The Sound of Water: Inferring Physical Properties from Pouring Liquids

We study the connection between audio-visual observations and the underlying physics of a mundane yet intriguing everyday activity: pouring liquids. Given only the sound of liquid pouring into a container, our objective is to automatically infer physical properties such as the liquid level, the shape and size of the container, the pouring rate and the time to fill. To this end, we: (i) show in theory that these properties can be determined from the fundamental frequency (pitch); (ii) train a pitch detection model with supervision from simulated data and visual data with a physics-inspired objective; (iii) introduce a new large dataset of real pouring videos for a systematic study; (iv) show that the trained model can indeed infer these physical properties for real data; and finally, (v) we demonstrate strong generalization to various container shapes, other datasets, and in-the-wild YouTube videos. Our work presents a keen understanding of a narrow yet rich problem at the intersection of acoustics, physics, and learning. It opens up applications to enhance multisensory perception in robotic pouring.

IdentifyMe: A Challenging Long-Context Mention Resolution Benchmark

Recent evaluations of LLMs on coreference resolution have revealed that traditional output formats and evaluation metrics do not fully capture the models' referential understanding. To address this, we introduce IdentifyMe, a new benchmark for mention resolution presented in a multiple-choice question (MCQ) format, commonly used for evaluating LLMs. IdentifyMe features long narratives and employs heuristics to exclude easily identifiable mentions, creating a more challenging task. The benchmark also consists of a curated mixture of different mention types and corresponding entities, allowing for a fine-grained analysis of model performance. We evaluate both closed- and open source LLMs on IdentifyMe and observe a significant performance gap (20-30%) between the state-of-the-art sub-10B open models vs. closed ones. We observe that pronominal mentions, which have limited surface information, are typically much harder for models to resolve than nominal mentions. Additionally, we find that LLMs often confuse entities when their mentions overlap in nested structures. The highest-scoring model, GPT-4o, achieves 81.9% accuracy, highlighting the strong referential capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs while also indicating room for further improvement.

No Detail Left Behind: Revisiting Self-Retrieval for Fine-Grained Image Captioning

Image captioning systems are unable to generate fine-grained captions as they are trained on data that is either noisy (alt-text) or generic (human annotations). This is further exacerbated by maximum likelihood training that encourages generation of frequently occurring phrases. Previous works have tried to address this limitation by fine-tuning captioners with a self-retrieval (SR) reward. However, we find that SR fine-tuning has a tendency to reduce caption faithfulness and even hallucinate. In this work, we circumvent this bottleneck by improving the MLE initialization of the captioning system and designing a curriculum for the SR fine-tuning process. To this extent, we present (1) Visual Caption Boosting, a novel framework to instill fine-grainedness in generic image captioning datasets while remaining anchored in human annotations; and (2) BagCurri, a carefully designed training curriculum that more optimally leverages the contrastive nature of the self-retrieval reward. Jointly, they enable the captioner to describe fine-grained aspects in the image while preserving faithfulness to ground-truth captions. Our approach outperforms previous work by +8.9% on SR against 99 random distractors (RD100) (Dessi et al., 2023); and +7.6% on ImageCoDe. Additionally, existing metrics to evaluate captioning systems fail to reward diversity or evaluate a model's fine-grained understanding ability. Our third contribution addresses this by proposing self-retrieval from the lens of evaluation. We introduce TrueMatch, a benchmark comprising bags of highly similar images that uses SR to assess the captioner's ability to capture subtle visual distinctions. We evaluate and compare several state-of-the-art open-source MLLMs on TrueMatch, and find that our SR approach outperforms them all by a significant margin (e.g. +4.8% - 7.1% over Cambrian) while having 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer parameters.

Major Entity Identification: A Generalizable Alternative to Coreference Resolution

The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task's broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative formulation of the CR task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, the MEI task fits the classification framework, which enables the use of classification-based metrics that are more robust than the current CR metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.

VELOCITI: Can Video-Language Models Bind Semantic Concepts through Time?

Compositionality is a fundamental aspect of vision-language understanding and is especially required for videos since they contain multiple entities (e.g. persons, actions, and scenes) interacting dynamically over time. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on perception capabilities. However, they do not study binding, the ability of a model to associate entities through appropriate relationships. To this end, we propose VELOCITI, a new benchmark building on complex movie clips and dense semantic role label annotations to test perception and binding in video language models (contrastive and Video-LLMs). Our perception-based tests require discriminating video-caption pairs that share similar entities, and the binding tests require models to associate the correct entity to a given situation while ignoring the different yet plausible entities that also appear in the same video. While current state-of-the-art models perform moderately well on perception tests, accuracy is near random when both entities are present in the same video, indicating that they fail at binding tests. Even the powerful Gemini 1.5 Flash has a substantial gap (16-28%) with respect to human accuracy in such binding tests.

MICap: A Unified Model for Identity-aware Movie Descriptions

Characters are an important aspect of any storyline and identifying and including them in descriptions is necessary for story understanding. While previous work has largely ignored identity and generated captions with someone (anonymized names), recent work formulates id-aware captioning as a fill-in-the-blanks (FITB) task, where, given a caption with blanks, the goal is to predict person id labels. However, to predict captions with ids, a two-stage approach is required: first predict captions with someone, then fill in identities. In this work, we present a new single stage approach that can seamlessly switch between id-aware caption generation or FITB when given a caption with blanks. Our model, Movie-Identity Captioner (MICap), uses a shared auto-regressive decoder that benefits from training with FITB and full-caption generation objectives, while the encoder can benefit from or disregard captions with blanks as input. Another challenge with id-aware captioning is the lack of a metric to capture subtle differences between person ids. To this end, we introduce iSPICE, a caption evaluation metric that focuses on identity tuples created through intermediate scene graphs. We evaluate MICap on Large-Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC), where we show a 4.2% improvement in FITB accuracy, and a 1-2% bump in classic captioning metrics.

"Previously on ..." From Recaps to Story Summarization

We introduce multimodal story summarization by leveraging TV episode recaps - short video sequences interweaving key story moments from previous episodes to bring viewers up to speed. We propose PlotSnap, a dataset featuring two crime thriller TV shows with rich recaps and long episodes of 40 minutes. Story summarization labels are unlocked by matching recap shots to corresponding sub-stories in the episode. We propose a hierarchical model TaleSumm that processes entire episodes by creating compact shot and dialog representations, and predicts importance scores for each video shot and dialog utterance by enabling interactions between local story groups. Unlike traditional summarization, our method extracts multiple plot points from long videos. We present a thorough evaluation on story summarization, including promising cross-series generalization. TaleSumm also shows good results on classic video summarization benchmarks.

NurtureNet: A Multi-task Video-based Approach for Newborn Anthropometry

Malnutrition among newborns is a top public health concern in developing countries. Identification and subsequent growth monitoring are key to successful interventions. However, this is challenging in rural communities where health systems tend to be inaccessible and under-equipped, with poor adherence to protocol. Our goal is to equip health workers and public health systems with a solution for contactless newborn anthropometry in the community. We propose NurtureNet, a multi-task model that fuses visual information (a video taken with a low-cost smartphone) with tabular inputs to regress multiple anthropometry estimates including weight, length, head circumference, and chest circumference. We show that visual proxy tasks of segmentation and keypoint prediction further improve performance. We establish the efficacy of the model through several experiments and achieve a relative error of 3.9% and mean absolute error of 114.3 g for weight estimation. Model compression to 15 MB also allows offline deployment to low-cost smartphones.

FiGCLIP: Fine-Grained CLIP Adaptation via Densely Annotated Videos

While contrastive language image pretraining (CLIP) have exhibited impressive performance by learning highly semantic and generalized representations, recent works have exposed a fundamental drawback in its syntactic properties, that includes interpreting fine-grained attributes, actions, spatial relations, states, and details that require compositional reasoning. One reason for this is that natural captions often do not capture all the visual details of a scene. This leads to unaddressed visual concepts being misattributed to the wrong words. And the pooled image and text features, ends up acting as a bag of words, hence losing the syntactic information. In this work, we ask: Is it possible to enhance CLIP's fine-grained and syntactic abilities without compromising its semantic properties? We show that this is possible by adapting CLIP efficiently on a high-quality, comprehensive, and relatively small dataset. We demonstrate our adaptation strategy on VidSitu, a video situation recognition dataset annotated with verbs and rich semantic role labels (SRL). We use the SRL and verb information to create rule-based detailed captions, making sure they capture most of the visual concepts. Combined with hard negatives and hierarchical losses, these annotations allow us to learn a powerful visual representation, dubbed Fine-Grained CLIP (FiGCLIP), that preserves semantic understanding while being detail-oriented. We evaluate on five diverse vision-language tasks in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, achieving consistent improvements over the base CLIP model.

Eye vs. AI: Human Gaze and Model Attention in Video Memorability

Understanding the factors that determine video memorability has important applications in areas such as educational technology and advertising. Towards this goal, we investigate the semantic and temporal attention mechanisms underlying video memorability. We propose a Transformer-based model with spatio-temporal attention that matches SoTA performance on video memorability prediction on a large naturalistic video dataset. More importantly, the self-attention patterns show us where the model looks to predict memorability. We compare model attention against human gaze fixation density maps collected through a small-scale eye-tracking experiment where humans perform a video memory task. Quantitative saliency metrics show that the model attention and human gaze follow similar patterns. Furthermore, while panoptic segmentation confirms that the model and humans attend more to thing classes, stuff classes that receive increased/decreased attention tend to have higher memorability scores. We also observe that the model assigns greater importance to the initial frames, mimicking temporal attention patterns found in humans.