NICE: CVPR 2023 Challenge on Zero-shot Image Captioning

In this report, we introduce NICE (New frontiers for zero-shot Image Captioning Evaluation) project and share the results and outcomes of 2023 challenge. This project is designed to challenge the computer vision community to develop robust image captioning models that advance the state-of-the-art both in terms of accuracy and fairness. Through the challenge, the image captioning models were tested using a new evaluation dataset that includes a large variety of visual concepts from many domains. There was no specific training data provided for the challenge, and therefore the challenge entries were required to adapt to new types of image descriptions that had not been seen during training. This report includes information on the newly proposed NICE dataset, evaluation methods, challenge results, and technical details of top-ranking entries. We expect that the outcomes of the challenge will contribute to the improvement of AI models on various vision-language tasks.

ReConPatch : Contrastive Patch Representation Learning for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is crucial to the advanced identification of product defects such as incorrect parts, misaligned components, and damages in industrial manufacturing. Due to the rare observations and unknown types of defects, anomaly detection is considered to be challenging in machine learning. To overcome this difficulty, recent approaches utilize the common visual representations from natural image datasets and distill the relevant features. However, existing approaches still have the discrepancy between the pre-trained feature and the target data, or require the input augmentation which should be carefully designed particularly for the industrial dataset. In this paper, we introduce ReConPatch, which constructs discriminative features for anomaly detection by training a linear modulation attached to a pre-trained model. ReConPatch employs contrastive representation learning to collect and distribute features in a way that produces a target-oriented and easily separable representation. To address the absence of labeled pairs for the contrastive learning, we utilize two similarity measures, pairwise and contextual similarities, between data representations as a pseudo-label. Unlike previous work, ReConPatch achieves robust anomaly detection performance without extensive input augmentation. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance (99.72%) for the widely used and challenging MVTec AD dataset.

Large-Scale Bidirectional Training for Zero-Shot Image Captioning

When trained on large-scale datasets, image captioning models can understand the content of images from a general domain but often fail to generate accurate, detailed captions. To improve performance, pretraining-and-finetuning has been a key strategy for image captioning. However, we find that large-scale bidirectional training between image and text enables zero-shot image captioning. In this paper, we introduce Bidirectional Image Text Training in largER Scale, BITTERS, an efficient training and inference framework for zero-shot image captioning. We also propose a new evaluation benchmark which comprises of high quality datasets and an extensive set of metrics to properly evaluate zero-shot captioning accuracy and societal bias. We additionally provide an efficient finetuning approach for keyword extraction. We show that careful selection of large-scale training set and model architecture is the key to achieving zero-shot image captioning.

L-Verse: Bidirectional Generation Between Image and Text

Far beyond learning long-range interactions of natural language, transformers are becoming the de-facto standard for many vision tasks with their power and scalabilty. Especially with cross-modal tasks between image and text, vector quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) are widely used to make a raw RGB image into a sequence of feature vectors. To better leverage the correlation between image and text, we propose L-Verse, a novel architecture consisting of feature-augmented variational autoencoder (AugVAE) and bidirectional auto-regressive transformer (BiART) for text-to-image and image-to-text generation. Our AugVAE shows the state-of-the-art reconstruction performance on ImageNet1K validation set, along with the robustness to unseen images in the wild. Unlike other models, BiART can distinguish between image (or text) as a conditional reference and a generation target. L-Verse can be directly used for image-to-text or text-to-image generation tasks without any finetuning or extra object detection frameworks. In quantitative and qualitative experiments, L-Verse shows impressive results against previous methods in both image-to-text and text-to-image generation on MS-COCO Captions. We furthermore assess the scalability of L-Verse architecture on Conceptual Captions and present the initial results of bidirectional vision-language representation learning on general domain.