Are They the Same? Exploring Visual Correspondence Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs

Recent advancements in multimodal models have shown a strong ability in visual perception, reasoning abilities, and vision-language understanding. However, studies on visual matching ability are missing, where finding the visual correspondence of objects is essential in vision research. Our research reveals that the matching capabilities in recent multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) still exhibit systematic shortcomings, even with current strong MLLMs models, GPT-4o. In particular, we construct a Multimodal Visual Matching (MMVM) benchmark to fairly benchmark over 30 different MLLMs. The MMVM benchmark is built from 15 open-source datasets and Internet videos with manual annotation. We categorize the data samples of MMVM benchmark into eight aspects based on the required cues and capabilities to more comprehensively evaluate and analyze current MLLMs. In addition, we have designed an automatic annotation pipeline to generate the MMVM SFT dataset, including 220K visual matching data with reasoning annotation. Finally, we present CoLVA, a novel contrastive MLLM with two novel technical designs: fine-grained vision expert with object-level contrastive learning and instruction augmentation strategy. CoLVA achieves 51.06\% overall accuracy (OA) on the MMVM benchmark, surpassing GPT-4o and baseline by 8.41\% and 23.58\% OA, respectively. The results show the effectiveness of our MMVM SFT dataset and our novel technical designs. Code, benchmark, dataset, and models are available at https://github.com/zhouyiks/CoLVA.

Sa2VA: Marrying SAM2 with LLaVA for Dense Grounded Understanding of Images and Videos

This work presents Sa2VA, the first unified model for dense grounded understanding of both images and videos. Unlike existing multi-modal large language models, which are often limited to specific modalities and tasks, Sa2VA supports a wide range of image and video tasks, including referring segmentation and conversation, with minimal one-shot instruction tuning. Sa2VA combines SAM-2, a foundation video segmentation model, with LLaVA, an advanced vision-language model, and unifies text, image, and video into a shared LLM token space. Using the LLM, Sa2VA generates instruction tokens that guide SAM-2 in producing precise masks, enabling a grounded, multi-modal understanding of both static and dynamic visual content. Additionally, we introduce Ref-SAV, an auto-labeled dataset containing over 72k object expressions in complex video scenes, designed to boost model performance. We also manually validate 2k video objects in the Ref-SAV datasets to benchmark referring video object segmentation in complex environments. Experiments show that Sa2VA achieves state-of-the-art across multiple tasks, particularly in referring video object segmentation, highlighting its potential for complex real-world applications.

A Novel Shape Guided Transformer Network for Instance Segmentation in Remote Sensing Images

Instance segmentation performance in remote sensing images (RSIs) is significantly affected by two issues: how to extract accurate boundaries of objects from remote imaging through the dynamic atmosphere, and how to integrate the mutual information of related object instances scattered over a vast spatial region. In this study, we propose a novel Shape Guided Transformer Network (SGTN) to accurately extract objects at the instance level. Inspired by the global contextual modeling capacity of the self-attention mechanism, we propose an effective transformer encoder termed LSwin, which incorporates vertical and horizontal 1D global self-attention mechanisms to obtain better global-perception capacity for RSIs than the popular local-shifted-window based Swin Transformer. To achieve accurate instance mask segmentation, we introduce a shape guidance module (SGM) to emphasize the object boundary and shape information. The combination of SGM, which emphasizes the local detail information, and LSwin, which focuses on the global context relationships, achieve excellent RSI instance segmentation. Their effectiveness was validated through comprehensive ablation experiments. Especially, LSwin is proved better than the popular ResNet and Swin transformer encoder at the same level of efficiency. Compared to other instance segmentation methods, our SGTN achieves the highest average precision (AP) scores on two single-class public datasets (WHU dataset and BITCC dataset) and a multi-class public dataset (NWPU VHR-10 dataset). Code will be available at http://gpcv.whu.edu.cn/data/.

Online Temporal Fusion for Vectorized Map Construction in Mapless Autonomous Driving

To reduce the reliance on high-definition (HD) maps, a growing trend in autonomous driving is leveraging on-board sensors to generate vectorized maps online. However, current methods are mostly constrained by processing only single-frame inputs, which hampers their robustness and effectiveness in complex scenarios. To overcome this problem, we propose an online map construction system that exploits the long-term temporal information to build a consistent vectorized map. First, the system efficiently fuses all historical road marking detections from an off-the-shelf network into a semantic voxel map, which is implemented using a hashing-based strategy to exploit the sparsity of road elements. Then reliable voxels are found by examining the fused information and incrementally clustered into an instance-level representation of road markings. Finally, the system incorporates domain knowledge to estimate the geometric and topological structures of roads, which can be directly consumed by the planning and control (PnC) module. Through experiments conducted in complicated urban environments, we have demonstrated that the output of our system is more consistent and accurate than the network output by a large margin and can be effectively used in a closed-loop autonomous driving system.

3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale 3D Surface Reconstruction from Aerial Images

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has garnered significant attention. However, the unstructured nature of 3DGS poses challenges for large-scale surface reconstruction from aerial images. To address this gap, we propose the first large-scale surface reconstruction method for multi-view stereo (MVS) aerial images based on 3DGS, named Aerial Gaussian Splatting (AGS). Initially, we introduce a data chunking method tailored for large-scale aerial imagery, making the modern 3DGS technology feasible for surface reconstruction over extensive scenes. Additionally, we integrate the Ray-Gaussian Intersection method to obtain normal and depth information, facilitating geometric constraints. Finally, we introduce a multi-view geometric consistency constraint to enhance global geometric consistency and improve reconstruction accuracy. Our experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate for the first time that the GS-based technique can match traditional aerial MVS methods on geometric accuracy, and beat state-of-the-art GS-based methods on geometry and rendering quality.

OMG-LLaVA: Bridging Image-level, Object-level, Pixel-level Reasoning and Understanding

Current universal segmentation methods demonstrate strong capabilities in pixel-level image and video understanding. However, they lack reasoning abilities and cannot be controlled via text instructions. In contrast, large vision-language multimodal models exhibit powerful vision-based conversation and reasoning capabilities but lack pixel-level understanding and have difficulty accepting visual prompts for flexible user interaction. This paper proposes OMG-LLaVA, a new and elegant framework combining powerful pixel-level vision understanding with reasoning abilities. It can accept various visual and text prompts for flexible user interaction. Specifically, we use a universal segmentation method as the visual encoder, integrating image information, perception priors, and visual prompts into visual tokens provided to the LLM. The LLM is responsible for understanding the user's text instructions and providing text responses and pixel-level segmentation results based on the visual information. We propose perception prior embedding to better integrate perception priors with image features. OMG-LLaVA achieves image-level, object-level, and pixel-level reasoning and understanding in a single model, matching or surpassing the performance of specialized methods on multiple benchmarks. Rather than using LLM to connect each specialist, our work aims at end-to-end training on one encoder, one decoder, and one LLM. The code and model have been released for further research.

P2PFormer: A Primitive-to-polygon Method for Regular Building Contour Extraction from Remote Sensing Images

Extracting building contours from remote sensing imagery is a significant challenge due to buildings' complex and diverse shapes, occlusions, and noise. Existing methods often struggle with irregular contours, rounded corners, and redundancy points, necessitating extensive post-processing to produce regular polygonal building contours. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel, streamlined pipeline that generates regular building contours without post-processing. Our approach begins with the segmentation of generic geometric primitives (which can include vertices, lines, and corners), followed by the prediction of their sequence. This allows for the direct construction of regular building contours by sequentially connecting the segmented primitives. Building on this pipeline, we developed P2PFormer, which utilizes a transformer-based architecture to segment geometric primitives and predict their order. To enhance the segmentation of primitives, we introduce a unique representation called group queries. This representation comprises a set of queries and a singular query position, which improve the focus on multiple midpoints of primitives and their efficient linkage. Furthermore, we propose an innovative implicit update strategy for the query position embedding aimed at sharpening the focus of queries on the correct positions and, consequently, enhancing the quality of primitive segmentation. Our experiments demonstrate that P2PFormer achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the WHU, CrowdAI, and WHU-Mix datasets, surpassing the previous SOTA PolyWorld by a margin of 2.7 AP and 6.5 AP75 on the largest CrowdAI dataset. We intend to make the code and trained weights publicly available to promote their use and facilitate further research.

DVIS-DAQ: Improving Video Segmentation via Dynamic Anchor Queries

Modern video segmentation methods adopt object queries to perform inter-frame association and demonstrate satisfactory performance in tracking continuously appearing objects despite large-scale motion and transient occlusion. However, they all underperform on newly emerging and disappearing objects that are common in the real world because they attempt to model object emergence and disappearance through feature transitions between background and foreground queries that have significant feature gaps. We introduce Dynamic Anchor Queries (DAQ) to shorten the transition gap between the anchor and target queries by dynamically generating anchor queries based on the features of potential candidates. Furthermore, we introduce a query-level object Emergence and Disappearance Simulation (EDS) strategy, which unleashes DAQ's potential without any additional cost. Finally, we combine our proposed DAQ and EDS with DVIS to obtain DVIS-DAQ. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVIS-DAQ achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on five mainstream video segmentation benchmarks. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/SkyworkAI/DAQ-VS}.

Point Could Mamba: Point Cloud Learning via State Space Model

In this work, for the first time, we demonstrate that Mamba-based point cloud methods can outperform point-based methods. Mamba exhibits strong global modeling capabilities and linear computational complexity, making it highly attractive for point cloud analysis. To enable more effective processing of 3-D point cloud data by Mamba, we propose a novel Consistent Traverse Serialization to convert point clouds into 1-D point sequences while ensuring that neighboring points in the sequence are also spatially adjacent. Consistent Traverse Serialization yields six variants by permuting the order of x, y, and z coordinates, and the synergistic use of these variants aids Mamba in comprehensively observing point cloud data. Furthermore, to assist Mamba in handling point sequences with different orders more effectively, we introduce point prompts to inform Mamba of the sequence's arrangement rules. Finally, we propose positional encoding based on spatial coordinate mapping to inject positional information into point cloud sequences better. Based on these improvements, we construct a point cloud network named Point Cloud Mamba, which combines local and global modeling. Point Cloud Mamba surpasses the SOTA point-based method PointNeXt and achieves new SOTA performance on the ScanObjectNN, ModelNet40, and ShapeNetPart datasets.

DVIS++: Improved Decoupled Framework for Universal Video Segmentation

We present the \textbf{D}ecoupled \textbf{VI}deo \textbf{S}egmentation (DVIS) framework, a novel approach for the challenging task of universal video segmentation, including video instance segmentation (VIS), video semantic segmentation (VSS), and video panoptic segmentation (VPS). Unlike previous methods that model video segmentation in an end-to-end manner, our approach decouples video segmentation into three cascaded sub-tasks: segmentation, tracking, and refinement. This decoupling design allows for simpler and more effective modeling of the spatio-temporal representations of objects, especially in complex scenes and long videos. Accordingly, we introduce two novel components: the referring tracker and the temporal refiner. These components track objects frame by frame and model spatio-temporal representations based on pre-aligned features. To improve the tracking capability of DVIS, we propose a denoising training strategy and introduce contrastive learning, resulting in a more robust framework named DVIS++. Furthermore, we evaluate DVIS++ in various settings, including open vocabulary and using a frozen pre-trained backbone. By integrating CLIP with DVIS++, we present OV-DVIS++, the first open-vocabulary universal video segmentation framework. We conduct extensive experiments on six mainstream benchmarks, including the VIS, VSS, and VPS datasets. Using a unified architecture, DVIS++ significantly outperforms state-of-the-art specialized methods on these benchmarks in both close- and open-vocabulary settings. Code:~\url{https://github.com/zhang-tao-whu/DVIS_Plus}.