Just a Few Glances: Open-Set Visual Perception with Image Prompt Paradigm

To break through the limitations of pre-training models on fixed categories, Open-Set Object Detection (OSOD) and Open-Set Segmentation (OSS) have attracted a surge of interest from researchers. Inspired by large language models, mainstream OSOD and OSS methods generally utilize text as a prompt, achieving remarkable performance. Following SAM paradigm, some researchers use visual prompts, such as points, boxes, and masks that cover detection or segmentation targets. Despite these two prompt paradigms exhibit excellent performance, they also reveal inherent limitations. On the one hand, it is difficult to accurately describe characteristics of specialized category using textual description. On the other hand, existing visual prompt paradigms heavily rely on multi-round human interaction, which hinders them being applied to fully automated pipeline. To address the above issues, we propose a novel prompt paradigm in OSOD and OSS, that is, \textbf{Image Prompt Paradigm}. This brand new prompt paradigm enables to detect or segment specialized categories without multi-round human intervention. To achieve this goal, the proposed image prompt paradigm uses just a few image instances as prompts, and we propose a novel framework named \textbf{MI Grounding} for this new paradigm. In this framework, high-quality image prompts are automatically encoded, selected and fused, achieving the single-stage and non-interactive inference. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets, showing that MI Grounding achieves competitive performance on OSOD and OSS benchmarks compared to text prompt paradigm methods and visual prompt paradigm methods. Moreover, MI Grounding can greatly outperform existing method on our constructed specialized ADR50K dataset.

More Pictures Say More: Visual Intersection Network for Open Set Object Detection

Open Set Object Detection has seen rapid development recently, but it continues to pose significant challenges. Language-based methods, grappling with the substantial modal disparity between textual and visual modalities, require extensive computational resources to bridge this gap. Although integrating visual prompts into these frameworks shows promise for enhancing performance, it always comes with constraints related to textual semantics. In contrast, viusal-only methods suffer from the low-quality fusion of multiple visual prompts. In response, we introduce a strong DETR-based model, Visual Intersection Network for Open Set Object Detection (VINO), which constructs a multi-image visual bank to preserve the semantic intersections of each category across all time steps. Our innovative multi-image visual updating mechanism learns to identify the semantic intersections from various visual prompts, enabling the flexible incorporation of new information and continuous optimization of feature representations. Our approach guarantees a more precise alignment between target category semantics and region semantics, while significantly reducing pre-training time and resource demands compared to language-based methods. Furthermore, the integration of a segmentation head illustrates the broad applicability of visual intersection in various visual tasks. VINO, which requires only 7 RTX4090 GPU days to complete one epoch on the Objects365v1 dataset, achieves competitive performance on par with vision-language models on benchmarks such as LVIS and ODinW35.

End-to-End Streaming Video Temporal Action Segmentation with Reinforce Learning

Temporal Action Segmentation (TAS) from video is a kind of frame recognition task for long video with multiple action classes. As an video understanding task for long videos, current methods typically combine multi-modality action recognition models with temporal models to convert feature sequences to label sequences. This approach can only be applied to offline scenarios, which severely limits the TAS application. Therefore, this paper proposes an end-to-end Streaming Video Temporal Action Segmentation with Reinforce Learning (SVTAS-RL). The end-to-end SVTAS which regard TAS as an action segment clustering task can expand the application scenarios of TAS; and RL is used to alleviate the problem of inconsistent optimization objective and direction. Through extensive experiments, the SVTAS-RL model achieves a competitive performance to the state-of-the-art model of TAS on multiple datasets, and shows greater advantages on the ultra-long video dataset EGTEA. This indicates that our method can replace all current TAS models end-to-end and SVTAS-RL is more suitable for long video TAS. Code is availabel at https://github.com/Thinksky5124/SVTAS.