CLIPS: An Enhanced CLIP Framework for Learning with Synthetic Captions

Previous works show that noisy, web-crawled image-text pairs may limit vision-language pretraining like CLIP and propose learning with synthetic captions as a promising alternative. Our work continues this effort, introducing two simple yet effective designs to better leverage richly described synthetic captions. Firstly, by observing a strong inverse effect in learning with synthetic captions -- the short synthetic captions can generally lead to MUCH higher performance than full-length ones -- we therefore fed only partial synthetic captions to the text encoder. Secondly, we incorporate an autoregressive captioner to mimic the recaptioning process -- by conditioning on the paired image input and web-crawled text description, the captioner learns to predict the full-length synthetic caption generated by advanced MLLMs. Experiments show that our framework significantly improves zero-shot performance in cross-modal retrieval tasks, setting new SOTA results on MSCOCO and Flickr30K. Moreover, such trained vision encoders can enhance the visual capability of LLaVA, showing strong improvements on a range of MLLM benchmarks. Our project page is https://ucsc-vlaa.github.io/CLIPS/.

AttnGCG: Enhancing Jailbreaking Attacks on LLMs with Attention Manipulation

This paper studies the vulnerabilities of transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) to jailbreaking attacks, focusing specifically on the optimization-based Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) strategy. We first observe a positive correlation between the effectiveness of attacks and the internal behaviors of the models. For instance, attacks tend to be less effective when models pay more attention to system prompts designed to ensure LLM safety alignment. Building on this discovery, we introduce an enhanced method that manipulates models' attention scores to facilitate LLM jailbreaking, which we term AttnGCG. Empirically, AttnGCG shows consistent improvements in attack efficacy across diverse LLMs, achieving an average increase of ~7% in the Llama-2 series and ~10% in the Gemma series. Our strategy also demonstrates robust attack transferability against both unseen harmful goals and black-box LLMs like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Moreover, we note our attention-score visualization is more interpretable, allowing us to gain better insights into how our targeted attention manipulation facilitates more effective jailbreaking. We release the code at https://github.com/UCSC-VLAA/AttnGCG-attack.

Contextuality Helps Representation Learning for Generalized Category Discovery

This paper introduces a novel approach to Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) by leveraging the concept of contextuality to enhance the identification and classification of categories in unlabeled datasets. Drawing inspiration from human cognition's ability to recognize objects within their context, we propose a dual-context based method. Our model integrates two levels of contextuality: instance-level, where nearest-neighbor contexts are utilized for contrastive learning, and cluster-level, employing prototypical contrastive learning based on category prototypes. The integration of the contextual information effectively improves the feature learning and thereby the classification accuracy of all categories, which better deals with the real-world datasets. Different from the traditional semi-supervised and novel category discovery techniques, our model focuses on a more realistic and challenging scenario where both known and novel categories are present in the unlabeled data. Extensive experimental results on several benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art. Code is available at: https://github.com/Clarence-CV/Contexuality-GCD

PromptCCD: Learning Gaussian Mixture Prompt Pool for Continual Category Discovery

We tackle the problem of Continual Category Discovery (CCD), which aims to automatically discover novel categories in a continuous stream of unlabeled data while mitigating the challenge of catastrophic forgetting -- an open problem that persists even in conventional, fully supervised continual learning. To address this challenge, we propose PromptCCD, a simple yet effective framework that utilizes a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) as a prompting method for CCD. At the core of PromptCCD lies the Gaussian Mixture Prompting (GMP) module, which acts as a dynamic pool that updates over time to facilitate representation learning and prevent forgetting during category discovery. Moreover, GMP enables on-the-fly estimation of category numbers, allowing PromptCCD to discover categories in unlabeled data without prior knowledge of the category numbers. We extend the standard evaluation metric for Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) to CCD and benchmark state-of-the-art methods on diverse public datasets. PromptCCD significantly outperforms existing methods, demonstrating its effectiveness. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/promptccd .

Benchmarking Multi-Image Understanding in Vision and Language Models: Perception, Knowledge, Reasoning, and Multi-Hop Reasoning

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly broadened the scope of applications in natural language processing, with multi-modal LLMs extending these capabilities to integrate and interpret visual data. However, existing benchmarks for visual language models (VLMs) predominantly focus on single-image inputs, neglecting the crucial aspect of multi-image understanding. In this paper, we introduce a Multi-Image Relational Benchmark MIRB, designed to evaluate VLMs' ability to compare, analyze, and reason across multiple images. Our benchmark encompasses four categories: perception, visual world knowledge, reasoning, and multi-hop reasoning. Through a comprehensive evaluation of a wide range of open-source and closed-source models, we demonstrate that while open-source VLMs were shown to approach the performance of GPT-4V in single-image tasks, a significant performance gap remains in multi-image reasoning tasks. Our findings also reveal that even the state-of-the-art GPT-4V model struggles with our benchmark, underscoring the need for further research and development in this area. We believe our contribution of MIRB could serve as a testbed for developing the next-generation multi-modal models.

What If We Recaption Billions of Web Images with LLaMA-3?

Web-crawled image-text pairs are inherently noisy. Prior studies demonstrate that semantically aligning and enriching textual descriptions of these pairs can significantly enhance model training across various vision-language tasks, particularly text-to-image generation. However, large-scale investigations in this area remain predominantly closed-source. Our paper aims to bridge this community effort, leveraging the powerful and \textit{open-sourced} LLaMA-3, a GPT-4 level LLM. Our recaptioning pipeline is simple: first, we fine-tune a LLaMA-3-8B powered LLaVA-1.5 and then employ it to recaption 1.3 billion images from the DataComp-1B dataset. Our empirical results confirm that this enhanced dataset, Recap-DataComp-1B, offers substantial benefits in training advanced vision-language models. For discriminative models like CLIP, we observe enhanced zero-shot performance in cross-modal retrieval tasks. For generative models like text-to-image Diffusion Transformers, the generated images exhibit a significant improvement in alignment with users' text instructions, especially in following complex queries. Our project page is https://www.haqtu.me/Recap-Datacomp-1B/

Labeled Data Selection for Category Discovery

Category discovery methods aim to find novel categories in unlabeled visual data. At training time, a set of labeled and unlabeled images are provided, where the labels correspond to the categories present in the images. The labeled data provides guidance during training by indicating what types of visual properties and features are relevant for performing discovery in the unlabeled data. As a result, changing the categories present in the labeled set can have a large impact on what is ultimately discovered in the unlabeled set. Despite its importance, the impact of labeled data selection has not been explored in the category discovery literature to date. We show that changing the labeled data can significantly impact discovery performance. Motivated by this, we propose two new approaches for automatically selecting the most suitable labeled data based on the similarity between the labeled and unlabeled data. Our observation is that, unlike in conventional supervised transfer learning, the best labeled is neither too similar, nor too dissimilar, to the unlabeled categories. Our resulting approaches obtains state-of-the-art discovery performance across a range of challenging fine-grained benchmark datasets.

Generalization Beyond Data Imbalance: A Controlled Study on CLIP for Transferable Insights

Severe data imbalance naturally exists among web-scale vision-language datasets. Despite this, we find CLIP pre-trained thereupon exhibits notable robustness to the data imbalance compared to supervised learning, and demonstrates significant effectiveness in learning generalizable representations. With an aim to investigate the reasons behind this finding, we conduct controlled experiments to study various underlying factors, and reveal that CLIP's pretext task forms a dynamic classification problem wherein only a subset of classes is present in training. This isolates the bias from dominant classes and implicitly balances the learning signal. Furthermore, the robustness and discriminability of CLIP improve with more descriptive language supervision, larger data scale, and broader open-world concepts, which are inaccessible to supervised learning. Our study not only uncovers the mechanisms behind CLIP's generalizability beyond data imbalance but also provides transferable insights for the research community. The findings are validated in both supervised and self-supervised learning, enabling models trained on imbalanced data to achieve CLIP-level performance on diverse recognition tasks. Code will be available at: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/clip-beyond-tail.

HQ-Edit: A High-Quality Dataset for Instruction-based Image Editing

This study introduces HQ-Edit, a high-quality instruction-based image editing dataset with around 200,000 edits. Unlike prior approaches relying on attribute guidance or human feedback on building datasets, we devise a scalable data collection pipeline leveraging advanced foundation models, namely GPT-4V and DALL-E 3. To ensure its high quality, diverse examples are first collected online, expanded, and then used to create high-quality diptychs featuring input and output images with detailed text prompts, followed by precise alignment ensured through post-processing. In addition, we propose two evaluation metrics, Alignment and Coherence, to quantitatively assess the quality of image edit pairs using GPT-4V. HQ-Edits high-resolution images, rich in detail and accompanied by comprehensive editing prompts, substantially enhance the capabilities of existing image editing models. For example, an HQ-Edit finetuned InstructPix2Pix can attain state-of-the-art image editing performance, even surpassing those models fine-tuned with human-annotated data. The project page is https://thefllood.github.io/HQEdit_web.

Beyond Known Clusters: Probe New Prototypes for Efficient Generalized Class Discovery

Generalized Class Discovery (GCD) aims to dynamically assign labels to unlabelled data partially based on knowledge learned from labelled data, where the unlabelled data may come from known or novel classes. The prevailing approach generally involves clustering across all data and learning conceptions by prototypical contrastive learning. However, existing methods largely hinge on the performance of clustering algorithms and are thus subject to their inherent limitations. Firstly, the estimated cluster number is often smaller than the ground truth, making the existing methods suffer from the lack of prototypes for comprehensive conception learning. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive probing mechanism that introduces learnable potential prototypes to expand cluster prototypes (centers). As there is no ground truth for the potential prototype, we develop a self-supervised prototype learning framework to optimize the potential prototype in an end-to-end fashion. Secondly, clustering is computationally intensive, and the conventional strategy of clustering both labelled and unlabelled instances exacerbates this issue. To counteract this inefficiency, we opt to cluster only the unlabelled instances and subsequently expand the cluster prototypes with our introduced potential prototypes to fast explore novel classes. Despite the simplicity of our proposed method, extensive empirical analysis on a wide range of datasets confirms that our method consistently delivers state-of-the-art results. Specifically, our method surpasses the nearest competitor by a significant margin of \textbf{9.7}$\%$ within the Stanford Cars dataset and \textbf{12$\times$} clustering efficiency within the Herbarium 19 dataset. We will make the code and checkpoints publicly available at \url{https://github.com/xjtuYW/PNP.git}.