Visuo-Tactile Zero-Shot Object Recognition with Vision-Language Model

Tactile perception is vital, especially when distinguishing visually similar objects. We propose an approach to incorporate tactile data into a Vision-Language Model (VLM) for visuo-tactile zero-shot object recognition. Our approach leverages the zero-shot capability of VLMs to infer tactile properties from the names of tactilely similar objects. The proposed method translates tactile data into a textual description solely by annotating object names for each tactile sequence during training, making it adaptable to various contexts with low training costs. The proposed method was evaluated on the FoodReplica and Cube datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in recognizing objects that are difficult to distinguish by vision alone.

COM Kitchens: An Unedited Overhead-view Video Dataset as a Vision-Language Benchmark

Procedural video understanding is gaining attention in the vision and language community. Deep learning-based video analysis requires extensive data. Consequently, existing works often use web videos as training resources, making it challenging to query instructional contents from raw video observations. To address this issue, we propose a new dataset, COM Kitchens. The dataset consists of unedited overhead-view videos captured by smartphones, in which participants performed food preparation based on given recipes. Fixed-viewpoint video datasets often lack environmental diversity due to high camera setup costs. We used modern wide-angle smartphone lenses to cover cooking counters from sink to cooktop in an overhead view, capturing activity without in-person assistance. With this setup, we collected a diverse dataset by distributing smartphones to participants. With this dataset, we propose the novel video-to-text retrieval task Online Recipe Retrieval (OnRR) and new video captioning domain Dense Video Captioning on unedited Overhead-View videos (DVC-OV). Our experiments verified the capabilities and limitations of current web-video-based SOTA methods in handling these tasks.

AdaCoder: Adaptive Prompt Compression for Programmatic Visual Question Answering

Visual question answering aims to provide responses to natural language questions given visual input. Recently, visual programmatic models (VPMs), which generate executable programs to answer questions through large language models (LLMs), have attracted research interest. However, they often require long input prompts to provide the LLM with sufficient API usage details to generate relevant code. To address this limitation, we propose AdaCoder, an adaptive prompt compression framework for VPMs. AdaCoder operates in two phases: a compression phase and an inference phase. In the compression phase, given a preprompt that describes all API definitions in the Python language with example snippets of code, a set of compressed preprompts is generated, each depending on a specific question type. In the inference phase, given an input question, AdaCoder predicts the question type and chooses the appropriate corresponding compressed preprompt to generate code to answer the question. Notably, AdaCoder employs a single frozen LLM and pre-defined prompts, negating the necessity of additional training and maintaining adaptability across different powerful black-box LLMs such as GPT and Claude. In experiments, we apply AdaCoder to ViperGPT and demonstrate that it reduces token length by 71.1%, while maintaining or even improving the performance of visual question answering.

Exo2EgoDVC: Dense Video Captioning of Egocentric Procedural Activities Using Web Instructional Videos

We propose a novel benchmark for cross-view knowledge transfer of dense video captioning, adapting models from web instructional videos with exocentric views to an egocentric view. While dense video captioning (predicting time segments and their captions) is primarily studied with exocentric videos (e.g., YouCook2), benchmarks with egocentric videos are restricted due to data scarcity. To overcome the limited video availability, transferring knowledge from abundant exocentric web videos is demanded as a practical approach. However, learning the correspondence between exocentric and egocentric views is difficult due to their dynamic view changes. The web videos contain mixed views focusing on either human body actions or close-up hand-object interactions, while the egocentric view is constantly shifting as the camera wearer moves. This necessitates the in-depth study of cross-view transfer under complex view changes. In this work, we first create a real-life egocentric dataset (EgoYC2) whose captions are shared with YouCook2, enabling transfer learning between these datasets assuming their ground-truth is accessible. To bridge the view gaps, we propose a view-invariant learning method using adversarial training in both the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. While the pre-training is designed to learn invariant features against the mixed views in the web videos, the view-invariant fine-tuning further mitigates the view gaps between both datasets. We validate our proposed method by studying how effectively it overcomes the view change problem and efficiently transfers the knowledge to the egocentric domain. Our benchmark pushes the study of the cross-view transfer into a new task domain of dense video captioning and will envision methodologies to describe egocentric videos in natural language.

Vision-Language Interpreter for Robot Task Planning

Large language models (LLMs) are accelerating the development of language-guided robot planners. Meanwhile, symbolic planners offer the advantage of interpretability. This paper proposes a new task that bridges these two trends, namely, multimodal planning problem specification. The aim is to generate a problem description (PD), a machine-readable file used by the planners to find a plan. By generating PDs from language instruction and scene observation, we can drive symbolic planners in a language-guided framework. We propose a Vision-Language Interpreter (ViLaIn), a new framework that generates PDs using state-of-the-art LLM and vision-language models. ViLaIn can refine generated PDs via error message feedback from the symbolic planner. Our aim is to answer the question: How accurately can ViLaIn and the symbolic planner generate valid robot plans? To evaluate ViLaIn, we introduce a novel dataset called the problem description generation (ProDG) dataset. The framework is evaluated with four new evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that ViLaIn can generate syntactically correct problems with more than 99% accuracy and valid plans with more than 58% accuracy.

WeaveNet for Approximating Two-sided Matching Problems

Matching, a task to optimally assign limited resources under constraints, is a fundamental technology for society. The task potentially has various objectives, conditions, and constraints; however, the efficient neural network architecture for matching is underexplored. This paper proposes a novel graph neural network (GNN), \textit{WeaveNet}, designed for bipartite graphs. Since a bipartite graph is generally dense, general GNN architectures lose node-wise information by over-smoothing when deeply stacked. Such a phenomenon is undesirable for solving matching problems. WeaveNet avoids it by preserving edge-wise information while passing messages densely to reach a better solution. To evaluate the model, we approximated one of the \textit{strongly NP-hard} problems, \textit{fair stable matching}. Despite its inherent difficulties and the network's general purpose design, our model reached a comparative performance with state-of-the-art algorithms specially designed for stable matching for small numbers of agents.

A Critical Look at the Current Usage of Foundation Model for Dense Recognition Task

In recent years large model trained on huge amount of cross-modality data, which is usually be termed as foundation model, achieves conspicuous accomplishment in many fields, such as image recognition and generation. Though achieving great success in their original application case, it is still unclear whether those foundation models can be applied to other different downstream tasks. In this paper, we conduct a short survey on the current methods for discriminative dense recognition tasks, which are built on the pretrained foundation model. And we also provide some preliminary experimental analysis of an existing open-vocabulary segmentation method based on Stable Diffusion, which indicates the current way of deploying diffusion model for segmentation is not optimal. This aims to provide insights for future research on adopting foundation model for downstream task.

Noisy Universal Domain Adaptation via Divergence Optimization for Visual Recognition

To transfer the knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, many studies have worked on universal domain adaptation (UniDA), where there is no constraint on the label sets of the source domain and target domain. However, the existing UniDA methods rely on source samples with correct annotations. Due to the limited resources in the real world, it is difficult to obtain a large amount of perfectly clean labeled data in a source domain in some applications. As a result, we propose a novel realistic scenario named Noisy UniDA, in which classifiers are trained using noisy labeled data from the source domain as well as unlabeled domain data from the target domain that has an uncertain class distribution. A multi-head convolutional neural network framework is proposed in this paper to address all of the challenges faced in the Noisy UniDA at once. Our network comprises a single common feature generator and multiple classifiers with various decision bounds. We can detect noisy samples in the source domain, identify unknown classes in the target domain, and align the distribution of the source and target domains by optimizing the divergence between the outputs of the various classifiers. The proposed method outperformed the existing methods in most of the settings after a thorough analysis of the various domain adaption scenarios. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/YU1ut/Divergence-Optimization}.

Recipe Generation from Unsegmented Cooking Videos

This paper tackles recipe generation from unsegmented cooking videos, a task that requires agents to (1) extract key events in completing the dish and (2) generate sentences for the extracted events. Our task is similar to dense video captioning (DVC), which aims at detecting events thoroughly and generating sentences for them. However, unlike DVC, in recipe generation, recipe story awareness is crucial, and a model should output an appropriate number of key events in the correct order. We analyze the output of the DVC model and observe that although (1) several events are adoptable as a recipe story, (2) the generated sentences for such events are not grounded in the visual content. Based on this, we hypothesize that we can obtain correct recipes by selecting oracle events from the output events of the DVC model and re-generating sentences for them. To achieve this, we propose a novel transformer-based joint approach of training event selector and sentence generator for selecting oracle events from the outputs of the DVC model and generating grounded sentences for the events, respectively. In addition, we extend the model by including ingredients to generate more accurate recipes. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art DVC models. We also confirm that, by modeling the recipe in a story-aware manner, the proposed model output the appropriate number of events in the correct order.

Visual Recipe Flow: A Dataset for Learning Visual State Changes of Objects with Recipe Flows

We present a new multimodal dataset called Visual Recipe Flow, which enables us to learn each cooking action result in a recipe text. The dataset consists of object state changes and the workflow of the recipe text. The state change is represented as an image pair, while the workflow is represented as a recipe flow graph (r-FG). The image pairs are grounded in the r-FG, which provides the cross-modal relation. With our dataset, one can try a range of applications, from multimodal commonsense reasoning and procedural text generation.