ImagineNav: Prompting Vision-Language Models as Embodied Navigator through Scene Imagination

Visual navigation is an essential skill for home-assistance robots, providing the object-searching ability to accomplish long-horizon daily tasks. Many recent approaches use Large Language Models (LLMs) for commonsense inference to improve exploration efficiency. However, the planning process of LLMs is limited within texts and it is difficult to represent the spatial occupancy and geometry layout only by texts. Both are important for making rational navigation decisions. In this work, we seek to unleash the spatial perception and planning ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and explore whether the VLM, with only on-board camera captured RGB/RGB-D stream inputs, can efficiently finish the visual navigation tasks in a mapless manner. We achieve this by developing the imagination-powered navigation framework ImagineNav, which imagines the future observation images at valuable robot views and translates the complex navigation planning process into a rather simple best-view image selection problem for VLM. To generate appropriate candidate robot views for imagination, we introduce the Where2Imagine module, which is distilled to align with human navigation habits. Finally, to reach the VLM preferred views, an off-the-shelf point-goal navigation policy is utilized. Empirical experiments on the challenging open-vocabulary object navigation benchmarks demonstrates the superiority of our proposed system.

Sample then Identify: A General Framework for Risk Control and Assessment in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit promising advancements across various tasks, yet they still encounter significant trustworthiness issues. Prior studies apply Split Conformal Prediction (SCP) in language modeling to construct prediction sets with statistical guarantees. However, these methods typically rely on internal model logits or are restricted to multiple-choice settings, which hampers their generalizability and adaptability in dynamic, open-ended environments. In this paper, we introduce TRON, a two-step framework for risk control and assessment, applicable to any MLLM that supports sampling in both open-ended and closed-ended scenarios. TRON comprises two main components: (1) a novel conformal score to sample response sets of minimum size, and (2) a nonconformity score to identify high-quality responses based on self-consistency theory, controlling the error rates by two specific risk levels. Furthermore, we investigate semantic redundancy in prediction sets within open-ended contexts for the first time, leading to a promising evaluation metric for MLLMs based on average set size. Our comprehensive experiments across four Video Question-Answering (VideoQA) datasets utilizing eight MLLMs show that TRON achieves desired error rates bounded by two user-specified risk levels. Additionally, deduplicated prediction sets maintain adaptiveness while being more efficient and stable for risk assessment under different risk levels.

Large Language Models are Good Multi-lingual Learners : When LLMs Meet Cross-lingual Prompts

With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), generating rule-based data for real-world applications has become more accessible. Due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language and the complexity of rule sets, especially in long contexts, LLMs often struggle to follow all specified rules, frequently omitting at least one. To enhance the reasoning and understanding of LLMs on long and complex contexts, we propose a novel prompting strategy Multi-Lingual Prompt, namely MLPrompt, which automatically translates the error-prone rule that an LLM struggles to follow into another language, thus drawing greater attention to it. Experimental results on public datasets across various tasks have shown MLPrompt can outperform state-of-the-art prompting methods such as Chain of Thought, Tree of Thought, and Self-Consistency. Additionally, we introduce a framework integrating MLPrompt with an auto-checking mechanism for structured data generation, with a specific case study in text-to-MIP instances. Further, we extend the proposed framework for text-to-SQL to demonstrate its generation ability towards structured data synthesis.

Leveraging Large Language Models for Solving Rare MIP Challenges

Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) has been extensively applied in areas requiring mathematical solvers to address complex instances within tight time constraints. However, as the problem scale increases, the complexity of model formulation and finding feasible solutions escalates significantly. In contrast, the model-building cost for end-to-end models, such as large language models (LLMs), remains largely unaffected by problem scale due to their pattern recognition capabilities. While LLMs, like GPT-4, without fine-tuning, can handle some traditional medium-scale MIP problems, they struggle with uncommon or highly specialized MIP scenarios. Fine-tuning LLMs can yield some feasible solutions for medium-scale MIP instances, but these models typically fail to explore diverse solutions when constrained by a low and constant temperature, limiting their performance. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a recursively dynamic temperature method integrated with a chain-of-thought approach. Our findings show that starting with a high temperature and gradually lowering it leads to better feasible solutions compared to other dynamic temperature strategies. Additionally, by comparing results generated by the LLM with those from Gurobi, we demonstrate that the LLM can produce solutions that complement traditional solvers by accelerating the pruning process and improving overall efficiency.

Reflective Instruction Tuning: Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have shown promising performance on a variety of vision-language tasks. However, they remain susceptible to hallucinations, generating outputs misaligned with visual content or instructions. While various mitigation strategies have been proposed, they often neglect a key contributor to hallucinations: lack of fine-grained reasoning supervision during training. Without intermediate reasoning steps, models may establish superficial shortcuts between instructions and responses, failing to internalize the inherent reasoning logic. To address this challenge, we propose reflective instruction tuning, which integrates rationale learning into visual instruction tuning. Unlike previous methods that learning from responses only, our approach entails the model predicting rationales justifying why responses are correct or incorrect. This fosters a deeper engagement with the fine-grained reasoning underlying each response, thus enhancing the model's reasoning proficiency. To facilitate this approach, we propose REVERIE, the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset with ReflEctiVE RatIonalE annotations. REVERIE comprises 115k machine-generated reasoning instructions, each meticulously annotated with a corresponding pair of correct and confusing responses, alongside comprehensive rationales elucidating the justification behind the correctness or erroneousness of each response. Experimental results on multiple LVLM benchmarks reveal that reflective instruction tuning with the REVERIE dataset yields noticeable performance gain over the baseline model, demonstrating the effectiveness of reflecting from the rationales. Project page is at https://zjr2000.github.io/projects/reverie.

LVLM-empowered Multi-modal Representation Learning for Visual Place Recognition

Visual place recognition (VPR) remains challenging due to significant viewpoint changes and appearance variations. Mainstream works tackle these challenges by developing various feature aggregation methods to transform deep features into robust and compact global representations. Unfortunately, satisfactory results cannot be achieved under challenging conditions. We start from a new perspective and attempt to build a discriminative global representations by fusing image data and text descriptions of the the visual scene. The motivation is twofold: (1) Current Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate extraordinary emergent capability in visual instruction following, and thus provide an efficient and flexible manner in generating text descriptions of images; (2) The text descriptions, which provide high-level scene understanding, show strong robustness against environment variations. Although promising, leveraging LVLMs to build multi-modal VPR solutions remains challenging in efficient multi-modal fusion. Furthermore, LVLMs will inevitably produces some inaccurate descriptions, making it even harder. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel multi-modal VPR solution. It first adapts pre-trained visual and language foundation models to VPR for extracting image and text features, which are then fed into the feature combiner to enhance each other. As the main component, the feature combiner first propose a token-wise attention block to adaptively recalibrate text tokens according to their relevance to the image data, and then develop an efficient cross-attention fusion module to propagate information across different modalities. The enhanced multi-modal features are compressed into the feature descriptor for performing retrieval. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin with significantly smaller image descriptor dimension.

Window-to-Window BEV Representation Learning for Limited FoV Cross-View Geo-localization

Cross-view geo-localization confronts significant challenges due to large perspective changes, especially when the ground-view query image has a limited field of view with unknown orientation. To bridge the cross-view domain gap, we for the first time explore to learn a BEV representation directly from the ground query image. However, the unknown orientation between ground and aerial images combined with the absence of camera parameters led to ambiguity between BEV queries and ground references. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel Window-to-Window BEV representation learning method, termed W2W-BEV, which adaptively matches BEV queries to ground reference at window-scale. Specifically, predefined BEV embeddings and extracted ground features are segmented into a fixed number of windows, and then most similar ground window is chosen for each BEV feature based on the context-aware window matching strategy. Subsequently, the cross-attention is performed between the matched BEV and ground windows to learn the robust BEV representation. Additionally, we use ground features along with predicted depth information to initialize the BEV embeddings, helping learn more powerful BEV representations. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate significant superiority of our W2W-BEV over previous state-of-the-art methods under challenging conditions of unknown orientation and limited FoV. Specifically, on the CVUSA dataset with limited Fov of 90 degree and unknown orientation, the W2W-BEV achieve an significant improvement from 47.24% to 64.73 %(+17.49%) in R@1 accuracy.

Two in One Go: Single-stage Emotion Recognition with Decoupled Subject-context Transformer

Emotion recognition aims to discern the emotional state of subjects within an image, relying on subject-centric and contextual visual cues. Current approaches typically follow a two-stage pipeline: first localize subjects by off-the-shelf detectors, then perform emotion classification through the late fusion of subject and context features. However, the complicated paradigm suffers from disjoint training stages and limited interaction between fine-grained subject-context elements. To address the challenge, we present a single-stage emotion recognition approach, employing a Decoupled Subject-Context Transformer (DSCT), for simultaneous subject localization and emotion classification. Rather than compartmentalizing training stages, we jointly leverage box and emotion signals as supervision to enrich subject-centric feature learning. Furthermore, we introduce DSCT to facilitate interactions between fine-grained subject-context cues in a decouple-then-fuse manner. The decoupled query token--subject queries and context queries--gradually intertwine across layers within DSCT, during which spatial and semantic relations are exploited and aggregated. We evaluate our single-stage framework on two widely used context-aware emotion recognition datasets, CAER-S and EMOTIC. Our approach surpasses two-stage alternatives with fewer parameter numbers, achieving a 3.39% accuracy improvement and a 6.46% average precision gain on CAER-S and EMOTIC datasets, respectively.

UniAV: Unified Audio-Visual Perception for Multi-Task Video Localization

Video localization tasks aim to temporally locate specific instances in videos, including temporal action localization (TAL), sound event detection (SED) and audio-visual event localization (AVEL). Existing methods over-specialize on each task, overlooking the fact that these instances often occur in the same video to form the complete video content. In this work, we present UniAV, a Unified Audio-Visual perception network, to achieve joint learning of TAL, SED and AVEL tasks for the first time. UniAV can leverage diverse data available in task-specific datasets, allowing the model to learn and share mutually beneficial knowledge across tasks and modalities. To tackle the challenges posed by substantial variations in datasets (size/domain/duration) and distinct task characteristics, we propose to uniformly encode visual and audio modalities of all videos to derive generic representations, while also designing task-specific experts to capture unique knowledge for each task. Besides, we develop a unified language-aware classifier by utilizing a pre-trained text encoder, enabling the model to flexibly detect various types of instances and previously unseen ones by simply changing prompts during inference. UniAV outperforms its single-task counterparts by a large margin with fewer parameters, achieving on-par or superior performances compared to state-of-the-art task-specific methods across ActivityNet 1.3, DESED and UnAV-100 benchmarks.

Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey

With the burgeoning growth of online video platforms and the escalating volume of video content, the demand for proficient video understanding tools has intensified markedly. Given the remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in language and multimodal tasks, this survey provides a detailed overview of the recent advancements in video understanding harnessing the power of LLMs (Vid-LLMs). The emergent capabilities of Vid-LLMs are surprisingly advanced, particularly their ability for open-ended spatial-temporal reasoning combined with commonsense knowledge, suggesting a promising path for future video understanding. We examine the unique characteristics and capabilities of Vid-LLMs, categorizing the approaches into four main types: LLM-based Video Agents, Vid-LLMs Pretraining, Vid-LLMs Instruction Tuning, and Hybrid Methods. Furthermore, this survey presents a comprehensive study of the tasks, datasets, and evaluation methodologies for Vid-LLMs. Additionally, it explores the expansive applications of Vid-LLMs across various domains, highlighting their remarkable scalability and versatility in real-world video understanding challenges. Finally, it summarizes the limitations of existing Vid-LLMs and outlines directions for future research. For more information, readers are recommended to visit the repository at https://github.com/yunlong10/Awesome-LLMs-for-Video-Understanding.