Natural language explanations promise to offer intuitively understandable explanations of a neural network's decision process in complex vision-language tasks, as pursued in recent VL-NLE models. While current models offer impressive performance on task accuracy and explanation plausibility, they suffer from a range of issues: Some models feature a modular design where the explanation generation module is poorly integrated with a separate module for task-answer prediction, employ backbone models trained on limited sets of tasks, or incorporate ad hoc solutions to increase performance on single datasets. We propose to evade these limitations by applying recent advances in large-scale multi-task pretraining of generative Transformer models to the problem of VL-NLE tasks. Our approach outperforms recent models by a large margin, with human annotators preferring the generated explanations over the ground truth in two out of three evaluated datasets. As a novel challenge in VL-NLE research, we propose the problem of multi-task VL-NLE and show that jointly training on multiple tasks can increase the explanation quality. We discuss the ethical implications of high-quality NLE generation and other issues in recent VL-NLE research.

Knowledge about space and time is necessary to solve problems in the physical world: An AI agent situated in the physical world and interacting with objects often needs to reason about positions of and relations between objects; and as soon as the agent plans its actions to solve a task, it needs to consider the temporal aspect (e.g., what actions to perform over time). Spatio-temporal knowledge, however, is required beyond interacting with the physical world, and is also often transferred to the abstract world of concepts through analogies and metaphors (e.g., "a threat that is hanging over our heads"). As spatial and temporal reasoning is ubiquitous, different attempts have been made to integrate this into AI systems. In the area of knowledge representation, spatial and temporal reasoning has been largely limited to modeling objects and relations and developing reasoning methods to verify statements about objects and relations. On the other hand, neural network researchers have tried to teach models to learn spatial relations from data with limited reasoning capabilities. Bridging the gap between these two approaches in a mutually beneficial way could allow us to tackle many complex real-world problems, such as natural language processing, visual question answering, and semantic image segmentation. In this chapter, we view this integration problem from the perspective of Neuro-Symbolic AI. Specifically, we propose a synergy between logical reasoning and machine learning that will be grounded on spatial and temporal knowledge. Describing some successful applications, remaining challenges, and evaluation datasets pertaining to this direction is the main topic of this contribution.

灵活地处理各种机器人动作语言翻译任务是机器人和人之间自然相互作用的必不可少的要求。以前的方法需要更改推理过程中每个任务的模型体系结构的配置，这破坏了多任务学习的前提。在这项工作中，我们提出了配对的门控自动编码器（PGAE），以在桌面对象操纵方案中的机器人动作和语言描述之间进行灵活翻译。我们通过将每个动作与包含信号通知翻译方向的信号的适当描述配对，以端到端的方式训练模型。在推断期间，我们的模型可以从动作转化为语言，反之亦然，根据给定的语言信号。此外，为了选择使用预算语言模型作为语言编码器，我们的模型有可能识别看不见的自然语言输入。我们模型的另一个功能是，它可以通过使用机器人演示来识别和模仿另一个代理的动作。该实验结果突出了我们方法的灵活双向翻译能力，同时又可以推广到相反剂的作用。

空间推理给智能代理带来了一个特殊的挑战，同时是他们在物理世界中成功互动和交流的先决条件。这样的推理任务是描述目标对象在通过相对方向的某些参考对象的固有方向方面的位置。在本文中，我们介绍了基于抽象对象的新型诊断视觉询问（VQA）数据集。我们的数据集允许对端到端VQA模型对地面相对方向的功能进行细粒度分析。同时，与现有数据集相比，模型培训需要少得多的计算资源，但产生可比甚至更高的性能。除了新数据集外，我们还基于在Grid-A-3D训练的两个端到端的VQA架构进行彻底评估。我们证明，在几个时期内，以相对方向进行推理所需的子任务，例如在场景中识别和定位对象并估算其内在方向，以直观的方式处理相对方向。

We present X-Decoder, a generalized decoding model that can predict pixel-level segmentation and language tokens seamlessly. X-Decodert takes as input two types of queries: (i) generic non-semantic queries and (ii) semantic queries induced from text inputs, to decode different pixel-level and token-level outputs in the same semantic space. With such a novel design, X-Decoder is the first work that provides a unified way to support all types of image segmentation and a variety of vision-language (VL) tasks. Further, our design enables seamless interactions across tasks at different granularities and brings mutual benefits by learning a common and rich pixel-level visual-semantic understanding space, without any pseudo-labeling. After pretraining on a mixed set of a limited amount of segmentation data and millions of image-text pairs, X-Decoder exhibits strong transferability to a wide range of downstream tasks in both zero-shot and finetuning settings. Notably, it achieves (1) state-of-the-art results on open-vocabulary segmentation and referring segmentation on eight datasets; (2) better or competitive finetuned performance to other generalist and specialist models on segmentation and VL tasks; and (3) flexibility for efficient finetuning and novel task composition (e.g., referring captioning and image editing). Code, demo, video, and visualization are available at https://x-decoder-vl.github.io.

Recent neural radiance field (NeRF) representation has achieved great success in the tasks of novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. However, they suffer from the catastrophic forgetting problem when continuously learning from streaming data without revisiting the previous training data. This limitation prohibits the application of existing NeRF models to scenarios where images come in sequentially. In view of this, we explore the task of incremental learning for neural radiance field representation in this work. We first propose a student-teacher pipeline to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem. Specifically, we iterate the process of using the student as the teacher at the end of each incremental step and let the teacher guide the training of the student in the next step. In this way, the student network is able to learn new information from the streaming data and retain old knowledge from the teacher network simultaneously. Given that not all information from the teacher network is helpful since it is only trained with the old data, we further introduce a random inquirer and an uncertainty-based filter to filter useful information. We conduct experiments on the NeRF-synthetic360 and NeRF-real360 datasets, where our approach significantly outperforms the baselines by 7.3% and 25.2% in terms of PSNR. Furthermore, we also show that our approach can be applied to the large-scale camera facing-outwards dataset ScanNet, where we surpass the baseline by 60.0% in PSNR.

Domain shift widely exists in the visual world, while modern deep neural networks commonly suffer from severe performance degradation under domain shift due to the poor generalization ability, which limits the real-world applications. The domain shift mainly lies in the limited source environmental variations and the large distribution gap between source and unseen target data. To this end, we propose a unified framework, Style-HAllucinated Dual consistEncy learning (SHADE), to handle such domain shift in various visual tasks. Specifically, SHADE is constructed based on two consistency constraints, Style Consistency (SC) and Retrospection Consistency (RC). SC enriches the source situations and encourages the model to learn consistent representation across style-diversified samples. RC leverages general visual knowledge to prevent the model from overfitting to source data and thus largely keeps the representation consistent between the source and general visual models. Furthermore, we present a novel style hallucination module (SHM) to generate style-diversified samples that are essential to consistency learning. SHM selects basis styles from the source distribution, enabling the model to dynamically generate diverse and realistic samples during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our versatile SHADE can significantly enhance the generalization in various visual recognition tasks, including image classification, semantic segmentation and object detection, with different models, i.e., ConvNets and Transformer.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Mix-up training approaches have proven to be effective in improving the generalization ability of Deep Neural Networks. Over the years, the research community expands mix-up methods into two directions, with extensive efforts to improve saliency-guided procedures but minimal focus on the arbitrary path, leaving the randomization domain unexplored. In this paper, inspired by the superior qualities of each direction over one another, we introduce a novel method that lies at the junction of the two routes. By combining the best elements of randomness and saliency utilization, our method balances speed, simplicity, and accuracy. We name our method R-Mix following the concept of "Random Mix-up". We demonstrate its effectiveness in generalization, weakly supervised object localization, calibration, and robustness to adversarial attacks. Finally, in order to address the question of whether there exists a better decision protocol, we train a Reinforcement Learning agent that decides the mix-up policies based on the classifier's performance, reducing dependency on human-designed objectives and hyperparameter tuning. Extensive experiments further show that the agent is capable of performing at the cutting-edge level, laying the foundation for a fully automatic mix-up. Our code is released at [https://github.com/minhlong94/Random-Mixup].

Existing state-of-the-art method for audio-visual conditioned video prediction uses the latent codes of the audio-visual frames from a multimodal stochastic network and a frame encoder to predict the next visual frame. However, a direct inference of per-pixel intensity for the next visual frame from the latent codes is extremely challenging because of the high-dimensional image space. To this end, we propose to decouple the audio-visual conditioned video prediction into motion and appearance modeling. The first part is the multimodal motion estimation module that learns motion information as optical flow from the given audio-visual clip. The second part is the context-aware refinement module that uses the predicted optical flow to warp the current visual frame into the next visual frame and refines it base on the given audio-visual context. Experimental results show that our method achieves competitive results on existing benchmarks.