited a 91\% accuracy rate in generating reasonable action descriptions and a 75\% accuracy rate in executing the correct actions for single-step instructions on iOS. Additionally, we evaluate the model on a subset of an Android screen navigation dataset, where the model outperforms previous GUI navigators in a zero-shot fashion. Our benchmark and detailed analyses aim to lay a robust groundwork for future research into the GUI navigation task. The project page is at https://github.com/zzxslp/MM-Navigator.

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OpenLEAF: Open-Domain Interleaved Image-Text Generation and Evaluation

This work investigates a challenging task named open-domain interleaved image-text generation, which generates interleaved texts and images following an input query. We propose a new interleaved generation framework based on prompting large-language models (LLMs) and pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models, namely OpenLEAF. In OpenLEAF, the LLM generates textual descriptions, coordinates T2I models, creates visual prompts for generating images, and incorporates global contexts into the T2I models. This global context improves the entity and style consistencies of images in the interleaved generation. For model assessment, we first propose to use large multi-modal models (LMMs) to evaluate the entity and style consistencies of open-domain interleaved image-text sequences. According to the LMM evaluation on our constructed evaluation set, the proposed interleaved generation framework can generate high-quality image-text content for various domains and applications, such as how-to question answering, storytelling, graphical story rewriting, and webpage/poster generation tasks. Moreover, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed LMM evaluation technique with human assessment. We hope our proposed framework, benchmark, and LMM evaluation could help establish the intriguing interleaved image-text generation task.

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MM-VID: Advancing Video Understanding with GPT-4V(ision)

We present MM-VID, an integrated system that harnesses the capabilities of GPT-4V, combined with specialized tools in vision, audio, and speech, to facilitate advanced video understanding. MM-VID is designed to address the challenges posed by long-form videos and intricate tasks such as reasoning within hour-long content and grasping storylines spanning multiple episodes. MM-VID uses a video-to-script generation with GPT-4V to transcribe multimodal elements into a long textual script. The generated script details character movements, actions, expressions, and dialogues, paving the way for large language models (LLMs) to achieve video understanding. This enables advanced capabilities, including audio description, character identification, and multimodal high-level comprehension. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MM-VID in handling distinct video genres with various video lengths. Additionally, we showcase its potential when applied to interactive environments, such as video games and graphic user interfaces.

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DEsignBench: Exploring and Benchmarking DALL-E 3 for Imagining Visual Design

We introduce DEsignBench, a text-to-image (T2I) generation benchmark tailored for visual design scenarios. Recent T2I models like DALL-E 3 and others, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating photorealistic images that align closely with textual inputs. While the allure of creating visually captivating images is undeniable, our emphasis extends beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. We aim to investigate the potential of using these powerful models in authentic design contexts. In pursuit of this goal, we develop DEsignBench, which incorporates test samples designed to assess T2I models on both "design technical capability" and "design application scenario." Each of these two dimensions is supported by a diverse set of specific design categories. We explore DALL-E 3 together with other leading T2I models on DEsignBench, resulting in a comprehensive visual gallery for side-by-side comparisons. For DEsignBench benchmarking, we perform human evaluations on generated images in DEsignBench gallery, against the criteria of image-text alignment, visual aesthetic, and design creativity. Our evaluation also considers other specialized design capabilities, including text rendering, layout composition, color harmony, 3D design, and medium style. In addition to human evaluations, we introduce the first automatic image generation evaluator powered by GPT-4V. This evaluator provides ratings that align well with human judgments, while being easily replicable and cost-efficient. A high-resolution version is available at https://github.com/design-bench/design-bench.github.io/raw/main/designbench.pdf?download=

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The Dawn of LMMs: Preliminary Explorations with GPT-4V(ision)

Large multimodal models (LMMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with multi-sensory skills, such as visual understanding, to achieve stronger generic intelligence. In this paper, we analyze the latest model, GPT-4V(ision), to deepen the understanding of LMMs. The analysis focuses on the intriguing tasks that GPT-4V can perform, containing test samples to probe the quality and genericity of GPT-4V's capabilities, its supported inputs and working modes, and the effective ways to prompt the model. In our approach to exploring GPT-4V, we curate and organize a collection of carefully designed qualitative samples spanning a variety of domains and tasks. Observations from these samples demonstrate that GPT-4V's unprecedented ability in processing arbitrarily interleaved multimodal inputs and the genericity of its capabilities together make GPT-4V a powerful multimodal generalist system. Furthermore, GPT-4V's unique capability of understanding visual markers drawn on input images can give rise to new human-computer interaction methods such as visual referring prompting. We conclude the report with in-depth discussions on the emerging application scenarios and the future research directions for GPT-4V-based systems. We hope that this preliminary exploration will inspire future research on the next-generation multimodal task formulation, new ways to exploit and enhance LMMs to solve real-world problems, and gaining better understanding of multimodal foundation models. Finally, we acknowledge that the model under our study is solely the product of OpenAI's innovative work, and they should be fully credited for its development. Please see the GPT-4V contributions paper for the authorship and credit attribution: https://cdn.openai.com/contributions/gpt-4v.pdf

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Equivariant Similarity for Vision-Language Foundation Models

This study explores the concept of equivariance in vision-language foundation models (VLMs), focusing specifically on the multimodal similarity function that is not only the major training objective but also the core delivery to support downstream tasks. Unlike the existing image-text similarity objective which only categorizes matched pairs as similar and unmatched pairs as dissimilar, equivariance also requires similarity to vary faithfully according to the semantic changes. This allows VLMs to generalize better to nuanced and unseen multimodal compositions. However, modeling equivariance is challenging as the ground truth of semantic change is difficult to collect. For example, given an image-text pair about a dog, it is unclear to what extent the similarity changes when the pixel is changed from dog to cat? To this end, we propose EqSim, a regularization loss that can be efficiently calculated from any two matched training pairs and easily pluggable into existing image-text retrieval fine-tuning. Meanwhile, to further diagnose the equivariance of VLMs, we present a new challenging benchmark EqBen. Compared to the existing evaluation sets, EqBen is the first to focus on "visual-minimal change". Extensive experiments show the lack of equivariance in current VLMs and validate the effectiveness of EqSim. Code is available at https://github.com/Wangt-CN/EqBen.

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Multimodal Foundation Models: From Specialists to General-Purpose Assistants

This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the taxonomy and evolution of multimodal foundation models that demonstrate vision and vision-language capabilities, focusing on the transition from specialist models to general-purpose assistants. The research landscape encompasses five core topics, categorized into two classes. (i) We start with a survey of well-established research areas: multimodal foundation models pre-trained for specific purposes, including two topics -- methods of learning vision backbones for visual understanding and text-to-image generation. (ii) Then, we present recent advances in exploratory, open research areas: multimodal foundation models that aim to play the role of general-purpose assistants, including three topics -- unified vision models inspired by large language models (LLMs), end-to-end training of multimodal LLMs, and chaining multimodal tools with LLMs. The target audiences of the paper are researchers, graduate students, and professionals in computer vision and vision-language multimodal communities who are eager to learn the basics and recent advances in multimodal foundation models.

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PromptCap: Prompt-Guided Task-Aware Image Captioning

Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) involves questions that require world knowledge beyond the image to yield the correct answer. Large language models (LMs) like GPT-3 are particularly helpful for this task because of their strong knowledge retrieval and reasoning capabilities. To enable LM to understand images, prior work uses a captioning model to convert images into text. However, when summarizing an image in a single caption sentence, which visual entities to describe are often underspecified. Generic image captions often miss visual details essential for the LM to answer visual questions correctly. To address this challenge, we propose PromptCap (Prompt-guided image Captioning), a captioning model designed to serve as a better connector between images and black-box LMs. Different from generic captions, PromptCap takes a natural-language prompt to control the visual entities to describe in the generated caption. The prompt contains a question that the caption should aid in answering. To avoid extra annotation, PromptCap is trained by examples synthesized with GPT-3 and existing datasets. We demonstrate PromptCap's effectiveness on an existing pipeline in which GPT-3 is prompted with image captions to carry out VQA. PromptCap outperforms generic captions by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on knowledge-based VQA tasks (60.4% on OK-VQA and 59.6% on A-OKVQA). Zero-shot results on WebQA show that PromptCap generalizes well to unseen domains.

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Spatial-Frequency U-Net for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

In this paper, we study the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) in wavelet space, instead of pixel space, for visual synthesis. Considering the wavelet transform represents the image in spatial and frequency domains, we carefully design a novel architecture SFUNet to effectively capture the correlation for both domains. Specifically, in the standard denoising U-Net for pixel data, we supplement the 2D convolutions and spatial-only attention layers with our spatial frequency-aware convolution and attention modules to jointly model the complementary information from spatial and frequency domains in wavelet data. Our new architecture can be used as a drop-in replacement to the pixel-based network and is compatible with the vanilla DDPM training process. By explicitly modeling the wavelet signals, we find our model is able to generate images with higher quality on CIFAR-10, FFHQ, LSUN-Bedroom, and LSUN-Church datasets, than the pixel-based counterpart.

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NUWA-XL: Diffusion over Diffusion for eXtremely Long Video Generation

In this paper, we propose NUWA-XL, a novel Diffusion over Diffusion architecture for eXtremely Long video generation. Most current work generates long videos segment by segment sequentially, which normally leads to the gap between training on short videos and inferring long videos, and the sequential generation is inefficient. Instead, our approach adopts a ``coarse-to-fine'' process, in which the video can be generated in parallel at the same granularity. A global diffusion model is applied to generate the keyframes across the entire time range, and then local diffusion models recursively fill in the content between nearby frames. This simple yet effective strategy allows us to directly train on long videos (3376 frames) to reduce the training-inference gap, and makes it possible to generate all segments in parallel. To evaluate our model, we build FlintstonesHD dataset, a new benchmark for long video generation. Experiments show that our model not only generates high-quality long videos with both global and local coherence, but also decreases the average inference time from 7.55min to 26s (by 94.26\%) at the same hardware setting when generating 1024 frames. The homepage link is \url{https://msra-nuwa.azurewebsites.net/}

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MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action

We propose MM-REACT, a system paradigm that integrates ChatGPT with a pool of vision experts to achieve multimodal reasoning and action. In this paper, we define and explore a comprehensive list of advanced vision tasks that are intriguing to solve, but may exceed the capabilities of existing vision and vision-language models. To achieve such advanced visual intelligence, MM-REACT introduces a textual prompt design that can represent text descriptions, textualized spatial coordinates, and aligned file names for dense visual signals such as images and videos. MM-REACT's prompt design allows language models to accept, associate, and process multimodal information, thereby facilitating the synergetic combination of ChatGPT and various vision experts. Zero-shot experiments demonstrate MM-REACT's effectiveness in addressing the specified capabilities of interests and its wide application in different scenarios that require advanced visual understanding. Furthermore, we discuss and compare MM-REACT's system paradigm with an alternative approach that extends language models for multimodal scenarios through joint finetuning. Code, demo, video, and visualization are available at https://multimodal-react.github.io/

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Learning 3D Photography Videos via Self-supervised Diffusion on Single Images

3D photography renders a static image into a video with appealing 3D visual effects. Existing approaches typically first conduct monocular depth estimation, then render the input frame to subsequent frames with various viewpoints, and finally use an inpainting model to fill those missing/occluded regions. The inpainting model plays a crucial role in rendering quality, but it is normally trained on out-of-domain data. To reduce the training and inference gap, we propose a novel self-supervised diffusion model as the inpainting module. Given a single input image, we automatically construct a training pair of the masked occluded image and the ground-truth image with random cycle-rendering. The constructed training samples are closely aligned to the testing instances, without the need of data annotation. To make full use of the masked images, we design a Masked Enhanced Block (MEB), which can be easily plugged into the UNet and enhance the semantic conditions. Towards real-world animation, we present a novel task: out-animation, which extends the space and time of input objects. Extensive experiments on real datasets show that our method achieves competitive results with existing SOTA methods.

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Prompting GPT-3 To Be Reliable

Large language models (LLMs) show impressive abilities via few-shot prompting. Commercialized APIs such as OpenAI GPT-3 further increase their use in real-world language applications. However, the crucial problem of how to improve the reliability of GPT-3 is still under-explored. While reliability is a broad and vaguely defined term, we decompose reliability into four main facets that correspond to the existing framework of ML safety and are well-recognized to be important: generalizability, social biases, calibration, and factuality. Our core contribution is to establish simple and effective prompts that improve GPT-3's reliability as it: 1) generalizes out-of-distribution, 2) balances demographic distribution and uses natural language instructions to reduce social biases, 3) calibrates output probabilities, and 4) updates the LLM's factual knowledge and reasoning chains. With appropriate prompts, GPT-3 is more reliable than smaller-scale supervised models on all these facets. We release all processed datasets, evaluation scripts, and model predictions. Our systematic empirical study not only sheds new insights on the reliability of prompting LLMs, but more importantly, our prompting strategies can help practitioners more reliably use LLMs like GPT-3.

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GIT: A Generative Image-to-text Transformer for Vision and Language

In this paper, we design and train a Generative Image-to-text Transformer, GIT, to unify vision-language tasks such as image/video captioning and question answering. While generative models provide a consistent network architecture between pre-training and fine-tuning, existing work typically contains complex structures (uni/multi-modal encoder/decoder) and depends on external modules such as object detectors/taggers and optical character recognition (OCR). In GIT, we simplify the architecture as one image encoder and one text decoder under a single language modeling task. We also scale up the pre-training data and the model size to boost the model performance. Without bells and whistles, our GIT establishes new state of the arts on 12 challenging benchmarks with a large margin. For instance, our model surpasses the human performance for the first time on TextCaps (138.2 vs. 125.5 in CIDEr). Furthermore, we present a new scheme of generation-based image classification and scene text recognition, achieving decent performance on standard benchmarks. Codes are released at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text}.

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