Visual Large Language Models for Generalized and Specialized Applications

Visual-language models (VLM) have emerged as a powerful tool for learning a unified embedding space for vision and language. Inspired by large language models, which have demonstrated strong reasoning and multi-task capabilities, visual large language models (VLLMs) are gaining increasing attention for building general-purpose VLMs. Despite the significant progress made in VLLMs, the related literature remains limited, particularly from a comprehensive application perspective, encompassing generalized and specialized applications across vision (image, video, depth), action, and language modalities. In this survey, we focus on the diverse applications of VLLMs, examining their using scenarios, identifying ethics consideration and challenges, and discussing future directions for their development. By synthesizing these contents, we aim to provide a comprehensive guide that will pave the way for future innovations and broader applications of VLLMs. The paper list repository is available: https://github.com/JackYFL/awesome-VLLMs.

LiDAR-based End-to-end Temporal Perception for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperation

Temporal perception, the ability to detect and track objects over time, is critical in autonomous driving for maintaining a comprehensive understanding of dynamic environments. However, this task is hindered by significant challenges, including incomplete perception caused by occluded objects and observational blind spots, which are common in single-vehicle perception systems. To address these issues, we introduce LET-VIC, a LiDAR-based End-to-End Tracking framework for Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperation (VIC). LET-VIC leverages Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication to enhance temporal perception by fusing spatial and temporal data from both vehicle and infrastructure sensors. First, it spatially integrates Bird's Eye View (BEV) features from vehicle-side and infrastructure-side LiDAR data, creating a comprehensive view that mitigates occlusions and compensates for blind spots. Second, LET-VIC incorporates temporal context across frames, allowing the model to leverage historical data for enhanced tracking stability and accuracy. To further improve robustness, LET-VIC includes a Calibration Error Compensation (CEC) module to address sensor misalignments and ensure precise feature alignment. Experiments on the V2X-Seq-SPD dataset demonstrate that LET-VIC significantly outperforms baseline models, achieving at least a 13.7% improvement in mAP and a 13.1% improvement in AMOTA without considering communication delays. This work offers a practical solution and a new research direction for advancing temporal perception in autonomous driving through vehicle-infrastructure cooperation.

Exploiting VLM Localizability and Semantics for Open Vocabulary Action Detection

Action detection aims to detect (recognize and localize) human actions spatially and temporally in videos. Existing approaches focus on the closed-set setting where an action detector is trained and tested on videos from a fixed set of action categories. However, this constrained setting is not viable in an open world where test videos inevitably come beyond the trained action categories. In this paper, we address the practical yet challenging Open-Vocabulary Action Detection (OVAD) problem. It aims to detect any action in test videos while training a model on a fixed set of action categories. To achieve such an open-vocabulary capability, we propose a novel method OpenMixer that exploits the inherent semantics and localizability of large vision-language models (VLM) within the family of query-based detection transformers (DETR). Specifically, the OpenMixer is developed by spatial and temporal OpenMixer blocks (S-OMB and T-OMB), and a dynamically fused alignment (DFA) module. The three components collectively enjoy the merits of strong generalization from pre-trained VLMs and end-to-end learning from DETR design. Moreover, we established OVAD benchmarks under various settings, and the experimental results show that the OpenMixer performs the best over baselines for detecting seen and unseen actions. We release the codes, models, and dataset splits at https://github.com/Cogito2012/OpenMixer.

A Survey of Multimodal Sarcasm Detection

Sarcasm is a rhetorical device that is used to convey the opposite of the literal meaning of an utterance. Sarcasm is widely used on social media and other forms of computer-mediated communication motivating the use of computational models to identify it automatically. While the clear majority of approaches to sarcasm detection have been carried out on text only, sarcasm detection often requires additional information present in tonality, facial expression, and contextual images. This has led to the introduction of multimodal models, opening the possibility to detect sarcasm in multiple modalities such as audio, images, text, and video. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive survey on multimodal sarcasm detection - henceforth MSD - to date. We survey papers published between 2018 and 2023 on the topic, and discuss the models and datasets used for this task. We also present future research directions in MSD.

Learning to Localize Actions in Instructional Videos with LLM-Based Multi-Pathway Text-Video Alignment

Learning to localize temporal boundaries of procedure steps in instructional videos is challenging due to the limited availability of annotated large-scale training videos. Recent works focus on learning the cross-modal alignment between video segments and ASR-transcripted narration texts through contrastive learning. However, these methods fail to account for the alignment noise, i.e., irrelevant narrations to the instructional task in videos and unreliable timestamps in narrations. To address these challenges, this work proposes a novel training framework. Motivated by the strong capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in procedure understanding and text summarization, we first apply an LLM to filter out task-irrelevant information and summarize task-related procedure steps (LLM-steps) from narrations. To further generate reliable pseudo-matching between the LLM-steps and the video for training, we propose the Multi-Pathway Text-Video Alignment (MPTVA) strategy. The key idea is to measure alignment between LLM-steps and videos via multiple pathways, including: (1) step-narration-video alignment using narration timestamps, (2) direct step-to-video alignment based on their long-term semantic similarity, and (3) direct step-to-video alignment focusing on short-term fine-grained semantic similarity learned from general video domains. The results from different pathways are fused to generate reliable pseudo step-video matching. We conducted extensive experiments across various tasks and problem settings to evaluate our proposed method. Our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods in three downstream tasks: procedure step grounding, step localization, and narration grounding by 5.9\%, 3.1\%, and 2.8\%.

SHINE: Saliency-aware HIerarchical NEgative Ranking for Compositional Temporal Grounding

Temporal grounding, a.k.a video moment retrieval, aims at locating video segments corresponding to a given query sentence. The compositional nature of natural language enables the localization beyond predefined events, posing a certain challenge to the compositional generalizability of existing methods. Recent studies establish the correspondence between videos and queries through a decompose-reconstruct manner to achieve compositional generalization. However, they only consider dominant primitives and build negative queries through random sampling and recombination, resulting in semantically implausible negatives that hinder the models from learning rational compositions. In addition, recent DETR-based methods still underperform in compositional temporal grounding, showing irrational saliency responses when given negative queries that have subtle differences from positive queries. To address these limitations, we first propose a large language model-driven method for negative query construction, utilizing GPT-3.5-Turbo to generate semantically plausible hard negative queries. Subsequently, we introduce a coarse-to-fine saliency ranking strategy, which encourages the model to learn the multi-granularity semantic relationships between videos and hierarchical negative queries to boost compositional generalization. Extensive experiments on two challenging benchmarks validate the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed method. Our code is available at https://github.com/zxccade/SHINE.

Facial Affective Behavior Analysis with Instruction Tuning

Facial affective behavior analysis (FABA) is crucial for understanding human mental states from images. However, traditional approaches primarily deploy models to discriminate among discrete emotion categories, and lack the fine granularity and reasoning capability for complex facial behaviors. The advent of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has been proven successful in general visual understanding tasks. However, directly harnessing MLLMs for FABA is challenging due to the scarcity of datasets and benchmarks, neglecting facial prior knowledge, and low training efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce (i) an instruction-following dataset for two FABA tasks, e.g., emotion and action unit recognition, (ii) a benchmark FABA-Bench with a new metric considering both recognition and generation ability, and (iii) a new MLLM "EmoLA" as a strong baseline to the community. Our initiative on the dataset and benchmarks reveal the nature and rationale of facial affective behaviors, i.e., fine-grained facial movement, interpretability, and reasoning. Moreover, to build an effective and efficient FABA MLLM, we introduce a facial prior expert module with face structure knowledge and a low-rank adaptation module into pre-trained MLLM. We conduct extensive experiments on FABA-Bench and four commonly-used FABA datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed facial prior expert can boost the performance and EmoLA achieves the best results on our FABA-Bench. On commonly-used FABA datasets, EmoLA is competitive rivaling task-specific state-of-the-art models.

The Wolf Within: Covert Injection of Malice into MLLM Societies via an MLLM Operative

Due to their unprecedented ability to process and respond to various types of data, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are constantly defining the new boundary of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As these advanced generative models increasingly form collaborative networks for complex tasks, the integrity and security of these systems are crucial. Our paper, ``The Wolf Within'', explores a novel vulnerability in MLLM societies - the indirect propagation of malicious content. Unlike direct harmful output generation for MLLMs, our research demonstrates how a single MLLM agent can be subtly influenced to generate prompts that, in turn, induce other MLLM agents in the society to output malicious content. This subtle, yet potent method of indirect influence marks a significant escalation in the security risks associated with MLLMs. Our findings reveal that, with minimal or even no access to MLLMs' parameters, an MLLM agent, when manipulated to produce specific prompts or instructions, can effectively ``infect'' other agents within a society of MLLMs. This infection leads to the generation and circulation of harmful outputs, such as dangerous instructions or misinformation, across the society. We also show the transferability of these indirectly generated prompts, highlighting their possibility in propagating malice through inter-agent communication. This research provides a critical insight into a new dimension of threat posed by MLLMs, where a single agent can act as a catalyst for widespread malevolent influence. Our work underscores the urgent need for developing robust mechanisms to detect and mitigate such covert manipulations within MLLM societies, ensuring their safe and ethical utilization in societal applications. Our implementation is released at \url{https://github.com/ChengshuaiZhao0/The-Wolf-Within.git}.

CSGNN: Conquering Noisy Node labels via Dynamic Class-wise Selection

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for representation learning on graphs, but they often suffer from overfitting and label noise issues, especially when the data is scarce or imbalanced. Different from the paradigm of previous methods that rely on single-node confidence, in this paper, we introduce a novel Class-wise Selection for Graph Neural Networks, dubbed CSGNN, which employs a neighbor-aggregated latent space to adaptively select reliable nodes across different classes. Specifically, 1) to tackle the class imbalance issue, we introduce a dynamic class-wise selection mechanism, leveraging the clustering technique to identify clean nodes based on the neighbor-aggregated confidences. In this way, our approach can avoid the pitfalls of biased sampling which is common with global threshold techniques. 2) To alleviate the problem of noisy labels, built on the concept of the memorization effect, CSGNN prioritizes learning from clean nodes before noisy ones, thereby iteratively enhancing model performance while mitigating label noise. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that CSGNN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both effectiveness and robustness.

Latent Space Energy-based Model for Fine-grained Open Set Recognition

Fine-grained open-set recognition (FineOSR) aims to recognize images belonging to classes with subtle appearance differences while rejecting images of unknown classes. A recent trend in OSR shows the benefit of generative models to discriminative unknown detection. As a type of generative model, energy-based models (EBM) are the potential for hybrid modeling of generative and discriminative tasks. However, most existing EBMs suffer from density estimation in high-dimensional space, which is critical to recognizing images from fine-grained classes. In this paper, we explore the low-dimensional latent space with energy-based prior distribution for OSR in a fine-grained visual world. Specifically, based on the latent space EBM, we propose an attribute-aware information bottleneck (AIB), a residual attribute feature aggregation (RAFA) module, and an uncertainty-based virtual outlier synthesis (UVOS) module to improve the expressivity, granularity, and density of the samples in fine-grained classes, respectively. Our method is flexible to take advantage of recent vision transformers for powerful visual classification and generation. The method is validated on both fine-grained and general visual classification datasets while preserving the capability of generating photo-realistic fake images with high resolution.