Adapting Dual-encoder Vision-language Models for Paraphrased Retrieval

In the recent years, the dual-encoder vision-language models (\eg CLIP) have achieved remarkable text-to-image retrieval performance. However, we discover that these models usually results in very different retrievals for a pair of paraphrased queries. Such behavior might render the retrieval system less predictable and lead to user frustration. In this work, we consider the task of paraphrased text-to-image retrieval where a model aims to return similar results given a pair of paraphrased queries. To start with, we collect a dataset of paraphrased image descriptions to facilitate quantitative evaluation for this task. We then hypothesize that the undesired behavior of existing dual-encoder model is due to their text towers which are trained on image-sentence pairs and lack the ability to capture the semantic similarity between paraphrased queries. To improve on this, we investigate multiple strategies for training a dual-encoder model starting from a language model pretrained on a large text corpus. Compared to public dual-encoder models such as CLIP and OpenCLIP, the model trained with our best adaptation strategy achieves a significantly higher ranking similarity for paraphrased queries while maintaining similar zero-shot classification and retrieval accuracy.

Koala: Key frame-conditioned long video-LLM

Long video question answering is a challenging task that involves recognizing short-term activities and reasoning about their fine-grained relationships. State-of-the-art video Large Language Models (vLLMs) hold promise as a viable solution due to their demonstrated emergent capabilities on new tasks. However, despite being trained on millions of short seconds-long videos, vLLMs are unable to understand minutes-long videos and accurately answer questions about them. To address this limitation, we propose a lightweight and self-supervised approach, Key frame-conditioned long video-LLM (Koala), that introduces learnable spatiotemporal queries to adapt pretrained vLLMs for generalizing to longer videos. Our approach introduces two new tokenizers that condition on visual tokens computed from sparse video key frames for understanding short and long video moments. We train our proposed approach on HowTo100M and demonstrate its effectiveness on zero-shot long video understanding benchmarks, where it outperforms state-of-the-art large models by 3 - 6% in absolute accuracy across all tasks. Surprisingly, we also empirically show that our approach not only helps a pretrained vLLM to understand long videos but also improves its accuracy on short-term action recognition.

Customizing Motion in Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

We introduce an approach for augmenting text-to-video generation models with customized motions, extending their capabilities beyond the motions depicted in the original training data. By leveraging a few video samples demonstrating specific movements as input, our method learns and generalizes the input motion patterns for diverse, text-specified scenarios. Our contributions are threefold. First, to achieve our results, we finetune an existing text-to-video model to learn a novel mapping between the depicted motion in the input examples to a new unique token. To avoid overfitting to the new custom motion, we introduce an approach for regularization over videos. Second, by leveraging the motion priors in a pretrained model, our method can produce novel videos featuring multiple people doing the custom motion, and can invoke the motion in combination with other motions. Furthermore, our approach extends to the multimodal customization of motion and appearance of individualized subjects, enabling the generation of videos featuring unique characters and distinct motions. Third, to validate our method, we introduce an approach for quantitatively evaluating the learned custom motion and perform a systematic ablation study. We show that our method significantly outperforms prior appearance-based customization approaches when extended to the motion customization task.

Meta-Personalizing Vision-Language Models to Find Named Instances in Video

Large-scale vision-language models (VLM) have shown impressive results for language-guided search applications. While these models allow category-level queries, they currently struggle with personalized searches for moments in a video where a specific object instance such as ``My dog Biscuit'' appears. We present the following three contributions to address this problem. First, we describe a method to meta-personalize a pre-trained VLM, i.e., learning how to learn to personalize a VLM at test time to search in video. Our method extends the VLM's token vocabulary by learning novel word embeddings specific to each instance. To capture only instance-specific features, we represent each instance embedding as a combination of shared and learned global category features. Second, we propose to learn such personalization without explicit human supervision. Our approach automatically identifies moments of named visual instances in video using transcripts and vision-language similarity in the VLM's embedding space. Finally, we introduce This-Is-My, a personal video instance retrieval benchmark. We evaluate our approach on This-Is-My and DeepFashion2 and show that we obtain a 15% relative improvement over the state of the art on the latter dataset.

Language-Guided Music Recommendation for Video via Prompt Analogies

We propose a method to recommend music for an input video while allowing a user to guide music selection with free-form natural language. A key challenge of this problem setting is that existing music video datasets provide the needed (video, music) training pairs, but lack text descriptions of the music. This work addresses this challenge with the following three contributions. First, we propose a text-synthesis approach that relies on an analogy-based prompting procedure to generate natural language music descriptions from a large-scale language model (BLOOM-176B) given pre-trained music tagger outputs and a small number of human text descriptions. Second, we use these synthesized music descriptions to train a new trimodal model, which fuses text and video input representations to query music samples. For training, we introduce a text dropout regularization mechanism which we show is critical to model performance. Our model design allows for the retrieved music audio to agree with the two input modalities by matching visual style depicted in the video and musical genre, mood, or instrumentation described in the natural language query. Third, to evaluate our approach, we collect a testing dataset for our problem by annotating a subset of 4k clips from the YT8M-MusicVideo dataset with natural language music descriptions which we make publicly available. We show that our approach can match or exceed the performance of prior methods on video-to-music retrieval while significantly improving retrieval accuracy when using text guidance.

Conditional Generation of Audio from Video via Foley Analogies

The sound effects that designers add to videos are designed to convey a particular artistic effect and, thus, may be quite different from a scene's true sound. Inspired by the challenges of creating a soundtrack for a video that differs from its true sound, but that nonetheless matches the actions occurring on screen, we propose the problem of conditional Foley. We present the following contributions to address this problem. First, we propose a pretext task for training our model to predict sound for an input video clip using a conditional audio-visual clip sampled from another time within the same source video. Second, we propose a model for generating a soundtrack for a silent input video, given a user-supplied example that specifies what the video should "sound like". We show through human studies and automated evaluation metrics that our model successfully generates sound from video, while varying its output according to the content of a supplied example. Project site: https://xypb.github.io/CondFoleyGen/

Language-Guided Audio-Visual Source Separation via Trimodal Consistency

We propose a self-supervised approach for learning to perform audio source separation in videos based on natural language queries, using only unlabeled video and audio pairs as training data. A key challenge in this task is learning to associate the linguistic description of a sound-emitting object to its visual features and the corresponding components of the audio waveform, all without access to annotations during training. To overcome this challenge, we adapt off-the-shelf vision-language foundation models to provide pseudo-target supervision via two novel loss functions and encourage a stronger alignment between the audio, visual and natural language modalities. During inference, our approach can separate sounds given text, video and audio input, or given text and audio input alone. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our self-supervised approach on three audio-visual separation datasets, including MUSIC, SOLOS and AudioSet, where we outperform state-of-the-art strongly supervised approaches despite not using object detectors or text labels during training.

Monocular Dynamic View Synthesis: A Reality Check

We study the recent progress on dynamic view synthesis (DVS) from monocular video. Though existing approaches have demonstrated impressive results, we show a discrepancy between the practical capture process and the existing experimental protocols, which effectively leaks in multi-view signals during training. We define effective multi-view factors (EMFs) to quantify the amount of multi-view signal present in the input capture sequence based on the relative camera-scene motion. We introduce two new metrics: co-visibility masked image metrics and correspondence accuracy, which overcome the issue in existing protocols. We also propose a new iPhone dataset that includes more diverse real-life deformation sequences. Using our proposed experimental protocol, we show that the state-of-the-art approaches observe a 1-2 dB drop in masked PSNR in the absence of multi-view cues and 4-5 dB drop when modeling complex motion. Code and data can be found at https://hangg7.com/dycheck.

It's Time for Artistic Correspondence in Music and Video

We present an approach for recommending a music track for a given video, and vice versa, based on both their temporal alignment and their correspondence at an artistic level. We propose a self-supervised approach that learns this correspondence directly from data, without any need of human annotations. In order to capture the high-level concepts that are required to solve the task, we propose modeling the long-term temporal context of both the video and the music signals, using Transformer networks for each modality. Experiments show that this approach strongly outperforms alternatives that do not exploit the temporal context. The combination of our contributions improve retrieval accuracy up to 10x over prior state of the art. This strong improvement allows us to introduce a wide range of analyses and applications. For instance, we can condition music retrieval based on visually defined attributes.

Neural Volumetric Object Selection

We introduce an approach for selecting objects in neural volumetric 3D representations, such as multi-plane images (MPI) and neural radiance fields (NeRF). Our approach takes a set of foreground and background 2D user scribbles in one view and automatically estimates a 3D segmentation of the desired object, which can be rendered into novel views. To achieve this result, we propose a novel voxel feature embedding that incorporates the neural volumetric 3D representation and multi-view image features from all input views. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a new dataset of human-provided segmentation masks for depicted objects in real-world multi-view scene captures. We show that our approach out-performs strong baselines, including 2D segmentation and 3D segmentation approaches adapted to our task.