PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfer

PaliGemma is an open Vision-Language Model (VLM) that is based on the SigLIP-So400m vision encoder and the Gemma-2B language model. It is trained to be a versatile and broadly knowledgeable base model that is effective to transfer. It achieves strong performance on a wide variety of open-world tasks. We evaluate PaliGemma on almost 40 diverse tasks including standard VLM benchmarks, but also more specialized tasks such as remote-sensing and segmentation.

Text Prompting for Multi-Concept Video Customization by Autoregressive Generation

We present a method for multi-concept customization of pretrained text-to-video (T2V) models. Intuitively, the multi-concept customized video can be derived from the (non-linear) intersection of the video manifolds of the individual concepts, which is not straightforward to find. We hypothesize that sequential and controlled walking towards the intersection of the video manifolds, directed by text prompting, leads to the solution. To do so, we generate the various concepts and their corresponding interactions, sequentially, in an autoregressive manner. Our method can generate videos of multiple custom concepts (subjects, action and background) such as a teddy bear running towards a brown teapot, a dog playing violin and a teddy bear swimming in the ocean. We quantitatively evaluate our method using videoCLIP and DINO scores, in addition to human evaluation. Videos for results presented in this paper can be found at https://github.com/divyakraman/MultiConceptVideo2024.

Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context

In this report, we present the latest model of the Gemini family, Gemini 1.5 Pro, a highly compute-efficient multimodal mixture-of-experts model capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. Gemini 1.5 Pro achieves near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improves the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and matches or surpasses Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5 Pro's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 2.1 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.

Point-VOS: Pointing Up Video Object Segmentation

Current state-of-the-art Video Object Segmentation (VOS) methods rely on dense per-object mask annotations both during training and testing. This requires time-consuming and costly video annotation mechanisms. We propose a novel Point-VOS task with a spatio-temporally sparse point-wise annotation scheme that substantially reduces the annotation effort. We apply our annotation scheme to two large-scale video datasets with text descriptions and annotate over 19M points across 133K objects in 32K videos. Based on our annotations, we propose a new Point-VOS benchmark, and a corresponding point-based training mechanism, which we use to establish strong baseline results. We show that existing VOS methods can easily be adapted to leverage our point annotations during training, and can achieve results close to the fully-supervised performance when trained on pseudo-masks generated from these points. In addition, we show that our data can be used to improve models that connect vision and language, by evaluating it on the Video Narrative Grounding (VNG) task. We will make our code and annotations available at https://pointvos.github.io.

PaLI-3 Vision Language Models: Smaller, Faster, Stronger

This paper presents PaLI-3, a smaller, faster, and stronger vision language model (VLM) that compares favorably to similar models that are 10x larger. As part of arriving at this strong performance, we compare Vision Transformer (ViT) models pretrained using classification objectives to contrastively (SigLIP) pretrained ones. We find that, while slightly underperforming on standard image classification benchmarks, SigLIP-based PaLI shows superior performance across various multimodal benchmarks, especially on localization and visually-situated text understanding. We scale the SigLIP image encoder up to 2 billion parameters, and achieves a new state-of-the-art on multilingual cross-modal retrieval. We hope that PaLI-3, at only 5B parameters, rekindles research on fundamental pieces of complex VLMs, and could fuel a new generation of scaled-up models.

StoryBench: A Multifaceted Benchmark for Continuous Story Visualization

Generating video stories from text prompts is a complex task. In addition to having high visual quality, videos need to realistically adhere to a sequence of text prompts whilst being consistent throughout the frames. Creating a benchmark for video generation requires data annotated over time, which contrasts with the single caption used often in video datasets. To fill this gap, we collect comprehensive human annotations on three existing datasets, and introduce StoryBench: a new, challenging multi-task benchmark to reliably evaluate forthcoming text-to-video models. Our benchmark includes three video generation tasks of increasing difficulty: action execution, where the next action must be generated starting from a conditioning video; story continuation, where a sequence of actions must be executed starting from a conditioning video; and story generation, where a video must be generated from only text prompts. We evaluate small yet strong text-to-video baselines, and show the benefits of training on story-like data algorithmically generated from existing video captions. Finally, we establish guidelines for human evaluation of video stories, and reaffirm the need of better automatic metrics for video generation. StoryBench aims at encouraging future research efforts in this exciting new area.

Connecting Vision and Language with Video Localized Narratives

We propose Video Localized Narratives, a new form of multimodal video annotations connecting vision and language. In the original Localized Narratives, annotators speak and move their mouse simultaneously on an image, thus grounding each word with a mouse trace segment. However, this is challenging on a video. Our new protocol empowers annotators to tell the story of a video with Localized Narratives, capturing even complex events involving multiple actors interacting with each other and with several passive objects. We annotated 20k videos of the OVIS, UVO, and Oops datasets, totalling 1.7M words. Based on this data, we also construct new benchmarks for the video narrative grounding and video question answering tasks, and provide reference results from strong baseline models. Our annotations are available at https://google.github.io/video-localized-narratives/.

BURST: A Benchmark for Unifying Object Recognition, Segmentation and Tracking in Video

Multiple existing benchmarks involve tracking and segmenting objects in video e.g., Video Object Segmentation (VOS) and Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation (MOTS), but there is little interaction between them due to the use of disparate benchmark datasets and metrics (e.g. J&F, mAP, sMOTSA). As a result, published works usually target a particular benchmark, and are not easily comparable to each another. We believe that the development of generalized methods that can tackle multiple tasks requires greater cohesion among these research sub-communities. In this paper, we aim to facilitate this by proposing BURST, a dataset which contains thousands of diverse videos with high-quality object masks, and an associated benchmark with six tasks involving object tracking and segmentation in video. All tasks are evaluated using the same data and comparable metrics, which enables researchers to consider them in unison, and hence, more effectively pool knowledge from different methods across different tasks. Additionally, we demonstrate several baselines for all tasks and show that approaches for one task can be applied to another with a quantifiable and explainable performance difference. Dataset annotations and evaluation code is available at: https://github.com/Ali2500/BURST-benchmark.

STEP: Segmenting and Tracking Every Pixel

In this paper, we tackle video panoptic segmentation, a task that requires assigning semantic classes and track identities to all pixels in a video. To study this important problem in a setting that requires a continuous interpretation of sensory data, we present a new benchmark: Segmenting and Tracking Every Pixel (STEP), encompassing two datasets, KITTI-STEP, and MOTChallenge-STEP together with a new evaluation metric. Our work is the first that targets this task in a real-world setting that requires dense interpretation in both spatial and temporal domains. As the ground-truth for this task is difficult and expensive to obtain, existing datasets are either constructed synthetically or only sparsely annotated within short video clips. By contrast, our datasets contain long video sequences, providing challenging examples and a test-bed for studying long-term pixel-precise segmentation and tracking. For measuring the performance, we propose a novel evaluation metric Segmentation and Tracking Quality (STQ) that fairly balances semantic and tracking aspects of this task and is suitable for evaluating sequences of arbitrary length. We will make our datasets, metric, and baselines publicly available.

Reducing the Annotation Effort for Video Object Segmentation Datasets

For further progress in video object segmentation (VOS), larger, more diverse, and more challenging datasets will be necessary. However, densely labeling every frame with pixel masks does not scale to large datasets. We use a deep convolutional network to automatically create pseudo-labels on a pixel level from much cheaper bounding box annotations and investigate how far such pseudo-labels can carry us for training state-of-the-art VOS approaches. A very encouraging result of our study is that adding a manually annotated mask in only a single video frame for each object is sufficient to generate pseudo-labels which can be used to train a VOS method to reach almost the same performance level as when training with fully segmented videos. We use this workflow to create pixel pseudo-labels for the training set of the challenging tracking dataset TAO, and we manually annotate a subset of the validation set. Together, we obtain the new TAO-VOS benchmark, which we make publicly available at www.vision.rwth-aachen.de/page/taovos. While the performance of state-of-the-art methods on existing datasets starts to saturate, TAO-VOS remains very challenging for current algorithms and reveals their shortcomings.