Search

Power Line Autonomous Inspection (PLAI) plays a crucial role in the construction of smart grids due to its great advantages of low cost, high efficiency, and safe operation. PLAI is completed by accurately detecting the electrical components and defects in the aerial images captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, the visible quality of aerial images is inevitably degraded by adverse weather like haze, rain, or snow, which are found to drastically decrease the detection accuracy in our research. To circumvent this problem, we propose a new task of Power Line Aerial Image Restoration under Adverse Weather (PLAIR-AW), which aims to recover clean and high-quality images from degraded images with bad weather thus improving detection performance for PLAI. In this context, we are the first to release numerous corresponding datasets, namely, HazeCPLID, HazeTTPLA, HazeInsPLAD for power line aerial image dehazing, RainCPLID, RainTTPLA, RainInsPLAD for power line aerial image deraining, SnowCPLID, SnowInsPLAD for power line aerial image desnowing, which are synthesized upon the public power line aerial image datasets of CPLID, TTPLA, InsPLAD following the mathematical models. Meanwhile, we select numerous state-of-the-art methods from image restoration community as the baseline methods for PLAIR-AW. At last, we conduct large-scale empirical experiments to evaluate the performance of baseline methods on the proposed datasets. The proposed datasets and trained models are available at https://github.com/ntuhubin/PLAIR-AW.

Foundation models or pre-trained models have substantially improved the performance of various language, vision, and vision-language understanding tasks. However, existing foundation models can only perform the best in one type of tasks, namely language, vision, or vision-language. It is still an open question whether it is possible to construct a foundation model performing the best for all the understanding tasks, which we call a general foundation model. In this paper, we propose a new general foundation model, X-FM (the X-Foundation Model). X-FM has one language encoder, one vision encoder, and one fusion encoder, as well as a new training method. The training method includes two new techniques for learning X-FM from text, image, and image-text pair data. One is to stop gradients from the vision-language training when learning the language encoder. The other is to leverage the vision-language training to guide the learning of the vision encoder. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that X-FM can significantly outperform existing general foundation models and perform better than or comparable to existing foundation models specifically for language, vision, or vision-language understanding. Code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/zhangxinsong-nlp/XFM.

Vision language pre-training aims to learn alignments between vision and language from a large amount of data. Most existing methods only learn image-text alignments. Some others utilize pre-trained object detectors to leverage vision language alignments at the object level. In this paper, we propose to learn multi-grained vision language alignments by a unified pre-training framework that learns multi-grained aligning and multi-grained localization simultaneously. Based on it, we present X$^2$-VLM, an all-in-one model with a flexible modular architecture, in which we further unify image-text pre-training and video-text pre-training in one model. X$^2$-VLM is able to learn unlimited visual concepts associated with diverse text descriptions. Experiment results show that X$^2$-VLM performs the best on base and large scale for both image-text and video-text tasks, making a good trade-off between performance and model scale. Moreover, we show that the modular design of X$^2$-VLM results in high transferability for it to be utilized in any language or domain. For example, by simply replacing the text encoder with XLM-R, X$^2$-VLM outperforms state-of-the-art multilingual multi-modal pre-trained models without any multilingual pre-training. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/zengyan-97/X2-VLM., Comment: 25 pages

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results in a range of vision-language tasks. However, popular VLMs usually consist of hundreds of millions of parameters which brings challenges for fine-tuning and deployment in real-world applications due to space, memory, and latency constraints. In this work, we introduce a distilling then pruning framework to compress large vision-language models into smaller, faster, and more accurate ones. We first shrink the size of a pre-trained large VLM and apply knowledge distillation in the vision-language pre-training stage to obtain a task-agnostic compact VLM. Then we propose a modal-adaptive pruning algorithm to automatically infer the importance of vision and language modalities for different downstream tasks and adaptively remove redundant structures and neurons in different encoders with controllable target sparsity. We apply our framework to train EfficientVLM, a fast and accurate vision-language model consisting of 6 vision layers, 3 text layers, and 3 cross-modal fusion layers, accounting for only 93 million parameters in total, which is 44.3% of the teacher model. EfficientVLM retains 98.4% performance of the teacher model and accelerates its inference speed by 2.2x. EfficientVLM achieves a large absolute improvement over previous SoTA efficient VLMs of similar sizes by a large margin on various vision-language tasks, including VQAv2 (+4.9%), NLVR2 (+5.6%), ITR (R@1 on TR +17.2%, on IR + 15.6% ) and COCO caption generation (CIDEr +6.5), demonstrating a large potential on training lightweight VLMs., Comment: work in progress

Recent advances in vision-language pre-training have pushed the state-of-the-art on various vision-language tasks, making machines more capable of multi-modal writing (image-to-text generation) and painting (text-to-image generation). However, few studies investigate if these two essential capabilities can be learned together and boost each other, making a versatile and powerful multi-modal foundation model. In this work, we disclose the potential of symmetric generative vision-language pre-training in learning to write and paint concurrently, and propose a new unified modal model, named DaVinci, trained with prefix language modeling and prefix image modeling, a simple generative self-supervised objective on image-text pairs. Thanks to the proposed prefix multi-modal modeling framework, DaVinci is simple to train, scalable to huge data, adaptable to both writing and painting tasks, and also strong on other vision, text, and multi-modal understanding tasks. DaVinci achieves competitive performance on a wide range of 27 generation/understanding tasks and demonstrates the superiority of combining vision/language generative pre-training. Furthermore, we carefully benchmark the performance of different vision-language pre-training objectives on different scales of pre-training datasets on a heterogeneous and broad distribution coverage. Our results demonstrate the potential of exploiting self-supervision in both language and vision inputs, and establish new, stronger baselines for future comparisons at different data scales. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/shizhediao/DaVinci., Comment: ICLR 2023

In this paper, we introduce Cross-View Language Modeling, a simple and effective pre-training framework that unifies cross-lingual and cross-modal pre-training with shared architectures and objectives. Our approach is motivated by a key observation that cross-lingual and cross-modal pre-training share the same goal of aligning two different views of the same object into a common semantic space. To this end, the cross-view language modeling framework considers both multi-modal data (i.e., image-caption pairs) and multi-lingual data (i.e., parallel sentence pairs) as two different views of the same object, and trains the model to align the two views by maximizing the mutual information between them with conditional masked language modeling and contrastive learning. We pre-train CCLM, a Cross-lingual Cross-modal Language Model, with the cross-view language modeling framework. Empirical results on IGLUE, a multi-lingual multi-modal benchmark, and two multi-lingual image-text retrieval datasets show that while conceptually simpler, CCLM significantly outperforms the prior state-of-the-art with an average absolute improvement of over 10%. Moreover, CCLM is the first multi-lingual multi-modal pre-trained model that surpasses the translate-test performance of representative English vision-language models by zero-shot cross-lingual transfer., Comment: ACL 2023

Recent advances in vision-language pre-training (VLP) have demonstrated impressive performance in a range of vision-language (VL) tasks. However, there exist several challenges for measuring the community's progress in building general multi-modal intelligence. First, most of the downstream VL datasets are annotated using raw images that are already seen during pre-training, which may result in an overestimation of current VLP models' generalization ability. Second, recent VLP work mainly focuses on absolute performance but overlooks the efficiency-performance trade-off, which is also an important indicator for measuring progress. To this end, we introduce the Vision-Language Understanding Evaluation (VLUE) benchmark, a multi-task multi-dimension benchmark for evaluating the generalization capabilities and the efficiency-performance trade-off (``Pareto SOTA'') of VLP models. We demonstrate that there is a sizable generalization gap for all VLP models when testing on out-of-distribution test sets annotated on images from a more diverse distribution that spreads across cultures. Moreover, we find that measuring the efficiency-performance trade-off of VLP models leads to complementary insights for several design choices of VLP. We release the VLUE benchmark to promote research on building vision-language models that generalize well to more diverse images and concepts unseen during pre-training, and are practical in terms of efficiency-performance trade-off., Comment: ICML 2022, Benchmark website at https://vlue-benchmark.github.io

Most existing methods in vision language pre-training rely on object-centric features extracted through object detection and make fine-grained alignments between the extracted features and texts. It is challenging for these methods to learn relations among multiple objects. To this end, we propose a new method called X-VLM to perform `multi-grained vision language pre-training.' The key to learning multi-grained alignments is to locate visual concepts in the image given the associated texts, and in the meantime align the texts with the visual concepts, where the alignments are in multi-granularity. Experimental results show that X-VLM effectively leverages the learned multi-grained alignments to many downstream vision language tasks and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods., Comment: ICML 2022