Daily Papers

The ability to identify whether or not a test sample belongs to one of the semantic classes in a classifier's training set is critical to practical deployment of the model. This task is termed open-set recognition (OSR) and has received significant attention in recent years. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the ability of a classifier to make the 'none-of-above' decision is highly correlated with its accuracy on the closed-set classes. We find that this relationship holds across loss objectives and architectures, and further demonstrate the trend both on the standard OSR benchmarks as well as on a large-scale ImageNet evaluation. Second, we use this correlation to boost the performance of a maximum logit score OSR 'baseline' by improving its closed-set accuracy, and with this strong baseline achieve state-of-the-art on a number of OSR benchmarks. Similarly, we boost the performance of the existing state-of-the-art method by improving its closed-set accuracy, but the resulting discrepancy with the strong baseline is marginal. Our third contribution is to present the 'Semantic Shift Benchmark' (SSB), which better respects the task of detecting semantic novelty, in contrast to other forms of distribution shift also considered in related sub-fields, such as out-of-distribution detection. On this new evaluation, we again demonstrate that there is negligible difference between the strong baseline and the existing state-of-the-art. Project Page: https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/osr/

Within Human Activity Recognition (HAR), there is an insurmountable gap between the range of activities performed in life and those that can be captured in an annotated sensor dataset used in training. Failure to properly handle unseen activities seriously undermines any HAR classifier's reliability. Additionally within HAR, not all classes are equally dissimilar, some significantly overlap or encompass other sub-activities. Based on these observations, we arrange activity classes into a structured hierarchy. From there, we propose Hi-OSCAR: a Hierarchical Open-set Classifier for Activity Recognition, that can identify known activities at state-of-the-art accuracy while simultaneously rejecting unknown activities. This not only enables open-set classification, but also allows for unknown classes to be localized to the nearest internal node, providing insight beyond a binary "known/unknown" classification. To facilitate this and future open-set HAR research, we collected a new dataset: NFI_FARED. NFI_FARED contains data from multiple subjects performing nineteen activities from a range of contexts, including daily living, commuting, and rapid movements, which is fully public and available for download.

Despite the remarkable progress in generative technology, the Janus-faced issues of intellectual property protection and malicious content supervision have arisen. Efforts have been paid to manage synthetic images by attributing them to a set of potential source models. However, the closed-set classification setting limits the application in real-world scenarios for handling contents generated by arbitrary models. In this study, we focus on a challenging task, namely Open-Set Model Attribution (OSMA), to simultaneously attribute images to known models and identify those from unknown ones. Compared to existing open-set recognition (OSR) tasks focusing on semantic novelty, OSMA is more challenging as the distinction between images from known and unknown models may only lie in visually imperceptible traces. To this end, we propose a Progressive Open Space Expansion (POSE) solution, which simulates open-set samples that maintain the same semantics as closed-set samples but embedded with different imperceptible traces. Guided by a diversity constraint, the open space is simulated progressively by a set of lightweight augmentation models. We consider three real-world scenarios and construct an OSMA benchmark dataset, including unknown models trained with different random seeds, architectures, and datasets from known ones. Extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate POSE is superior to both existing model attribution methods and off-the-shelf OSR methods.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) aims to leverage massive unlabeled data when labels are expensive to obtain. Unfortunately, in many real-world applications, the collected unlabeled data will inevitably contain unseen-class outliers not belonging to any of the labeled classes. To deal with the challenging open-set SSL task, the mainstream methods tend to first detect outliers and then filter them out. However, we observe a surprising fact that such approach could result in more severe performance degradation when labels are extremely scarce, as the unreliable outlier detector may wrongly exclude a considerable portion of valuable inliers. To tackle with this issue, we introduce a novel open-set SSL framework, IOMatch, which can jointly utilize inliers and outliers, even when it is difficult to distinguish exactly between them. Specifically, we propose to employ a multi-binary classifier in combination with the standard closed-set classifier for producing unified open-set classification targets, which regard all outliers as a single new class. By adopting these targets as open-set pseudo-labels, we optimize an open-set classifier with all unlabeled samples including both inliers and outliers. Extensive experiments have shown that IOMatch significantly outperforms the baseline methods across different benchmark datasets and different settings despite its remarkable simplicity. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/nukezil/IOMatch.

Deep learning models have become increasingly useful in many different industries. On the domain of image classification, convolutional neural networks proved the ability to learn robust features for the closed set problem, as shown in many different datasets, such as MNIST FASHIONMNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and IMAGENET. These approaches use deep neural networks with dense layers with softmax activation functions in order to learn features that can separate classes in a latent space. However, this traditional approach is not useful for identifying classes unseen on the training set, known as the open set problem. A similar problem occurs in scenarios involving learning on small data. To tackle both problems, few-shot learning has been proposed. In particular, metric learning learns features that obey constraints of a metric distance in the latent space in order to perform classification. However, while this approach proves to be useful for the open set problem, current implementation requires pair-wise training, where both positive and negative examples of similar images are presented during the training phase, which limits the applicability of these approaches in large data or large class scenarios given the combinatorial nature of the possible inputs.In this paper, we present a constraint-based approach applied to the representations in the latent space under the normalized softmax loss, proposed by[18]. We experimentally validate the proposed approach for the classification of unseen classes on different datasets using both metric learning and the normalized softmax loss, on disjoint and joint scenarios. Our results show that not only our proposed strategy can be efficiently trained on larger set of classes, as it does not require pairwise learning, but also present better classification results than the metric learning strategies surpassing its accuracy by a significant margin.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has proven to be highly effective in transferring knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a label-scarce target domain. However, the presence of additional novel categories in the target domain has led to the development of open-set domain adaptation (ODA) and universal domain adaptation (UNDA). Existing ODA and UNDA methods treat all novel categories as a single, unified unknown class and attempt to detect it during training. However, we found that domain variance can lead to more significant view-noise in unsupervised data augmentation, which affects the effectiveness of contrastive learning (CL) and causes the model to be overconfident in novel category discovery. To address these issues, a framework named Soft-contrastive All-in-one Network (SAN) is proposed for ODA and UNDA tasks. SAN includes a novel data-augmentation-based soft contrastive learning (SCL) loss to fine-tune the backbone for feature transfer and a more human-intuitive classifier to improve new class discovery capability. The SCL loss weakens the adverse effects of the data augmentation view-noise problem which is amplified in domain transfer tasks. The All-in-One (AIO) classifier overcomes the overconfidence problem of current mainstream closed-set and open-set classifiers. Visualization and ablation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed innovations. Furthermore, extensive experiment results on ODA and UNDA show that SAN outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

We introduce a new, highly challenging benchmark and a dataset -- FungiTastic -- based on data continuously collected over a twenty-year span. The dataset originates in fungal records labeled and curated by experts. It consists of about 350k multi-modal observations that include more than 650k photographs from 5k fine-grained categories and diverse accompanying information, e.g., acquisition metadata, satellite images, and body part segmentation. FungiTastic is the only benchmark that includes a test set with partially DNA-sequenced ground truth of unprecedented label reliability. The benchmark is designed to support (i) standard close-set classification, (ii) open-set classification, (iii) multi-modal classification, (iv) few-shot learning, (v) domain shift, and many more. We provide baseline methods tailored for almost all the use-cases. We provide a multitude of ready-to-use pre-trained models on HuggingFace and a framework for model training. A comprehensive documentation describing the dataset features and the baselines are available at https://bohemianvra.github.io/FungiTastic/ and https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/picekl/fungitastic.

The capability of the traditional semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods is far from real-world application due to severely biased pseudo-labels caused by (1) class imbalance and (2) class distribution mismatch between labeled and unlabeled data. This paper addresses such a relatively under-explored problem. First, we propose a general pseudo-labeling framework that class-adaptively blends the semantic pseudo-label from a similarity-based classifier to the linear one from the linear classifier, after making the observation that both types of pseudo-labels have complementary properties in terms of bias. We further introduce a novel semantic alignment loss to establish balanced feature representation to reduce the biased predictions from the classifier. We term the whole framework as Distribution-Aware Semantics-Oriented (DASO) Pseudo-label. We conduct extensive experiments in a wide range of imbalanced benchmarks: CIFAR10/100-LT, STL10-LT, and large-scale long-tailed Semi-Aves with open-set class, and demonstrate that, the proposed DASO framework reliably improves SSL learners with unlabeled data especially when both (1) class imbalance and (2) distribution mismatch dominate.

Data imbalance and open-ended distribution are two intrinsic characteristics of the real visual world. Though encouraging progress has been made in tackling each challenge separately, few works dedicated to combining them towards real-world scenarios. While several previous works have focused on classifying close-set samples and detecting open-set samples during testing, it's still essential to be able to classify unknown subjects as human beings. In this paper, we formally define a more realistic task as distribution-agnostic generalized category discovery (DA-GCD): generating fine-grained predictions for both close- and open-set classes in a long-tailed open-world setting. To tackle the challenging problem, we propose a Self-Balanced Co-Advice contrastive framework (BaCon), which consists of a contrastive-learning branch and a pseudo-labeling branch, working collaboratively to provide interactive supervision to resolve the DA-GCD task. In particular, the contrastive-learning branch provides reliable distribution estimation to regularize the predictions of the pseudo-labeling branch, which in turn guides contrastive learning through self-balanced knowledge transfer and a proposed novel contrastive loss. We compare BaCon with state-of-the-art methods from two closely related fields: imbalanced semi-supervised learning and generalized category discovery. The effectiveness of BaCon is demonstrated with superior performance over all baselines and comprehensive analysis across various datasets. Our code is publicly available.

Semantic mapping based on the supervised object detectors is sensitive to image distribution. In real-world environments, the object detection and segmentation performance can lead to a major drop, preventing the use of semantic mapping in a wider domain. On the other hand, the development of vision-language foundation models demonstrates a strong zero-shot transferability across data distribution. It provides an opportunity to construct generalizable instance-aware semantic maps. Hence, this work explores how to boost instance-aware semantic mapping from object detection generated from foundation models. We propose a probabilistic label fusion method to predict close-set semantic classes from open-set label measurements. An instance refinement module merges the over-segmented instances caused by inconsistent segmentation. We integrate all the modules into a unified semantic mapping system. Reading a sequence of RGB-D input, our work incrementally reconstructs an instance-aware semantic map. We evaluate the zero-shot performance of our method in ScanNet and SceneNN datasets. Our method achieves 40.3 mean average precision (mAP) on the ScanNet semantic instance segmentation task. It outperforms the traditional semantic mapping method significantly.

Malware family classification is a significant issue with public safety and research implications that has been hindered by the high cost of expert labels. The vast majority of corpora use noisy labeling approaches that obstruct definitive quantification of results and study of deeper interactions. In order to provide the data needed to advance further, we have created the Malware Open-source Threat Intelligence Family (MOTIF) dataset. MOTIF contains 3,095 malware samples from 454 families, making it the largest and most diverse public malware dataset with ground truth family labels to date, nearly 3x larger than any prior expert-labeled corpus and 36x larger than the prior Windows malware corpus. MOTIF also comes with a mapping from malware samples to threat reports published by reputable industry sources, which both validates the labels and opens new research opportunities in connecting opaque malware samples to human-readable descriptions. This enables important evaluations that are normally infeasible due to non-standardized reporting in industry. For example, we provide aliases of the different names used to describe the same malware family, allowing us to benchmark for the first time accuracy of existing tools when names are obtained from differing sources. Evaluation results obtained using the MOTIF dataset indicate that existing tasks have significant room for improvement, with accuracy of antivirus majority voting measured at only 62.10% and the well-known AVClass tool having just 46.78% accuracy. Our findings indicate that malware family classification suffers a type of labeling noise unlike that studied in most ML literature, due to the large open set of classes that may not be known from the sample under consideration

This paper surveys vision-language pre-training (VLP) methods for multimodal intelligence that have been developed in the last few years. We group these approaches into three categories: (i) VLP for image-text tasks, such as image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, and visual grounding; (ii) VLP for core computer vision tasks, such as (open-set) image classification, object detection, and segmentation; and (iii) VLP for video-text tasks, such as video captioning, video-text retrieval, and video question answering. For each category, we present a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art methods, and discuss the progress that has been made and challenges still being faced, using specific systems and models as case studies. In addition, for each category, we discuss advanced topics being actively explored in the research community, such as big foundation models, unified modeling, in-context few-shot learning, knowledge, robustness, and computer vision in the wild, to name a few.

Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) leverages both labeled and unlabeled data to improve model performance. Traditional SSL methods assume that labeled and unlabeled data share the same label space. However, in real-world applications, especially when the labeled training set is small, there may be classes that are missing from the labeled set. Existing frameworks aim to either reject all unseen classes (open-set SSL) or to discover unseen classes by partitioning an unlabeled set during training (open-world SSL). In our work, we construct a classifier for points from both seen and unseen classes. Our approach is based on extending an existing SSL method, such as FlexMatch, by incorporating an additional entropy loss. This enhancement allows our method to improve the performance of any existing SSL method in the classification of both seen and unseen classes. We demonstrate large improvement gains over state-of-the-art SSL, open-set SSL, and open-world SSL methods, on two benchmark image classification data sets, CIFAR-100 and STL-10. The gains are most pronounced when the labeled data is severely limited (1-25 labeled examples per class).

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) formulates image classification as an image-to-text matching task, i.e., matching images to the corresponding natural language descriptions instead of discrete category IDs. This allows for open-vocabulary visual recognition, where the model can recognize images from an open class set (also known as an open vocabulary) in a zero-shot manner. However, evaluating the openness of CLIP-like models is challenging, as the models are open to arbitrary vocabulary in theory, but their accuracy varies in practice. To address this, we resort to an incremental perspective to assess the openness through vocabulary expansions, and define extensibility to measure a model's ability to handle novel classes. Our evaluation shows that CLIP-like models are not truly open, and their performance deteriorates as the vocabulary expands. We further dissect the feature space of CLIP from the perspectives of representation alignment and uniformity. Our investigation reveals that the overestimation of openness is due to confusion among competing text features, rather than a failure to capture the similarity between image features and text features of novel classes. We hope that our investigation and analysis will facilitate future research on the CLIP openness issue.

Driven by advancements in deep learning, computer-aided diagnoses have made remarkable progress. However, outside controlled laboratory settings, algorithms may encounter several challenges. In the medical domain, these difficulties often stem from limited data availability due to ethical and legal restrictions, as well as the high cost and time required for expert annotations-especially in the face of emerging or rare diseases. In this context, open-set recognition plays a vital role by identifying whether a sample belongs to one of the known classes seen during training or should be rejected as an unknown. Recent studies have shown that features learned in the later stages of deep neural networks are observed to cluster around their class means, which themselves are arranged as individual vertices of a regular simplex [32]. The proposed method introduces a loss function designed to reject samples of unknown classes effectively by penalizing open space regions using auxiliary datasets. This approach achieves significant performance gain across four MedMNIST datasets-BloodMNIST, OCTMNIST, DermaMNIST, TissueMNIST and a publicly available skin dataset [29] outperforming state-of-the-art techniques.

Open set label shift (OSLS) occurs when label distributions change from a source to a target distribution, and the target distribution has an additional out-of-distribution (OOD) class. In this work, we build estimators for both source and target open set label distributions using a source domain in-distribution (ID) classifier and an ID/OOD classifier. With reasonable assumptions on the ID/OOD classifier, the estimators are assembled into a sequence of three stages: 1) an estimate of the source label distribution of the OOD class, 2) an EM algorithm for Maximum Likelihood estimates (MLE) of the target label distribution, and 3) an estimate of the target label distribution of OOD class under relaxed assumptions on the OOD classifier. The sampling errors of estimates in 1) and 3) are quantified with a concentration inequality. The estimation result allows us to correct the ID classifier trained on the source distribution to the target distribution without retraining. Experiments on a variety of open set label shift settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChangkunYe/OpenSetLabelShift.

Facial expression recognition (FER) models are typically trained on datasets with a fixed number of seven basic classes. However, recent research works point out that there are far more expressions than the basic ones. Thus, when these models are deployed in the real world, they may encounter unknown classes, such as compound expressions that cannot be classified into existing basic classes. To address this issue, we propose the open-set FER task for the first time. Though there are many existing open-set recognition methods, we argue that they do not work well for open-set FER because FER data are all human faces with very small inter-class distances, which makes the open-set samples very similar to close-set samples. In this paper, we are the first to transform the disadvantage of small inter-class distance into an advantage by proposing a new way for open-set FER. Specifically, we find that small inter-class distance allows for sparsely distributed pseudo labels of open-set samples, which can be viewed as symmetric noisy labels. Based on this novel observation, we convert the open-set FER to a noisy label detection problem. We further propose a novel method that incorporates attention map consistency and cycle training to detect the open-set samples. Extensive experiments on various FER datasets demonstrate that our method clearly outperforms state-of-the-art open-set recognition methods by large margins. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh-uaiaaaa.

The chips contained in any electronic device are manufactured over circular silicon wafers, which are monitored by inspection machines at different production stages. Inspection machines detect and locate any defect within the wafer and return a Wafer Defect Map (WDM), i.e., a list of the coordinates where defects lie, which can be considered a huge, sparse, and binary image. In normal conditions, wafers exhibit a small number of randomly distributed defects, while defects grouped in specific patterns might indicate known or novel categories of failures in the production line. Needless to say, a primary concern of semiconductor industries is to identify these patterns and intervene as soon as possible to restore normal production conditions. Here we address WDM monitoring as an open-set recognition problem to accurately classify WDM in known categories and promptly detect novel patterns. In particular, we propose a comprehensive pipeline for wafer monitoring based on a Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Network, a deep architecture designed to process sparse data at an arbitrary resolution, which is trained on the known classes. To detect novelties, we define an outlier detector based on a Gaussian Mixture Model fitted on the latent representation of the classifier. Our experiments on a real dataset of WDMs show that directly processing full-resolution WDMs by Submanifold Sparse Convolutions yields superior classification performance on known classes than traditional Convolutional Neural Networks, which require a preliminary binning to reduce the size of the binary images representing WDMs. Moreover, our solution outperforms state-of-the-art open-set recognition solutions in detecting novelties.

This paper extends Cross Modal Generalization (CMG) to open-set environments by proposing the more challenging Open-set Cross Modal Generalization (OSCMG) task. This task evaluates multimodal unified representations in open-set conditions, addressing the limitations of prior closed-set cross-modal evaluations. OSCMG requires not only cross-modal knowledge transfer but also robust generalization to unseen classes within new modalities, a scenario frequently encountered in real-world applications. Existing multimodal unified representation work lacks consideration for open-set environments. To tackle this, we propose MICU, comprising two key components: Fine-Coarse Masked multimodal InfoNCE (FCMI) and Cross modal Unified Jigsaw Puzzles (CUJP). FCMI enhances multimodal alignment by applying contrastive learning at both holistic semantic and temporal levels, incorporating masking to enhance generalization. CUJP enhances feature diversity and model uncertainty by integrating modality-agnostic feature selection with self-supervised learning, thereby strengthening the model's ability to handle unknown categories in open-set tasks. Extensive experiments on CMG and the newly proposed OSCMG validate the effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://github.com/haihuangcode/CMG.

Multimedia applications are often associated with cross-domain knowledge transfer, where Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can be used to reduce the domain shifts. Open Set Domain Adaptation (OSDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a well-labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain under the assumption that the target domain contains unknown classes. Existing OSDA methods consistently lay stress on the covariate shift, ignoring the potential label shift problem. The performance of OSDA methods degrades drastically under intra-domain class imbalance and inter-domain label shift. However, little attention has been paid to this issue in the community. In this paper, the Imbalanced Open Set Domain Adaptation (IOSDA) is explored where the covariate shift, label shift and category mismatch exist simultaneously. To alleviate the negative effects raised by label shift in OSDA, we propose Open-set Moving-threshold Estimation and Gradual Alignment (OMEGA) - a novel architecture that improves existing OSDA methods on class-imbalanced data. Specifically, a novel unknown-aware target clustering scheme is proposed to form tight clusters in the target domain to reduce the negative effects of label shift and intra-domain class imbalance. Furthermore, moving-threshold estimation is designed to generate specific thresholds for each target sample rather than using one for all. Extensive experiments on IOSDA, OSDA and OPDA benchmarks demonstrate that our method could significantly outperform existing state-of-the-arts. Code and data are available at https://github.com/mendicant04/OMEGA.

Deep learning models have a risk of utilizing spurious clues to make predictions, such as recognizing actions based on the background scene. This issue can severely degrade the open-set action recognition performance when the testing samples have different scene distributions from the training samples. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel method, called Scene-debiasing Open-set Action Recognition (SOAR), which features an adversarial scene reconstruction module and an adaptive adversarial scene classification module. The former prevents the decoder from reconstructing the video background given video features, and thus helps reduce the background information in feature learning. The latter aims to confuse scene type classification given video features, with a specific emphasis on the action foreground, and helps to learn scene-invariant information. In addition, we design an experiment to quantify the scene bias. The results indicate that the current open-set action recognizers are biased toward the scene, and our proposed SOAR method better mitigates such bias. Furthermore, our extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and the ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our proposed modules.

In real-world applications where confidence is key, like autonomous driving, the accurate detection and appropriate handling of classes differing from those used during training are crucial. Despite the proposal of various unknown object detection approaches, we have observed widespread inconsistencies among them regarding the datasets, metrics, and scenarios used, alongside a notable absence of a clear definition for unknown objects, which hampers meaningful evaluation. To counter these issues, we introduce two benchmarks: a unified VOC-COCO evaluation, and the new OpenImagesRoad benchmark which provides clear hierarchical object definition besides new evaluation metrics. Complementing the benchmark, we exploit recent self-supervised Vision Transformers performance, to improve pseudo-labeling-based OpenSet Object Detection (OSOD), through OW-DETR++. State-of-the-art methods are extensively evaluated on the proposed benchmarks. This study provides a clear problem definition, ensures consistent evaluations, and draws new conclusions about effectiveness of OSOD strategies.

Open-set 3D segmentation represents a major point of interest for multiple downstream robotics and augmented/virtual reality applications. We present a decoupled 3D segmentation pipeline to ensure modularity and adaptability to novel 3D representations as well as semantic segmentation foundation models. We first reconstruct a scene with 3D Gaussians and learn class-agnostic features through contrastive supervision from a 2D instance proposal network. These 3D features are then clustered to form coarse object- or part-level masks. Finally, we match each 3D cluster to class-aware masks predicted by a 2D open-vocabulary segmentation model, assigning semantic labels without retraining the 3D representation. Our decoupled design (1) provides a plug-and-play interface for swapping different 2D or 3D modules, (2) ensures multi-object instance segmentation at no extra cost, and (3) leverages rich 3D geometry for robust scene understanding. We evaluate on synthetic and real-world indoor datasets, demonstrating improved performance over comparable NeRF-based pipelines on mIoU and mAcc, particularly for challenging or long-tail classes. We also show how varying the 2D backbone affects the final segmentation, highlighting the modularity of our framework. These results confirm that decoupling 3D mask proposal and semantic classification can deliver flexible, efficient, and open-vocabulary 3D segmentation.

Test-time adaptation (TTA) methods, which generally rely on the model's predictions (e.g., entropy minimization) to adapt the source pretrained model to the unlabeled target domain, suffer from noisy signals originating from 1) incorrect or 2) open-set predictions. Long-term stable adaptation is hampered by such noisy signals, so training models without such error accumulation is crucial for practical TTA. To address these issues, including open-set TTA, we propose a simple yet effective sample selection method inspired by the following crucial empirical finding. While entropy minimization compels the model to increase the probability of its predicted label (i.e., confidence values), we found that noisy samples rather show decreased confidence values. To be more specific, entropy minimization attempts to raise the confidence values of an individual sample's prediction, but individual confidence values may rise or fall due to the influence of signals from numerous other predictions (i.e., wisdom of crowds). Due to this fact, noisy signals misaligned with such 'wisdom of crowds', generally found in the correct signals, fail to raise the individual confidence values of wrong samples, despite attempts to increase them. Based on such findings, we filter out the samples whose confidence values are lower in the adapted model than in the original model, as they are likely to be noisy. Our method is widely applicable to existing TTA methods and improves their long-term adaptation performance in both image classification (e.g., 49.4% reduced error rates with TENT) and semantic segmentation (e.g., 11.7% gain in mIoU with TENT).

Active learning (AL) in open set scenarios presents a novel challenge of identifying the most valuable examples in an unlabeled data pool that comprises data from both known and unknown classes. Traditional methods prioritize selecting informative examples with low confidence, with the risk of mistakenly selecting unknown-class examples with similarly low confidence. Recent methods favor the most probable known-class examples, with the risk of picking simple already mastered examples. In this paper, we attempt to query examples that are both likely from known classes and highly informative, and propose a Bidirectional Uncertainty-based Active Learning (BUAL) framework. Specifically, we achieve this by first pushing the unknown class examples toward regions with high-confidence predictions, i.e., the proposed Random Label Negative Learning method. Then, we propose a Bidirectional Uncertainty sampling strategy by jointly estimating uncertainty posed by both positive and negative learning to perform consistent and stable sampling. BUAL successfully extends existing uncertainty-based AL methods to complex open-set scenarios. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets with varying openness demonstrate that BUAL achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/chenchenzong/BUAL.

Conventional semi-supervised learning (SSL) ideally assumes that labeled and unlabeled data share an identical class distribution, however in practice, this assumption is easily violated, as unlabeled data often includes unknown class data, i.e., outliers. The outliers are treated as noise, considerably degrading the performance of SSL models. To address this drawback, we propose a novel framework, Diversify and Conquer (DAC), to enhance SSL robustness in the context of open-set semi-supervised learning. In particular, we note that existing open-set SSL methods rely on prediction discrepancies between inliers and outliers from a single model trained on labeled data. This approach can be easily failed when the labeled data is insufficient, leading to performance degradation that is worse than naive SSL that do not account for outliers. In contrast, our approach exploits prediction disagreements among multiple models that are differently biased towards the unlabeled distribution. By leveraging the discrepancies arising from training on unlabeled data, our method enables robust outlier detection even when the labeled data is underspecified. Our key contribution is constructing a collection of differently biased models through a single training process. By encouraging divergent heads to be differently biased towards outliers while making consistent predictions for inliers, we exploit the disagreement among these heads as a measure to identify unknown concepts. Our code is available at https://github.com/heejokong/DivCon.

Few-shot learning has made impressive strides in addressing the crucial challenges of recognizing unknown samples from novel classes in target query sets and managing visual shifts between domains. However, existing techniques fall short when it comes to identifying target outliers under domain shifts by learning to reject pseudo-outliers from the source domain, resulting in an incomplete solution to both problems. To address these challenges comprehensively, we propose a novel approach called Domain Adaptive Few-Shot Open Set Recognition (DA-FSOS) and introduce a meta-learning-based architecture named DAFOSNET. During training, our model learns a shared and discriminative embedding space while creating a pseudo open-space decision boundary, given a fully-supervised source domain and a label-disjoint few-shot target domain. To enhance data density, we use a pair of conditional adversarial networks with tunable noise variances to augment both domains closed and pseudo-open spaces. Furthermore, we propose a domain-specific batch-normalized class prototypes alignment strategy to align both domains globally while ensuring class-discriminativeness through novel metric objectives. Our training approach ensures that DAFOS-NET can generalize well to new scenarios in the target domain. We present three benchmarks for DA-FSOS based on the Office-Home, mini-ImageNet/CUB, and DomainNet datasets and demonstrate the efficacy of DAFOS-NET through extensive experimentation

Domain generalization (DG) is proposed to deal with the issue of domain shift, which occurs when statistical differences exist between source and target domains. However, most current methods do not account for a common realistic scenario where the source and target domains have different classes. To overcome this deficiency, open set domain generalization (OSDG) then emerges as a more practical setting to recognize unseen classes in unseen domains. An intuitive approach is to use multiple one-vs-all classifiers to define decision boundaries for each class and reject the outliers as unknown. However, the significant class imbalance between positive and negative samples often causes the boundaries biased towards positive ones, resulting in misclassification for known samples in the unseen target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel meta-learning-based framework called dualistic MEta-learning with joint DomaIn-Class matching (MEDIC), which considers gradient matching towards inter-domain and inter-class splits simultaneously to find a generalizable boundary balanced for all tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that MEDIC not only outperforms previous methods in open set scenarios, but also maintains competitive close set generalization ability at the same time. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzwdx/MEDIC.

Generalized Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (GFSS) extends Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (FSS) to simultaneously segment unseen classes and seen classes during evaluation. Previous works leverage additional branch or prototypical aggregation to eliminate the constrained setting of FSS. However, representation division and embedding prejudice, which heavily results in poor performance of GFSS, have not been synthetical considered. We address the aforementioned problems by jointing the prototypical kernel learning and open-set foreground perception. Specifically, a group of learnable kernels is proposed to perform segmentation with each kernel in charge of a stuff class. Then, we explore to merge the prototypical learning to the update of base-class kernels, which is consistent with the prototype knowledge aggregation of few-shot novel classes. In addition, a foreground contextual perception module cooperating with conditional bias based inference is adopted to perform class-agnostic as well as open-set foreground detection, thus to mitigate the embedding prejudice and prevent novel targets from being misclassified as background. Moreover, we also adjust our method to the Class Incremental Few-shot Semantic Segmentation (CIFSS) which takes the knowledge of novel classes in a incremental stream. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i datasets demonstrate that our method performs better than previous state-of-the-art.

Large visual-language models (VLMs), like CLIP, enable open-set image segmentation to segment arbitrary concepts from an image in a zero-shot manner. This goes beyond the traditional closed-set assumption, i.e., where models can only segment classes from a pre-defined training set. More recently, first works on open-set segmentation in 3D scenes have appeared in the literature. These methods are heavily influenced by closed-set 3D convolutional approaches that process point clouds or polygon meshes. However, these 3D scene representations do not align well with the image-based nature of the visual-language models. Indeed, point cloud and 3D meshes typically have a lower resolution than images and the reconstructed 3D scene geometry might not project well to the underlying 2D image sequences used to compute pixel-aligned CLIP features. To address these challenges, we propose OpenNeRF which naturally operates on posed images and directly encodes the VLM features within the NeRF. This is similar in spirit to LERF, however our work shows that using pixel-wise VLM features (instead of global CLIP features) results in an overall less complex architecture without the need for additional DINO regularization. Our OpenNeRF further leverages NeRF's ability to render novel views and extract open-set VLM features from areas that are not well observed in the initial posed images. For 3D point cloud segmentation on the Replica dataset, OpenNeRF outperforms recent open-vocabulary methods such as LERF and OpenScene by at least +4.9 mIoU.

Handling novelty remains a key challenge in visual recognition systems. Existing open-set recognition (OSR) methods rely on the familiarity hypothesis, detecting novelty by the absence of familiar features. We propose a novel attenuation hypothesis: small weights learned during training attenuate features and serve a dual role-differentiating known classes while discarding information useful for distinguishing known from unknown classes. To leverage this overlooked information, we present COSTARR, a novel approach that combines both the requirement of familiar features and the lack of unfamiliar ones. We provide a probabilistic interpretation of the COSTARR score, linking it to the likelihood of correct classification and belonging in a known class. To determine the individual contributions of the pre- and post-attenuated features to COSTARR's performance, we conduct ablation studies that show both pre-attenuated deep features and the underutilized post-attenuated Hadamard product features are essential for improving OSR. Also, we evaluate COSTARR in a large-scale setting using ImageNet2012-1K as known data and NINCO, iNaturalist, OpenImage-O, and other datasets as unknowns, across multiple modern pre-trained architectures (ViTs, ConvNeXts, and ResNet). The experiments demonstrate that COSTARR generalizes effectively across various architectures and significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods by incorporating previously discarded attenuation information, advancing open-set recognition capabilities.

Tracking and following objects of interest is critical to several robotics use cases, ranging from industrial automation to logistics and warehousing, to healthcare and security. In this paper, we present a robotic system to detect, track, and follow any object in real-time. Our approach, dubbed ``follow anything'' (FAn), is an open-vocabulary and multimodal model -- it is not restricted to concepts seen at training time and can be applied to novel classes at inference time using text, images, or click queries. Leveraging rich visual descriptors from large-scale pre-trained models (foundation models), FAn can detect and segment objects by matching multimodal queries (text, images, clicks) against an input image sequence. These detected and segmented objects are tracked across image frames, all while accounting for occlusion and object re-emergence. We demonstrate FAn on a real-world robotic system (a micro aerial vehicle) and report its ability to seamlessly follow the objects of interest in a real-time control loop. FAn can be deployed on a laptop with a lightweight (6-8 GB) graphics card, achieving a throughput of 6-20 frames per second. To enable rapid adoption, deployment, and extensibility, we open-source all our code on our project webpage at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/FollowAnything . We also encourage the reader the watch our 5-minutes explainer video in this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Mgt3EPytrw .

Camera traps, unmanned observation devices, and deep learning-based image recognition systems have greatly reduced human effort in collecting and analyzing wildlife images. However, data collected via above apparatus exhibits 1) long-tailed and 2) open-ended distribution problems. To tackle the open-set long-tailed recognition problem, we propose the Temporal Flow Mask Attention Network that comprises three key building blocks: 1) an optical flow module, 2) an attention residual module, and 3) a meta-embedding classifier. We extract temporal features of sequential frames using the optical flow module and learn informative representation using attention residual blocks. Moreover, we show that applying the meta-embedding technique boosts the performance of the method in open-set long-tailed recognition. We apply this method on a Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dataset. We conduct extensive experiments, and quantitative and qualitative analyses to prove that our method effectively tackles the open-set long-tailed recognition problem while being robust to unknown classes.

AI-generated image (AIGI) detection and source model attribution remain central challenges in combating deepfake abuses, primarily due to the structural diversity of generative models. Current detection methods are prone to overfitting specific forgery traits, whereas source attribution offers a robust alternative through fine-grained feature discrimination. However, synthetic image attribution remains constrained by the scarcity of large-scale, well-categorized synthetic datasets, limiting its practicality and compatibility with detection systems. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for image attribution called open-set, few-shot source identification. This paradigm is designed to reliably identify unseen generators using only limited samples, making it highly suitable for real-world application. To this end, we introduce OmniDFA (Omni Detector and Few-shot Attributor), a novel framework for AIGI that not only assesses the authenticity of images, but also determines the synthesis origins in a few-shot manner. To facilitate this work, we construct OmniFake, a large class-aware synthetic image dataset that curates 1.17 M images from 45 distinct generative models, substantially enriching the foundational resources for research on both AIGI detection and attribution. Experiments demonstrate that OmniDFA exhibits excellent capability in open-set attribution and achieves state-of-the-art generalization performance on AIGI detection. Our dataset and code will be made available.

We introduce Low-Shot Open-Set Domain Generalization (LSOSDG), a novel paradigm unifying low-shot learning with open-set domain generalization (ODG). While prompt-based methods using models like CLIP have advanced DG, they falter in low-data regimes (e.g., 1-shot) and lack precision in detecting open-set samples with fine-grained semantics related to training classes. To address these challenges, we propose OSLOPROMPT, an advanced prompt-learning framework for CLIP with two core innovations. First, to manage limited supervision across source domains and improve DG, we introduce a domain-agnostic prompt-learning mechanism that integrates adaptable domain-specific cues and visually guided semantic attributes through a novel cross-attention module, besides being supported by learnable domain- and class-generic visual prompts to enhance cross-modal adaptability. Second, to improve outlier rejection during inference, we classify unfamiliar samples as "unknown" and train specialized prompts with systematically synthesized pseudo-open samples that maintain fine-grained relationships to known classes, generated through a targeted query strategy with off-the-shelf foundation models. This strategy enhances feature learning, enabling our model to detect open samples with varied granularity more effectively. Extensive evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that OSLOPROMPT establishes a new state-of-the-art in LSOSDG, significantly outperforming existing methods.

In this paper, we address a key scientific problem in machine learning: Given a training set for an image classification task, can we train a generative model on this dataset to enhance the classification performance? (i.e., closed-set generative data augmentation). We start by exploring the distinctions and similarities between real images and closed-set synthetic images generated by advanced generative models. Through extensive experiments, we offer systematic insights into the effective use of closed-set synthetic data for augmentation. Notably, we empirically determine the equivalent scale of synthetic images needed for augmentation. In addition, we also show quantitative equivalence between the real data augmentation and open-set generative augmentation (generative models trained using data beyond the given training set). While it aligns with the common intuition that real images are generally preferred, our empirical formulation also offers a guideline to quantify the increased scale of synthetic data augmentation required to achieve comparable image classification performance. Our results on natural and medical image datasets further illustrate how this effect varies with the baseline training set size and the amount of synthetic data incorporated.

Open-set object detection (OSOD) is highly desirable for robotic manipulation in unstructured environments. However, existing OSOD methods often fail to meet the requirements of robotic applications due to their high computational burden and complex deployment. To address this issue, this paper proposes a light-weight framework called Decoupled OSOD (DOSOD), which is a practical and highly efficient solution to support real-time OSOD tasks in robotic systems. Specifically, DOSOD builds upon the YOLO-World pipeline by integrating a vision-language model (VLM) with a detector. A Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) adaptor is developed to transform text embeddings extracted by the VLM into a joint space, within which the detector learns the region representations of class-agnostic proposals. Cross-modality features are directly aligned in the joint space, avoiding the complex feature interactions and thereby improving computational efficiency. DOSOD operates like a traditional closed-set detector during the testing phase, effectively bridging the gap between closed-set and open-set detection. Compared to the baseline YOLO-World, the proposed DOSOD significantly enhances real-time performance while maintaining comparable accuracy. The slight DOSOD-S model achieves a Fixed AP of 26.7%, compared to 26.2% for YOLO-World-v1-S and 22.7% for YOLO-World-v2-S, using similar backbones on the LVIS minival dataset. Meanwhile, the FPS of DOSOD-S is 57.1% higher than YOLO-World-v1-S and 29.6% higher than YOLO-World-v2-S. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the DOSOD model facilitates the deployment of edge devices. The codes and models are publicly available at https://github.com/D-Robotics-AI-Lab/DOSOD.

We address the task of zero-shot fine-grained video classification, where no video examples or temporal annotations are available for unseen action classes. While contrastive vision-language models such as SigLIP demonstrate strong open-set recognition via mean-pooled image-text similarity, they fail to capture the temporal structure critical for distinguishing fine-grained activities. We introduce ActAlign, a zero-shot framework that formulates video classification as sequence alignment. For each class, a large language model generates an ordered sub-action sequence, which is aligned with video frames using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in a shared embedding space. Without any video-text supervision or fine-tuning, ActAlign achieves 30.5% accuracy on the extremely challenging ActionAtlas benchmark, where human accuracy is only 61.6%. ActAlign outperforms billion-parameter video-language models while using approximately 8x less parameters. These results demonstrate that structured language priors, combined with classical alignment techniques, offer a scalable and general approach to unlocking the open-set recognition potential of vision-language models for fine-grained video understanding.

This paper, for the first time, marries large foundation models with human sketch understanding. We demonstrate what this brings -- a paradigm shift in terms of generalised sketch representation learning (e.g., classification). This generalisation happens on two fronts: (i) generalisation across unknown categories (i.e., open-set), and (ii) generalisation traversing abstraction levels (i.e., good and bad sketches), both being timely challenges that remain unsolved in the sketch literature. Our design is intuitive and centred around transferring the already stellar generalisation ability of CLIP to benefit generalised learning for sketches. We first "condition" the vanilla CLIP model by learning sketch-specific prompts using a novel auxiliary head of raster to vector sketch conversion. This importantly makes CLIP "sketch-aware". We then make CLIP acute to the inherently different sketch abstraction levels. This is achieved by learning a codebook of abstraction-specific prompt biases, a weighted combination of which facilitates the representation of sketches across abstraction levels -- low abstract edge-maps, medium abstract sketches in TU-Berlin, and highly abstract doodles in QuickDraw. Our framework surpasses popular sketch representation learning algorithms in both zero-shot and few-shot setups and in novel settings across different abstraction boundaries.

Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) aims at segmenting and categorizing objects in videos from a closed set of training categories, lacking the generalization ability to handle novel categories in real-world videos. To address this limitation, we make the following three contributions. First, we introduce the novel task of Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation, which aims to simultaneously segment, track, and classify objects in videos from open-set categories, including novel categories unseen during training. Second, to benchmark Open-Vocabulary VIS, we collect a Large-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation dataset (LV-VIS), that contains well-annotated objects from 1,196 diverse categories, significantly surpassing the category size of existing datasets by more than one order of magnitude. Third, we propose an efficient Memory-Induced Transformer architecture, OV2Seg, to first achieve Open-Vocabulary VIS in an end-to-end manner with near real-time inference speed. Extensive experiments on LV-VIS and four existing VIS datasets demonstrate the strong zero-shot generalization ability of OV2Seg on novel categories. The dataset and code are released here https://github.com/haochenheheda/LVVIS.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of discovering new classes in unlabeled visual data given labeled data from disjoint classes. Existing methods typically first pre-train a model with labeled data, and then identify new classes in unlabeled data via unsupervised clustering. However, the labeled data that provide essential knowledge are often underexplored in the second step. The challenge is that the labeled and unlabeled examples are from non-overlapping classes, which makes it difficult to build the learning relationship between them. In this work, we introduce OpenMix to mix the unlabeled examples from an open set and the labeled examples from known classes, where their non-overlapping labels and pseudo-labels are simultaneously mixed into a joint label distribution. OpenMix dynamically compounds examples in two ways. First, we produce mixed training images by incorporating labeled examples with unlabeled examples. With the benefits of unique prior knowledge in novel class discovery, the generated pseudo-labels will be more credible than the original unlabeled predictions. As a result, OpenMix helps to prevent the model from overfitting on unlabeled samples that may be assigned with wrong pseudo-labels. Second, the first way encourages the unlabeled examples with high class-probabilities to have considerable accuracy. We introduce these examples as reliable anchors and further integrate them with unlabeled samples. This enables us to generate more combinations in unlabeled examples and exploit finer object relations among the new classes. Experiments on three classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed OpenMix, which is superior to state-of-the-art methods in novel class discovery.

Promptly identifying procedural errors from egocentric videos in an online setting is highly challenging and valuable for detecting mistakes as soon as they happen. This capability has a wide range of applications across various fields, such as manufacturing and healthcare. The nature of procedural mistakes is open-set since novel types of failures might occur, which calls for one-class classifiers trained on correctly executed procedures. However, no technique can currently detect open-set procedural mistakes online. We propose PREGO, the first online one-class classification model for mistake detection in PRocedural EGOcentric videos. PREGO is based on an online action recognition component to model the current action, and a symbolic reasoning module to predict the next actions. Mistake detection is performed by comparing the recognized current action with the expected future one. We evaluate PREGO on two procedural egocentric video datasets, Assembly101 and Epic-tent, which we adapt for online benchmarking of procedural mistake detection to establish suitable benchmarks, thus defining the Assembly101-O and Epic-tent-O datasets, respectively.

The objective of this paper is 'open-set' speaker recognition of unseen speakers, where ideal embeddings should be able to condense information into a compact utterance-level representation that has small intra-speaker and large inter-speaker distance. A popular belief in speaker recognition is that networks trained with classification objectives outperform metric learning methods. In this paper, we present an extensive evaluation of most popular loss functions for speaker recognition on the VoxCeleb dataset. We demonstrate that the vanilla triplet loss shows competitive performance compared to classification-based losses, and those trained with our proposed metric learning objective outperform state-of-the-art methods.

With the recent renaissance of deep convolution neural networks, encouraging breakthroughs have been achieved on the supervised recognition tasks, where each class has sufficient training data and fully annotated training data. However, to scale the recognition to a large number of classes with few or now training samples for each class remains an unsolved problem. One approach to scaling up the recognition is to develop models capable of recognizing unseen categories without any training instances, or zero-shot recognition/ learning. This article provides a comprehensive review of existing zero-shot recognition techniques covering various aspects ranging from representations of models, and from datasets and evaluation settings. We also overview related recognition tasks including one-shot and open set recognition which can be used as natural extensions of zero-shot recognition when limited number of class samples become available or when zero-shot recognition is implemented in a real-world setting. Importantly, we highlight the limitations of existing approaches and point out future research directions in this existing new research area.

Open-set object detection aims at detecting arbitrary categories beyond those seen during training. Most recent advancements have adopted the open-vocabulary paradigm, utilizing vision-language backbones to represent categories with language. In this paper, we introduce DE-ViT, an open-set object detector that employs vision-only DINOv2 backbones and learns new categories through example images instead of language. To improve general detection ability, we transform multi-classification tasks into binary classification tasks while bypassing per-class inference, and propose a novel region propagation technique for localization. We evaluate DE-ViT on open-vocabulary, few-shot, and one-shot object detection benchmark with COCO and LVIS. For COCO, DE-ViT outperforms the open-vocabulary SoTA by 6.9 AP50 and achieves 50 AP50 in novel classes. DE-ViT surpasses the few-shot SoTA by 15 mAP on 10-shot and 7.2 mAP on 30-shot and one-shot SoTA by 2.8 AP50. For LVIS, DE-ViT outperforms the open-vocabulary SoTA by 2.2 mask AP and reaches 34.3 mask APr. Code is available at https://github.com/mlzxy/devit.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is the problem of identifying inputs which are unrelated to the in-distribution task. The OOD detection performance when the in-distribution (ID) is ImageNet-1K is commonly being tested on a small range of test OOD datasets. We find that most of the currently used test OOD datasets, including datasets from the open set recognition (OSR) literature, have severe issues: In some cases more than 50% of the dataset contains objects belonging to one of the ID classes. These erroneous samples heavily distort the evaluation of OOD detectors. As a solution, we introduce with NINCO a novel test OOD dataset, each sample checked to be ID free, which with its fine-grained range of OOD classes allows for a detailed analysis of an OOD detector's strengths and failure modes, particularly when paired with a number of synthetic "OOD unit-tests". We provide detailed evaluations across a large set of architectures and OOD detection methods on NINCO and the unit-tests, revealing new insights about model weaknesses and the effects of pretraining on OOD detection performance. We provide code and data at https://github.com/j-cb/NINCO.

Ecological imbalance owing to rapid urbanization and deforestation has adversely affected the population of several wild animals. This loss of habitat has skewed the population of several non-human primate species like chimpanzees and macaques and has constrained them to co-exist in close proximity of human settlements, often leading to human-wildlife conflicts while competing for resources. For effective wildlife conservation and conflict management, regular monitoring of population and of conflicted regions is necessary. However, existing approaches like field visits for data collection and manual analysis by experts is resource intensive, tedious and time consuming, thus necessitating an automated, non-invasive, more efficient alternative like image based facial recognition. The challenge in individual identification arises due to unrelated factors like pose, lighting variations and occlusions due to the uncontrolled environments, that is further exacerbated by limited training data. Inspired by human perception, we propose to learn representations that are robust to such nuisance factors and capture the notion of similarity over the individual identity sub-manifolds. The proposed approach, Primate Face Identification (PFID), achieves this by training the network to distinguish between positive and negative pairs of images. The PFID loss augments the standard cross entropy loss with a pairwise loss to learn more discriminative and generalizable features, thus making it appropriate for other related identification tasks like open-set, closed set and verification. We report state-of-the-art accuracy on facial recognition of two primate species, rhesus macaques and chimpanzees under the four protocols of classification, verification, closed-set identification and open-set recognition.

Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation models associate vision and text to label pixels from an undefined set of classes using textual queries, providing versatile performance on novel datasets. However, large shifts between training and test domains degrade their performance, requiring fine-tuning for effective real-world applications. We introduce Semantic Library Adaptation (SemLA), a novel framework for training-free, test-time domain adaptation. SemLA leverages a library of LoRA-based adapters indexed with CLIP embeddings, dynamically merging the most relevant adapters based on proximity to the target domain in the embedding space. This approach constructs an ad-hoc model tailored to each specific input without additional training. Our method scales efficiently, enhances explainability by tracking adapter contributions, and inherently protects data privacy, making it ideal for sensitive applications. Comprehensive experiments on a 20-domain benchmark built over 10 standard datasets demonstrate SemLA's superior adaptability and performance across diverse settings, establishing a new standard in domain adaptation for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation.

Image geolocalization is the challenging task of predicting the geographic coordinates of origin for a given photo. It is an unsolved problem relying on the ability to combine visual clues with general knowledge about the world to make accurate predictions across geographies. We present https://huggingface.co/geolocal/StreetCLIP{StreetCLIP}, a robust, publicly available foundation model not only achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple open-domain image geolocalization benchmarks but also doing so in a zero-shot setting, outperforming supervised models trained on more than 4 million images. Our method introduces a meta-learning approach for generalized zero-shot learning by pretraining CLIP from synthetic captions, grounding CLIP in a domain of choice. We show that our method effectively transfers CLIP's generalized zero-shot capabilities to the domain of image geolocalization, improving in-domain generalized zero-shot performance without finetuning StreetCLIP on a fixed set of classes.

Compared to the wide array of advanced Monte Carlo methods supported by modern probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), PPL support for variational inference (VI) is less developed: users are typically limited to a predefined selection of variational objectives and gradient estimators, which are implemented monolithically (and without formal correctness arguments) in PPL backends. In this paper, we propose a more modular approach to supporting variational inference in PPLs, based on compositional program transformation. In our approach, variational objectives are expressed as programs, that may employ first-class constructs for computing densities of and expected values under user-defined models and variational families. We then transform these programs systematically into unbiased gradient estimators for optimizing the objectives they define. Our design enables modular reasoning about many interacting concerns, including automatic differentiation, density accumulation, tracing, and the application of unbiased gradient estimation strategies. Additionally, relative to existing support for VI in PPLs, our design increases expressiveness along three axes: (1) it supports an open-ended set of user-defined variational objectives, rather than a fixed menu of options; (2) it supports a combinatorial space of gradient estimation strategies, many not automated by today's PPLs; and (3) it supports a broader class of models and variational families, because it supports constructs for approximate marginalization and normalization (previously introduced only for Monte Carlo inference). We implement our approach in an extension to the Gen probabilistic programming system (genjax.vi, implemented in JAX), and evaluate on several deep generative modeling tasks, showing minimal performance overhead vs. hand-coded implementations and performance competitive with well-established open-source PPLs.

Localizing and recognizing objects in the open-ended physical world poses a long-standing challenge within the domain of machine perception. Recent methods have endeavored to address the issue by employing a class-agnostic mask (or box) proposal model, complemented by an open-vocabulary classifier (e.g., CLIP) using pre-extracted text embeddings. However, it is worth noting that these open-vocabulary recognition models still exhibit limitations in practical applications. On one hand, they rely on the provision of class names during testing, where the recognition performance heavily depends on this predefined set of semantic classes by users. On the other hand, when training with multiple datasets, human intervention is required to alleviate the label definition conflict between them. In this paper, we introduce the OmniScient Model (OSM), a novel Large Language Model (LLM) based mask classifier, as a straightforward and effective solution to the aforementioned challenges. Specifically, OSM predicts class labels in a generative manner, thus removing the supply of class names during both training and testing. It also enables cross-dataset training without any human interference, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities due to the world knowledge acquired from the LLM. By combining OSM with an off-the-shelf mask proposal model, we present promising results on various benchmarks, and demonstrate its effectiveness in handling novel concepts. Code/model are available at https://github.com/bytedance/OmniScient-Model.

Large-scale pre-trained Vision & Language (VL) models have shown remarkable performance in many applications, enabling replacing a fixed set of supported classes with zero-shot open vocabulary reasoning over (almost arbitrary) natural language prompts. However, recent works have uncovered a fundamental weakness of these models. For example, their difficulty to understand Visual Language Concepts (VLC) that go 'beyond nouns' such as the meaning of non-object words (e.g., attributes, actions, relations, states, etc.), or difficulty in performing compositional reasoning such as understanding the significance of the order of the words in a sentence. In this work, we investigate to which extent purely synthetic data could be leveraged to teach these models to overcome such shortcomings without compromising their zero-shot capabilities. We contribute Synthetic Visual Concepts (SyViC) - a million-scale synthetic dataset and data generation codebase allowing to generate additional suitable data to improve VLC understanding and compositional reasoning of VL models. Additionally, we propose a general VL finetuning strategy for effectively leveraging SyViC towards achieving these improvements. Our extensive experiments and ablations on VL-Checklist, Winoground, and ARO benchmarks demonstrate that it is possible to adapt strong pre-trained VL models with synthetic data significantly enhancing their VLC understanding (e.g. by 9.9% on ARO and 4.3% on VL-Checklist) with under 1% drop in their zero-shot accuracy.

The extreme multi-label classification (XMC) task aims at tagging content with a subset of labels from an extremely large label set. The label vocabulary is typically defined in advance by domain experts and assumed to capture all necessary tags. However in real world scenarios this label set, although large, is often incomplete and experts frequently need to refine it. To develop systems that simplify this process, we introduce the task of open vocabulary XMC (OXMC): given a piece of content, predict a set of labels, some of which may be outside of the known tag set. Hence, in addition to not having training data for some labels - as is the case in zero-shot classification - models need to invent some labels on-the-fly. We propose GROOV, a fine-tuned seq2seq model for OXMC that generates the set of labels as a flat sequence and is trained using a novel loss independent of predicted label order. We show the efficacy of the approach, experimenting with popular XMC datasets for which GROOV is able to predict meaningful labels outside the given vocabulary while performing on par with state-of-the-art solutions for known labels.

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect novel objects beyond a given set of base categories on which the detection model is trained. Recent OVOD methods focus on adapting the image-level pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to a region-level object detection task via, eg., region-level knowledge distillation, regional prompt learning, or region-text pre-training, to expand the detection vocabulary. These methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in recognizing regional visual concepts, but they are weak in exploiting the VLMs' powerful global scene understanding ability learned from the billion-scale image-level text descriptions. This limits their capability in detecting hard objects of small, blurred, or occluded appearance from novel/base categories, whose detection heavily relies on contextual information. To address this, we propose a novel approach, namely Simple Image-level Classification for Context-Aware Detection Scoring (SIC-CADS), to leverage the superior global knowledge yielded from CLIP for complementing the current OVOD models from a global perspective. The core of SIC-CADS is a multi-modal multi-label recognition (MLR) module that learns the object co-occurrence-based contextual information from CLIP to recognize all possible object categories in the scene. These image-level MLR scores can then be utilized to refine the instance-level detection scores of the current OVOD models in detecting those hard objects. This is verified by extensive empirical results on two popular benchmarks, OV-LVIS and OV-COCO, which show that SIC-CADS achieves significant and consistent improvement when combined with different types of OVOD models. Further, SIC-CADS also improves the cross-dataset generalization ability on Objects365 and OpenImages. The code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/SIC-CADS.

Vocal Bursts -- short, non-speech vocalizations that convey emotions, such as laughter, cries, sighs, moans, and groans -- are an often-overlooked aspect of speech emotion recognition, but an important aspect of human vocal communication. One barrier to study of these interesting vocalizations is a lack of large datasets. I am pleased to introduce the EmoGator dataset, which consists of 32,130 samples from 357 speakers, 16.9654 hours of audio; each sample classified into one of 30 distinct emotion categories by the speaker. Several different approaches to construct classifiers to identify emotion categories will be discussed, and directions for future research will be suggested. Data set is available for download from https://github.com/fredbuhl/EmoGator.

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD), detecting specific classes of objects using only their linguistic descriptions (e.g., class names) without any image samples, has garnered significant attention. However, in real-world applications, the target class concepts is often hard to describe in text and the only way to specify target objects is to provide their image examples, yet it is often challenging to obtain a good number of samples. Thus, there is a high demand from practitioners for few-shot object detection (FSOD). A natural question arises: Can the benefits of OVD extend to FSOD for object classes that are difficult to describe in text? Compared to traditional methods that learn only predefined classes (referred to in this paper as closed-set object detection, COD), can the extra cost of OVD be justified? To answer these questions, we propose a method to quantify the ``text-describability'' of object detection datasets using the zero-shot image classification accuracy with CLIP. This allows us to categorize various OD datasets with different text-describability and emprically evaluate the FSOD performance of OVD and COD methods within each category. Our findings reveal that: i) there is little difference between OVD and COD for object classes with low text-describability under equal conditions in OD pretraining; and ii) although OVD can learn from more diverse data than OD-specific data, thereby increasing the volume of training data, it can be counterproductive for classes with low-text-describability. These findings provide practitioners with valuable guidance amidst the recent advancements of OVD methods.

The goal of this paper is open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) x2013 building a model that can detect objects beyond the set of categories seen at training, thus enabling the user to specify categories of interest at inference without the need for model retraining. We adopt a standard two-stage object detector architecture, and explore three ways for specifying novel categories: via language descriptions, via image exemplars, or via a combination of the two. We make three contributions: first, we prompt a large language model (LLM) to generate informative language descriptions for object classes, and construct powerful text-based classifiers; second, we employ a visual aggregator on image exemplars that can ingest any number of images as input, forming vision-based classifiers; and third, we provide a simple method to fuse information from language descriptions and image exemplars, yielding a multi-modal classifier. When evaluating on the challenging LVIS open-vocabulary benchmark we demonstrate that: (i) our text-based classifiers outperform all previous OVOD works; (ii) our vision-based classifiers perform as well as text-based classifiers in prior work; (iii) using multi-modal classifiers perform better than either modality alone; and finally, (iv) our text-based and multi-modal classifiers yield better performance than a fully-supervised detector.

The Photometric LSST Astronomical Time Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC) is an open data challenge to classify simulated astronomical time-series data in preparation for observations from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will achieve first light in 2019 and commence its 10-year main survey in 2022. LSST will revolutionize our understanding of the changing sky, discovering and measuring millions of time-varying objects. In this challenge, we pose the question: how well can we classify objects in the sky that vary in brightness from simulated LSST time-series data, with all its challenges of non-representativity? In this note we explain the need for a data challenge to help classify such astronomical sources and describe the PLAsTiCC data set and Kaggle data challenge, noting that while the references are provided for context, they are not needed to participate in the challenge.

Traditional image classification requires a predefined list of semantic categories. In contrast, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) can sidestep this requirement by classifying images directly using natural language (e.g., answering the prompt "What is the main object in the image?"). Despite this remarkable capability, most existing studies on LMM classification performance are surprisingly limited in scope, often assuming a closed-world setting with a predefined set of categories. In this work, we address this gap by thoroughly evaluating LMM classification performance in a truly open-world setting. We first formalize the task and introduce an evaluation protocol, defining various metrics to assess the alignment between predicted and ground truth classes. We then evaluate 13 models across 10 benchmarks, encompassing prototypical, non-prototypical, fine-grained, and very fine-grained classes, demonstrating the challenges LMMs face in this task. Further analyses based on the proposed metrics reveal the types of errors LMMs make, highlighting challenges related to granularity and fine-grained capabilities, showing how tailored prompting and reasoning can alleviate them.

This work proposes POMP, a prompt pre-training method for vision-language models. Being memory and computation efficient, POMP enables the learned prompt to condense semantic information for a rich set of visual concepts with over twenty-thousand classes. Once pre-trained, the prompt with a strong transferable ability can be directly plugged into a variety of visual recognition tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection, to boost recognition performances in a zero-shot manner. Empirical evaluation shows that POMP achieves state-of-the-art performances on 21 downstream datasets, e.g., 67.0% average accuracy on 10 classification dataset (+3.1% compared to CoOp) and 84.4 hIoU on open-vocabulary Pascal VOC segmentation (+6.9 compared to ZSSeg).

Current closed-set instance segmentation models rely on pre-defined class labels for each mask during training and evaluation, largely limiting their ability to detect novel objects. Open-world instance segmentation (OWIS) models address this challenge by detecting unknown objects in a class-agnostic manner. However, previous OWIS approaches completely erase category information during training to keep the model's ability to generalize to unknown objects. In this work, we propose a novel training mechanism termed SegPrompt that uses category information to improve the model's class-agnostic segmentation ability for both known and unknown categories. In addition, the previous OWIS training setting exposes the unknown classes to the training set and brings information leakage, which is unreasonable in the real world. Therefore, we provide a new open-world benchmark closer to a real-world scenario by dividing the dataset classes into known-seen-unseen parts. For the first time, we focus on the model's ability to discover objects that never appear in the training set images. Experiments show that SegPrompt can improve the overall and unseen detection performance by 5.6% and 6.1% in AR on our new benchmark without affecting the inference efficiency. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on existing cross-dataset transfer and strongly supervised settings, leading to 5.5% and 12.3% relative improvement.

Open-vocabulary audio-language models, like CLAP, offer a promising approach for zero-shot audio classification (ZSAC) by enabling classification with any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language prompts. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to improve ZSAC with CLAP. Specifically, we shift from the conventional method of using prompts with abstract category labels (e.g., Sound of an organ) to prompts that describe sounds using their inherent descriptive features in a diverse context (e.g.,The organ's deep and resonant tones filled the cathedral.). To achieve this, we first propose ReCLAP, a CLAP model trained with rewritten audio captions for improved understanding of sounds in the wild. These rewritten captions describe each sound event in the original caption using their unique discriminative characteristics. ReCLAP outperforms all baselines on both multi-modal audio-text retrieval and ZSAC. Next, to improve zero-shot audio classification with ReCLAP, we propose prompt augmentation. In contrast to the traditional method of employing hand-written template prompts, we generate custom prompts for each unique label in the dataset. These custom prompts first describe the sound event in the label and then employ them in diverse scenes. Our proposed method improves ReCLAP's performance on ZSAC by 1%-18% and outperforms all baselines by 1% - 55%.

In-context learning (ICL) using large language models for tasks with many labels is challenging due to the limited context window, which makes it difficult to fit a sufficient number of examples in the prompt. In this paper, we use a pre-trained dense retrieval model to bypass this limitation, giving the model only a partial view of the full label space for each inference call. Testing with recent open-source LLMs (OPT, LLaMA), we set new state of the art performance in few-shot settings for three common intent classification datasets, with no finetuning. We also surpass fine-tuned performance on fine-grained sentiment classification in certain cases. We analyze the performance across number of in-context examples and different model scales, showing that larger models are necessary to effectively and consistently make use of larger context lengths for ICL. By running several ablations, we analyze the model's use of: a) the similarity of the in-context examples to the current input, b) the semantic content of the class names, and c) the correct correspondence between examples and labels. We demonstrate that all three are needed to varying degrees depending on the domain, contrary to certain recent works.

Open-vocabulary models are a promising new paradigm for image classification. Unlike traditional classification models, open-vocabulary models classify among any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language during inference. This natural language, called "prompts", typically consists of a set of hand-written templates (e.g., "a photo of a {}") which are completed with each of the category names. This work introduces a simple method to generate higher accuracy prompts, without relying on any explicit knowledge of the task domain and with far fewer hand-constructed sentences. To achieve this, we combine open-vocabulary models with large language models (LLMs) to create Customized Prompts via Language models (CuPL, pronounced "couple"). In particular, we leverage the knowledge contained in LLMs in order to generate many descriptive sentences that contain important discriminating characteristics of the image categories. This allows the model to place a greater importance on these regions in the image when making predictions. We find that this straightforward and general approach improves accuracy on a range of zero-shot image classification benchmarks, including over one percentage point gain on ImageNet. Finally, this simple baseline requires no additional training and remains completely zero-shot. Code available at https://github.com/sarahpratt/CuPL.

Navigating to a designated goal using visual information is a fundamental capability for intelligent robots. Most classical visual navigation methods are restricted to single-goal, single-modality, and closed set goal settings. To address the practical demands of multi-modal, open-vocabulary goal queries and multi-goal visual navigation, we propose LagMemo, a navigation system that leverages a language 3D Gaussian Splatting memory. During exploration, LagMemo constructs a unified 3D language memory. With incoming task goals, the system queries the memory, predicts candidate goal locations, and integrates a local perception-based verification mechanism to dynamically match and validate goals during navigation. For fair and rigorous evaluation, we curate GOAT-Core, a high-quality core split distilled from GOAT-Bench tailored to multi-modal open-vocabulary multi-goal visual navigation. Experimental results show that LagMemo's memory module enables effective multi-modal open-vocabulary goal localization, and that LagMemo outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multi-goal visual navigation. Project page: https://weekgoodday.github.io/lagmemo

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a challenging task that entails complex multi-modal reasoning. In contrast to multiple-choice VideoQA which aims to predict the answer given several options, the goal of open-ended VideoQA is to answer questions without restricting candidate answers. However, the majority of previous VideoQA models formulate open-ended VideoQA as a classification task to classify the video-question pairs into a fixed answer set, i.e., closed-vocabulary, which contains only frequent answers (e.g., top-1000 answers). This leads the model to be biased toward only frequent answers and fail to generalize on out-of-vocabulary answers. We hence propose a new benchmark, Open-vocabulary Video Question Answering (OVQA), to measure the generalizability of VideoQA models by considering rare and unseen answers. In addition, in order to improve the model's generalization power, we introduce a novel GNN-based soft verbalizer that enhances the prediction on rare and unseen answers by aggregating the information from their similar words. For evaluation, we introduce new baselines by modifying the existing (closed-vocabulary) open-ended VideoQA models and improve their performances by further taking into account rare and unseen answers. Our ablation studies and qualitative analyses demonstrate that our GNN-based soft verbalizer further improves the model performance, especially on rare and unseen answers. We hope that our benchmark OVQA can serve as a guide for evaluating the generalizability of VideoQA models and inspire future research. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/OVQA.

We introduce Granite Vision, a lightweight large language model with vision capabilities, specifically designed to excel in enterprise use cases, particularly in visual document understanding. Our model is trained on a comprehensive instruction-following dataset, including document-related tasks, such as content extraction from tables, charts, diagrams, sketches, and infographics, as well as general image tasks. The architecture of Granite Vision is centered around visual modality alignment with a decoder-only, 2 billion parameter Granite large language model. Additionally, we introduce a dedicated safety classification approach in test-time that leverages a sparse set of attention vectors to identify potential harmful inputs. Despite its lightweight architecture, Granite Vision achieves strong results in standard benchmarks related to visual document understanding, as well as on the LiveXiv benchmark, which is designed to avoid test set contamination by using a constantly updated corpus of recently published Arxiv papers. We are releasing the model under the Apache-2 license, allowing for both research and commercial use, while offering complete visibility into the training data and other relevant details. See https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/ for model weights.

Current scene graph datasets suffer from strong long-tail distributions of their predicate classes. Due to a very low number of some predicate classes in the test sets, no reliable metrics can be retrieved for the rarest classes. We construct a new panoptic scene graph dataset and a set of metrics that are designed as a benchmark for the predictive performance especially on rare predicate classes. To construct the new dataset, we propose a model-assisted annotation pipeline that efficiently finds rare predicate classes that are hidden in a large set of images like needles in a haystack. Contrary to prior scene graph datasets, Haystack contains explicit negative annotations, i.e. annotations that a given relation does not have a certain predicate class. Negative annotations are helpful especially in the field of scene graph generation and open up a whole new set of possibilities to improve current scene graph generation models. Haystack is 100% compatible with existing panoptic scene graph datasets and can easily be integrated with existing evaluation pipelines. Our dataset and code can be found here: https://lorjul.github.io/haystack/. It includes annotation files and simple to use scripts and utilities, to help with integrating our dataset in existing work.

Scene graph generation (SGG) is a fundamental task aimed at detecting visual relations between objects in an image. The prevailing SGG methods require all object classes to be given in the training set. Such a closed setting limits the practical application of SGG. In this paper, we introduce open-vocabulary scene graph generation, a novel, realistic and challenging setting in which a model is trained on a set of base object classes but is required to infer relations for unseen target object classes. To this end, we propose a two-step method that firstly pre-trains on large amounts of coarse-grained region-caption data and then leverages two prompt-based techniques to finetune the pre-trained model without updating its parameters. Moreover, our method can support inference over completely unseen object classes, which existing methods are incapable of handling. On extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, Visual Genome, GQA, and Open-Image, our method significantly outperforms recent, strong SGG methods on the setting of Ov-SGG, as well as on the conventional closed SGG.

Open-vocabulary 3D scene understanding (OV-3D) aims to localize and classify novel objects beyond the closed object classes. However, existing approaches and benchmarks primarily focus on the open vocabulary problem within the context of object classes, which is insufficient to provide a holistic evaluation to what extent a model understands the 3D scene. In this paper, we introduce a more challenging task called Generalized Open-Vocabulary 3D Scene Understanding (GOV-3D) to explore the open vocabulary problem beyond object classes. It encompasses an open and diverse set of generalized knowledge, expressed as linguistic queries of fine-grained and object-specific attributes. To this end, we contribute a new benchmark named OpenScan, which consists of 3D object attributes across eight representative linguistic aspects, including affordance, property, material, and more. We further evaluate state-of-the-art OV-3D methods on our OpenScan benchmark, and discover that these methods struggle to comprehend the abstract vocabularies of the GOV-3D task, a challenge that cannot be addressed by simply scaling up object classes during training. We highlight the limitations of existing methodologies and explore a promising direction to overcome the identified shortcomings. Data and code are available at https://github.com/YoujunZhao/OpenScan

Purpose: Hard-to-interpret Black-box Machine Learning (ML) were often used for early Alzheimer's Disease (AD) detection. Methods: To interpret eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) black-box models a workflow based on Shapley values was developed. All models were trained on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset and evaluated for an independent ADNI test set, as well as the external Australian Imaging and Lifestyle flagship study of Ageing (AIBL), and Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) datasets. Shapley values were compared to intuitively interpretable Decision Trees (DTs), and Logistic Regression (LR), as well as natural and permutation feature importances. To avoid the reduction of the explanation validity caused by correlated features, forward selection and aspect consolidation were implemented. Results: Some black-box models outperformed DTs and LR. The forward-selected features correspond to brain areas previously associated with AD. Shapley values identified biologically plausible associations with moderate to strong correlations with feature importances. The most important RF features to predict AD conversion were the volume of the amygdalae, and a cognitive test score. Good cognitive test performances and large brain volumes decreased the AD risk. The models trained using cognitive test scores significantly outperformed brain volumetric models (p<0.05). Cognitive Normal (CN) vs. AD models were successfully transferred to external datasets. Conclusion: In comparison to previous work, improved performances for ADNI and AIBL were achieved for CN vs. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) classification using brain volumes. The Shapley values and the feature importances showed moderate to strong correlations.

Recently, methods have been proposed for 3D open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. Such methods are able to segment scenes into arbitrary classes based on text descriptions provided during runtime. In this paper, we propose to the best of our knowledge the first algorithm for open-vocabulary panoptic segmentation in 3D scenes. Our algorithm, Panoptic Vision-Language Feature Fields (PVLFF), learns a semantic feature field of the scene by distilling vision-language features from a pretrained 2D model, and jointly fits an instance feature field through contrastive learning using 2D instance segments on input frames. Despite not being trained on the target classes, our method achieves panoptic segmentation performance similar to the state-of-the-art closed-set 3D systems on the HyperSim, ScanNet and Replica dataset and additionally outperforms current 3D open-vocabulary systems in terms of semantic segmentation. We ablate the components of our method to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model architecture. Our code will be available at https://github.com/ethz-asl/pvlff.

Scaling up representations for images or text has been extensively investigated in the past few years and has led to revolutions in learning vision and language. However, scalable representation for 3D objects and scenes is relatively unexplored. In this work, we present Uni3D, a 3D foundation model to explore the unified 3D representation at scale. Uni3D uses a 2D initialized ViT end-to-end pretrained to align the 3D point cloud features with the image-text aligned features. Via the simple architecture and pretext task, Uni3D can leverage abundant 2D pretrained models as initialization and image-text aligned models as the target, unlocking the great potential of 2D models and scaling-up strategies to the 3D world. We efficiently scale up Uni3D to one billion parameters, and set new records on a broad range of 3D tasks, such as zero-shot classification, few-shot classification, open-world understanding and part segmentation. We show that the strong Uni3D representation also enables applications such as 3D painting and retrieval in the wild. We believe that Uni3D provides a new direction for exploring both scaling up and efficiency of the representation in 3D domain.

Deep learning in general domains has constantly been extended to domain-specific tasks requiring the recognition of fine-grained characteristics. However, real-world applications for fine-grained tasks suffer from two challenges: a high reliance on expert knowledge for annotation and necessity of a versatile model for various downstream tasks in a specific domain (e.g., prediction of categories, bounding boxes, or pixel-wise annotations). Fortunately, the recent self-supervised learning (SSL) is a promising approach to pretrain a model without annotations, serving as an effective initialization for any downstream tasks. Since SSL does not rely on the presence of annotation, in general, it utilizes the large-scale unlabeled dataset, referred to as an open-set. In this sense, we introduce a novel Open-Set Self-Supervised Learning problem under the assumption that a large-scale unlabeled open-set is available, as well as the fine-grained target dataset, during a pretraining phase. In our problem setup, it is crucial to consider the distribution mismatch between the open-set and target dataset. Hence, we propose SimCore algorithm to sample a coreset, the subset of an open-set that has a minimum distance to the target dataset in the latent space. We demonstrate that SimCore significantly improves representation learning performance through extensive experimental settings, including eleven fine-grained datasets and seven open-sets in various downstream tasks.

Current deep learning methods are regarded as favorable if they empirically perform well on dedicated test sets. This mentality is seamlessly reflected in the resurfacing area of continual learning, where consecutively arriving data is investigated. The core challenge is framed as protecting previously acquired representations from being catastrophically forgotten. However, comparison of individual methods is nevertheless performed in isolation from the real world by monitoring accumulated benchmark test set performance. The closed world assumption remains predominant, i.e. models are evaluated on data that is guaranteed to originate from the same distribution as used for training. This poses a massive challenge as neural networks are well known to provide overconfident false predictions on unknown and corrupted instances. In this work we critically survey the literature and argue that notable lessons from open set recognition, identifying unknown examples outside of the observed set, and the adjacent field of active learning, querying data to maximize the expected performance gain, are frequently overlooked in the deep learning era. Hence, we propose a consolidated view to bridge continual learning, active learning and open set recognition in deep neural networks. Finally, the established synergies are supported empirically, showing joint improvement in alleviating catastrophic forgetting, querying data, selecting task orders, while exhibiting robust open world application.

A significant amount of research is focused on developing and evaluating large language models for a variety of code synthesis tasks. These include synthesizing code from natural language instructions, synthesizing tests from code, and synthesizing explanations of code. In contrast, the behavior of instructional code editing with LLMs is understudied. These are tasks in which the model is instructed to update a block of code provided in a prompt. The editing instruction may ask for a feature to added or removed, describe a bug and ask for a fix, ask for a different kind of solution, or many other common code editing tasks. We introduce a carefully crafted benchmark of code editing tasks and use it evaluate several cutting edge LLMs. Our evaluation exposes a significant gap between the capabilities of state-of-the-art open and closed models. For example, even GPT-3.5-Turbo is 8.8% better than the best open model at editing code. We also introduce a new, carefully curated, permissively licensed training set of code edits coupled with natural language instructions. Using this training set, we show that we can fine-tune open Code LLMs to significantly improve their code editing capabilities.

In the field of visual scene understanding, deep neural networks have made impressive advancements in various core tasks like segmentation, tracking, and detection. However, most approaches operate on the close-set assumption, meaning that the model can only identify pre-defined categories that are present in the training set. Recently, open vocabulary settings were proposed due to the rapid progress of vision language pre-training. These new approaches seek to locate and recognize categories beyond the annotated label space. The open vocabulary approach is more general, practical, and effective compared to weakly supervised and zero-shot settings. This paper provides a thorough review of open vocabulary learning, summarizing and analyzing recent developments in the field. In particular, we begin by comparing it to related concepts such as zero-shot learning, open-set recognition, and out-of-distribution detection. Then, we review several closely related tasks in the case of segmentation and detection, including long-tail problems, few-shot, and zero-shot settings. For the method survey, we first present the basic knowledge of detection and segmentation in close-set as the preliminary knowledge. Next, we examine various scenarios in which open vocabulary learning is used, identifying common design elements and core ideas. Then, we compare the recent detection and segmentation approaches in commonly used datasets and benchmarks. Finally, we conclude with insights, issues, and discussions regarding future research directions. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive literature review of open vocabulary learning. We keep tracing related works at https://github.com/jianzongwu/Awesome-Open-Vocabulary.

Discovering novel concepts in unlabelled datasets and in a continuous manner is an important desideratum of lifelong learners. In the literature such problems have been partially addressed under very restricted settings, where novel classes are learned by jointly accessing a related labelled set (e.g., NCD) or by leveraging only a supervisedly pre-trained model (e.g., class-iNCD). In this work we challenge the status quo in class-iNCD and propose a learning paradigm where class discovery occurs continuously and truly unsupervisedly, without needing any related labelled set. In detail, we propose to exploit the richer priors from strong self-supervised pre-trained models (PTM). To this end, we propose simple baselines, composed of a frozen PTM backbone and a learnable linear classifier, that are not only simple to implement but also resilient under longer learning scenarios. We conduct extensive empirical evaluation on a multitude of benchmarks and show the effectiveness of our proposed baselines when compared with sophisticated state-of-the-art methods. The code is open source.

In this work, we address the challenging and emergent problem of novel object detection (NOD), focusing on the accurate detection of both known and novel object categories during inference. Traditional object detection algorithms are inherently closed-set, limiting their capability to handle NOD. We present a novel approach to transform existing closed-set detectors into open-set detectors. This transformation is achieved by leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained foundational models, specifically CLIP and SAM, through our cooperative mechanism. Furthermore, by integrating this mechanism with state-of-the-art open-set detectors such as GDINO, we establish new benchmarks in object detection performance. Our method achieves 17.42 mAP in novel object detection and 42.08 mAP for known objects on the challenging LVIS dataset. Adapting our approach to the COCO OVD split, we surpass the current state-of-the-art by a margin of 7.2 AP_{50} for novel classes. Our code is available at https://github.com/rohit901/cooperative-foundational-models .

In the field of decision trees, most previous studies have difficulty ensuring the statistical optimality of a prediction of new data and suffer from overfitting because trees are usually used only to represent prediction functions to be constructed from given data. In contrast, some studies, including this paper, used the trees to represent stochastic data observation processes behind given data. Moreover, they derived the statistically optimal prediction, which is robust against overfitting, based on the Bayesian decision theory by assuming a prior distribution for the trees. However, these studies still have a problem in computing this Bayes optimal prediction because it involves an infeasible summation for all division patterns of a feature space, which is represented by the trees and some parameters. In particular, an open problem is a summation with respect to combinations of division axes, i.e., the assignment of features to inner nodes of the tree. We solve this by a Markov chain Monte Carlo method, whose step size is adaptively tuned according to a posterior distribution for the trees.

Panoptic Scene Graph Generation (PSG) aims to segment objects and recognize their relations, enabling the structured understanding of an image. Previous methods focus on predicting predefined object and relation categories, hence limiting their applications in the open world scenarios. With the rapid development of large multimodal models (LMMs), significant progress has been made in open-set object detection and segmentation, yet open-set relation prediction in PSG remains unexplored. In this paper, we focus on the task of open-set relation prediction integrated with a pretrained open-set panoptic segmentation model to achieve true open-set panoptic scene graph generation (OpenPSG). Our OpenPSG leverages LMMs to achieve open-set relation prediction in an autoregressive manner. We introduce a relation query transformer to efficiently extract visual features of object pairs and estimate the existence of relations between them. The latter can enhance the prediction efficiency by filtering irrelevant pairs. Finally, we design the generation and judgement instructions to perform open-set relation prediction in PSG autoregressively. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose the open-set PSG task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in open-set relation prediction and panoptic scene graph generation. Code is available at https://github.com/franciszzj/OpenPSG.

With recent dramatic increases in AI system capabilities, there has been growing interest in utilizing machine learning for reasoning-heavy, quantitative tasks, particularly mathematics. While there are many resources capturing mathematics at the high-school, undergraduate, and graduate level, there are far fewer resources available that align with the level of difficulty and open endedness encountered by professional mathematicians working on open problems. To address this, we introduce a new collection of datasets, the Algebraic Combinatorics Dataset Repository (ACD Repo), representing either foundational results or open problems in algebraic combinatorics, a subfield of mathematics that studies discrete structures arising from abstract algebra. Further differentiating our dataset collection is the fact that it aims at the conjecturing process. Each dataset includes an open-ended research-level question and a large collection of examples (up to 10M in some cases) from which conjectures should be generated. We describe all nine datasets, the different ways machine learning models can be applied to them (e.g., training with narrow models followed by interpretability analysis or program synthesis with LLMs), and discuss some of the challenges involved in designing datasets like these.

Machine learning has achieved remarkable success in many applications. However, existing studies are largely based on the closed-world assumption, which assumes that the environment is stationary, and the model is fixed once deployed. In many real-world applications, this fundamental and rather naive assumption may not hold because an open environment is complex, dynamic, and full of unknowns. In such cases, rejecting unknowns, discovering novelties, and then incrementally learning them, could enable models to be safe and evolve continually as biological systems do. This paper provides a holistic view of open-world machine learning by investigating unknown rejection, novel class discovery, and class-incremental learning in a unified paradigm. The challenges, principles, and limitations of current methodologies are discussed in detail. Finally, we discuss several potential directions for future research. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to the emerging open-world machine learning paradigm, to help researchers build more powerful AI systems in their respective fields, and to promote the development of artificial general intelligence.

In order to properly train a machine learning model, data must be properly collected. To guarantee a proper data collection, verifying that the collected data set holds certain properties is a possible solution. For example, guaranteeing that the data set contains samples across the whole input space, or that the data set is balanced w.r.t. different classes. We present a formal approach for verifying a set of arbitrarily stated properties over a data set. The proposed approach relies on the transformation of the data set into a first order logic formula, which can be later verified w.r.t. the different properties also stated in the same logic. A prototype tool, which uses the z3 solver, has been developed; the prototype can take as an input a set of properties stated in a formal language and formally verify a given data set w.r.t. to the given set of properties. Preliminary experimental results show the feasibility and performance of the proposed approach, and furthermore the flexibility for expressing properties of interest.

In this paper, we present an open-set object detector, called Grounding DINO, by marrying Transformer-based detector DINO with grounded pre-training, which can detect arbitrary objects with human inputs such as category names or referring expressions. The key solution of open-set object detection is introducing language to a closed-set detector for open-set concept generalization. To effectively fuse language and vision modalities, we conceptually divide a closed-set detector into three phases and propose a tight fusion solution, which includes a feature enhancer, a language-guided query selection, and a cross-modality decoder for cross-modality fusion. While previous works mainly evaluate open-set object detection on novel categories, we propose to also perform evaluations on referring expression comprehension for objects specified with attributes. Grounding DINO performs remarkably well on all three settings, including benchmarks on COCO, LVIS, ODinW, and RefCOCO/+/g. Grounding DINO achieves a 52.5 AP on the COCO detection zero-shot transfer benchmark, i.e., without any training data from COCO. It sets a new record on the ODinW zero-shot benchmark with a mean 26.1 AP. Code will be available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/GroundingDINO.

While the history of machine learning so far largely encompasses a series of problems posed by researchers and algorithms that learn their solutions, an important question is whether the problems themselves can be generated by the algorithm at the same time as they are being solved. Such a process would in effect build its own diverse and expanding curricula, and the solutions to problems at various stages would become stepping stones towards solving even more challenging problems later in the process. The Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET) algorithm introduced in this paper does just that: it pairs the generation of environmental challenges and the optimization of agents to solve those challenges. It simultaneously explores many different paths through the space of possible problems and solutions and, critically, allows these stepping-stone solutions to transfer between problems if better, catalyzing innovation. The term open-ended signifies the intriguing potential for algorithms like POET to continue to create novel and increasingly complex capabilities without bound. Our results show that POET produces a diverse range of sophisticated behaviors that solve a wide range of environmental challenges, many of which cannot be solved by direct optimization alone, or even through a direct-path curriculum-building control algorithm introduced to highlight the critical role of open-endedness in solving ambitious challenges. The ability to transfer solutions from one environment to another proves essential to unlocking the full potential of the system as a whole, demonstrating the unpredictable nature of fortuitous stepping stones. We hope that POET will inspire a new push towards open-ended discovery across many domains, where algorithms like POET can blaze a trail through their interesting possible manifestations and solutions.

Recent work has shown the immense potential of synthetically generated datasets for training large language models (LLMs), especially for acquiring targeted skills. Current large-scale math instruction tuning datasets such as MetaMathQA (Yu et al., 2024) and MAmmoTH (Yue et al., 2024) are constructed using outputs from closed-source LLMs with commercially restrictive licenses. A key reason limiting the use of open-source LLMs in these data generation pipelines has been the wide gap between the mathematical skills of the best closed-source LLMs, such as GPT-4, and the best open-source LLMs. Building on the recent progress in open-source LLMs, our proposed prompting novelty, and some brute-force scaling, we construct OpenMathInstruct-1, a math instruction tuning dataset with 1.8M problem-solution pairs. The dataset is constructed by synthesizing code-interpreter solutions for GSM8K and MATH, two popular math reasoning benchmarks, using the recently released and permissively licensed Mixtral model. Our best model, OpenMath-CodeLlama-70B, trained on a subset of OpenMathInstruct-1, achieves a score of 84.6% on GSM8K and 50.7% on MATH, which is competitive with the best gpt-distilled models. We release our code, models, and the OpenMathInstruct-1 dataset under a commercially permissive license.

The categories of open learners (due to Fong, Spivak and Tuy\'eras) and open games (due to the present author, Ghani, Winschel and Zahn) bear a very striking and unexpected similarity. The purpose of this short note is to prove that there is a faithful symmetric monoidal functor from the former to the latter, which means that any supervised neural network (without feedback or other complicating features) can be seen as an open game in a canonical way. Roughly, each parameter is controlled by a different player, and the game's best response relation encodes the dynamics of gradient descent. We suggest paths for further work exploiting the link.

Open weight models, which are ubiquitous, rarely provide access to their training data or loss function. This makes modifying such models for tasks such as pruning or unlearning constrained by this unavailability an active area of research. Existing techniques typically require gradients or ground-truth labels, rendering them infeasible in settings with limited computational resources. In this work, we investigate the fundamental question of identifying components that are critical to the model's predictive performance, without access to either gradients or the loss function, and with only distributional access such as synthetic data. We theoretically demonstrate that the global reconstruction error is linearly bounded by local reconstruction errors for Lipschitz-continuous networks such as CNNs and well-trained Transformers (which, contrary to existing literature, we find exhibit Lipschitz continuity). This motivates using the locally reconstructive behavior of component subsets to quantify their global importance, via a metric that we term Subset Fidelity. In the uncorrelated features setting, selecting individual components via their Subset Fidelity scores is optimal, which we use to propose ModHiFi, an algorithm for model modification that requires no training data or loss function access. ModHiFi-P, for structured pruning, achieves an 11% speedup over the current state of the art on ImageNet models and competitive performance on language models. ModHiFi-U, for classwise unlearning, achieves complete unlearning on CIFAR-10 without fine-tuning and demonstrates competitive performance on Swin Transformers.

Novel Class Discovery (NCD) is a growing field where we are given during training a labeled set of known classes and an unlabeled set of different classes that must be discovered. In recent years, many methods have been proposed to address this problem, and the field has begun to mature. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art NCD methods. We start by formally defining the NCD problem and introducing important notions. We then give an overview of the different families of approaches, organized by the way they transfer knowledge from the labeled set to the unlabeled set. We find that they either learn in two stages, by first extracting knowledge from the labeled data only and then applying it to the unlabeled data, or in one stage by conjointly learning on both sets. For each family, we describe their general principle and detail a few representative methods. Then, we briefly introduce some new related tasks inspired by the increasing number of NCD works. We also present some common tools and techniques used in NCD, such as pseudo labeling, self-supervised learning and contrastive learning. Finally, to help readers unfamiliar with the NCD problem differentiate it from other closely related domains, we summarize some of the closest areas of research and discuss their main differences.

In this technical report, we introduce OpenR, an open-source framework designed to integrate key components for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). OpenR unifies data acquisition, reinforcement learning training (both online and offline), and non-autoregressive decoding into a cohesive software platform. Our goal is to establish an open-source platform and community to accelerate the development of LLM reasoning. Inspired by the success of OpenAI's o1 model, which demonstrated improved reasoning abilities through step-by-step reasoning and reinforcement learning, OpenR integrates test-time compute, reinforcement learning, and process supervision to improve reasoning in LLMs. Our work is the first to provide an open-source framework that explores the core techniques of OpenAI's o1 model with reinforcement learning, achieving advanced reasoning capabilities beyond traditional autoregressive methods. We demonstrate the efficacy of OpenR by evaluating it on the MATH dataset, utilising publicly available data and search methods. Our initial experiments confirm substantial gains, with relative improvements in reasoning and performance driven by test-time computation and reinforcement learning through process reward models. The OpenR framework, including code, models, and datasets, is accessible at https://openreasoner.github.io.

Recent work on mini-batch consistency (MBC) for set functions has brought attention to the need for sequentially processing and aggregating chunks of a partitioned set while guaranteeing the same output for all partitions. However, existing constraints on MBC architectures lead to models with limited expressive power. Additionally, prior work has not addressed how to deal with large sets during training when the full set gradient is required. To address these issues, we propose a Universally MBC (UMBC) class of set functions which can be used in conjunction with arbitrary non-MBC components while still satisfying MBC, enabling a wider range of function classes to be used in MBC settings. Furthermore, we propose an efficient MBC training algorithm which gives an unbiased approximation of the full set gradient and has a constant memory overhead for any set size for both train- and test-time. We conduct extensive experiments including image completion, text classification, unsupervised clustering, and cancer detection on high-resolution images to verify the efficiency and efficacy of our scalable set encoding framework. Our code is available at github.com/jeffwillette/umbc

Set representation has become ubiquitous in deep learning for modeling the inductive bias of neural networks that are insensitive to the input order. DeepSets is the most widely used neural network architecture for set representation. It involves embedding each set element into a latent space with dimension L, followed by a sum pooling to obtain a whole-set embedding, and finally mapping the whole-set embedding to the output. In this work, we investigate the impact of the dimension L on the expressive power of DeepSets. Previous analyses either oversimplified high-dimensional features to be one-dimensional features or were limited to analytic activations, thereby diverging from practical use or resulting in L that grows exponentially with the set size N and feature dimension D. To investigate the minimal value of L that achieves sufficient expressive power, we present two set-element embedding layers: (a) linear + power activation (LP) and (b) linear + exponential activations (LE). We demonstrate that L being poly(N, D) is sufficient for set representation using both embedding layers. We also provide a lower bound of L for the LP embedding layer. Furthermore, we extend our results to permutation-equivariant set functions and the complex field.

Traditional machine learning systems are deployed under the closed-world setting, which requires the entire training data before the offline training process. However, real-world applications often face the incoming new classes, and a model should incorporate them continually. The learning paradigm is called Class-Incremental Learning (CIL). We propose a Python toolbox that implements several key algorithms for class-incremental learning to ease the burden of researchers in the machine learning community. The toolbox contains implementations of a number of founding works of CIL such as EWC and iCaRL, but also provides current state-of-the-art algorithms that can be used for conducting novel fundamental research. This toolbox, named PyCIL for Python Class-Incremental Learning, is available at https://github.com/G-U-N/PyCIL

Medical language models (MLMs) have become pivotal in advancing medical natural language processing. However, prior models that rely on pre-training or supervised fine-tuning often exhibit low data efficiency and limited practicality in real-world clinical applications. While OpenAIs O1 highlights test-time scaling in mathematics, attempts to replicate this approach in medicine typically distill responses from GPT-series models to open-source models, focusing primarily on multiple-choice tasks. This strategy, though straightforward, neglects critical concerns like data privacy and realistic deployment in clinical settings. In this work, we present a deployable, small-scale medical language model, \mone, designed for long-chain reasoning in clinical tasks using a self-evolution paradigm. Starting with a seed dataset of around 8,000 instances spanning five domains and 16 datasets, we prompt a base policy model to perform Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to construct verifiable reasoning chains. Each reasoning step is assigned an evolution rollout value, allowing verified trajectories to train the policy model and the reward model. During inference, the policy model generates multiple responses, and the reward model selects the one with the highest reward score. Experiments on eleven evaluation datasets demonstrate that \mone outperforms prior open-source models by 2 points, with the addition of the reward model further boosting performance (sim13 points), surpassing GPT-4o-mini. Code and data are available at https://github.com/pixas/MedSSS.

Math word problems (MWPs) are critical K-12 educational tools, and customizing them to students' interests and ability levels can increase learning outcomes. However, teachers struggle to find time to customize MWPs for each student given large class sizes and increasing burnout. We propose that LLMs can support math education by generating MWPs customized to student interests and math education standards. To this end, we use a joint human expert-LLM judge approach to evaluate over 11,000 MWPs generated by open and closed LLMs and develop the first teacher-annotated dataset for standards-aligned educational MWP generation. We show the value of our data by using it to train a 12B open model that matches the performance of larger and more capable open models. We also use our teacher-annotated data to train a text classifier that enables a 30B open LLM to outperform existing closed baselines without any training. Next, we show our models' MWPs are more similar to human-written MWPs than those from existing models. We conclude by conducting the first study of customized LLM-generated MWPs with grade school students, finding they perform similarly on our models' MWPs relative to human-written MWPs but consistently prefer our customized MWPs.

Set function learning has emerged as a crucial area in machine learning, addressing the challenge of modeling functions that take sets as inputs. Unlike traditional machine learning that involves fixed-size input vectors where the order of features matters, set function learning demands methods that are invariant to permutations of the input set, presenting a unique and complex problem. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current development in set function learning, covering foundational theories, key methodologies, and diverse applications. We categorize and discuss existing approaches, focusing on deep learning approaches, such as DeepSets and Set Transformer based methods, as well as other notable alternative methods beyond deep learning, offering a complete view of current models. We also introduce various applications and relevant datasets, such as point cloud processing and multi-label classification, highlighting the significant progress achieved by set function learning methods in these domains. Finally, we conclude by summarizing the current state of set function learning approaches and identifying promising future research directions, aiming to guide and inspire further advancements in this promising field.

The expansion of machine learning into dynamic environments presents challenges in handling open-world problems where label shift, covariate shift, and unknown classes emerge. Post-training methods have been explored to address these challenges, adapting models to newly emerging data. However, these methods struggle when the initial pre-training is performed on class-imbalanced datasets, limiting generalization to minority classes. To address this, we propose a method that effectively handles open-world problems even when pre-training is conducted on imbalanced data. Our contrastive-based pre-training approach enhances classification performance, particularly for underrepresented classes. Our post-training mechanism generates reliable pseudo-labels, improving model robustness against open-world problems. We also introduce selective activation criteria to optimize the post-training process, reducing unnecessary computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art adaptation techniques in both accuracy and efficiency across diverse open-world scenarios.

Conventional supervised learning typically assumes that the learning task can be solved by learning a single function since the data is sampled from a fixed distribution. However, this assumption is invalid in open-ended environments where no task-level data partitioning is available. In this paper, we present a novel supervised learning framework of learning from open-ended data, which is modeled as data implicitly sampled from multiple domains with the data in each domain obeying a domain-specific target function. Since different domains may possess distinct target functions, open-ended data inherently requires multiple functions to capture all its input-output relations, rendering training a single global model problematic. To address this issue, we devise an Open-ended Supervised Learning (OSL) framework, of which the key component is a subjective function that allocates the data among multiple candidate models to resolve the "conflict" between the data from different domains, exhibiting a natural hierarchy. We theoretically analyze the learnability and the generalization error of OSL, and empirically validate its efficacy in both open-ended regression and classification tasks.

We present SetExpander, a corpus-based system for expanding a seed set of terms into a more complete set of terms that belong to the same semantic class. SetExpander implements an iterative end-to end workflow for term set expansion. It enables users to easily select a seed set of terms, expand it, view the expanded set, validate it, re-expand the validated set and store it, thus simplifying the extraction of domain-specific fine-grained semantic classes. SetExpander has been used for solving real-life use cases including integration in an automated recruitment system and an issues and defects resolution system. A video demo of SetExpander is available at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1e545bB87Autsch36DjnJHmq3HWfSd1Rv (some images were blurred for privacy reasons).

Monocular 3D object detection is valuable for various applications such as robotics and AR/VR. Existing methods are confined to closed-set settings, where the training and testing sets consist of the same scenes and/or object categories. However, real-world applications often introduce new environments and novel object categories, posing a challenge to these methods. In this paper, we address monocular 3D object detection in an open-set setting and introduce the first end-to-end 3D Monocular Open-set Object Detector (3D-MOOD). We propose to lift the open-set 2D detection into 3D space through our designed 3D bounding box head, enabling end-to-end joint training for both 2D and 3D tasks to yield better overall performance. We condition the object queries with geometry prior and overcome the generalization for 3D estimation across diverse scenes. To further improve performance, we design the canonical image space for more efficient cross-dataset training. We evaluate 3D-MOOD on both closed-set settings (Omni3D) and open-set settings (Omni3D to Argoverse 2, ScanNet), and achieve new state-of-the-art results. Code and models are available at royyang0714.github.io/3D-MOOD.

There is growing evidence that pretraining on high quality, carefully thought-out tokens such as code or mathematics plays an important role in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. For example, Minerva, a PaLM model finetuned on billions of tokens of mathematical documents from arXiv and the web, reported dramatically improved performance on problems that require quantitative reasoning. However, because all known open source web datasets employ preprocessing that does not faithfully preserve mathematical notation, the benefits of large scale training on quantitive web documents are unavailable to the research community. We introduce OpenWebMath, an open dataset inspired by these works containing 14.7B tokens of mathematical webpages from Common Crawl. We describe in detail our method for extracting text and LaTeX content and removing boilerplate from HTML documents, as well as our methods for quality filtering and deduplication. Additionally, we run small-scale experiments by training 1.4B parameter language models on OpenWebMath, showing that models trained on 14.7B tokens of our dataset surpass the performance of models trained on over 20x the amount of general language data. We hope that our dataset, openly released on the Hugging Face Hub, will help spur advances in the reasoning abilities of large language models.

We resolve an open problem of Hanneke on the subject of universally consistent online learning with non-i.i.d. processes and unbounded losses. The notion of an optimistically universal learning rule was defined by Hanneke in an effort to study learning theory under minimal assumptions. A given learning rule is said to be optimistically universal if it achieves a low long-run average loss whenever the data generating process makes this goal achievable by some learning rule. Hanneke posed as an open problem whether, for every unbounded loss, the family of processes admitting universal learning are precisely those having a finite number of distinct values almost surely. In this paper, we completely resolve this problem, showing that this is indeed the case. As a consequence, this also offers a dramatically simpler formulation of an optimistically universal learning rule for any unbounded loss: namely, the simple memorization rule already suffices. Our proof relies on constructing random measurable partitions of the instance space and could be of independent interest for solving other open questions. We extend the results to the non-realizable setting thereby providing an optimistically universal Bayes consistent learning rule.

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning through reinforcement learning rely on annotated datasets for verifiable rewards, which may limit models' ability to surpass human-level performance. While self-play offers a promising alternative, existing approaches depend on external verifiers or cannot learn open-endedly. We present Open-Ended Self-Improving Reasoner (OpenSIR), a self-play framework where an LLM learns to generate and solve novel problems by alternating teacher and student roles without external supervision. To generate novel problems, OpenSIR optimises for both difficulty and diversity, rewarding problems that challenge appropriately while exploring distinct concepts, enabling open-ended mathematical discovery. Starting from a single trivial seed problem, OpenSIR substantially improves instruction models: Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct advances from 73.9 to 78.3 on GSM8K, and from 28.8 to 34.4 on College Math, while Gemma-2-2B-Instruct rises from 38.5 to 58.7 on GSM8K. Our analyses reveal that OpenSIR achieves open-ended learning through co-evolving teacher-student roles that adaptively calibrate difficulty and drive diverse exploration, progressing autonomously from basic to advanced mathematics.

We study the new task of class-incremental Novel Class Discovery (class-iNCD), which refers to the problem of discovering novel categories in an unlabelled data set by leveraging a pre-trained model that has been trained on a labelled data set containing disjoint yet related categories. Apart from discovering novel classes, we also aim at preserving the ability of the model to recognize previously seen base categories. Inspired by rehearsal-based incremental learning methods, in this paper we propose a novel approach for class-iNCD which prevents forgetting of past information about the base classes by jointly exploiting base class feature prototypes and feature-level knowledge distillation. We also propose a self-training clustering strategy that simultaneously clusters novel categories and trains a joint classifier for both the base and novel classes. This makes our method able to operate in a class-incremental setting. Our experiments, conducted on three common benchmarks, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/OatmealLiu/class-iNCD

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVOD) aims to recognize novel objects whose categories are not included in the training set. In order to classify these unseen classes during training, many OVOD frameworks leverage the zero-shot capability of largely pretrained vision and language models, such as CLIP. To further improve generalization on the unseen novel classes, several approaches proposed to additionally train with pseudo region labeling on the external data sources that contain a substantial number of novel category labels beyond the existing training data. Albeit its simplicity, these pseudo-labeling methods still exhibit limited improvement with regard to the truly unseen novel classes that were not pseudo-labeled. In this paper, we present a novel, yet simple technique that helps generalization on the overall distribution of novel classes. Inspired by our observation that numerous novel classes reside within the convex hull constructed by the base (seen) classes in the CLIP embedding space, we propose to synthesize proxy-novel classes approximating novel classes via linear mixup between a pair of base classes. By training our detector with these synthetic proxy-novel classes, we effectively explore the embedding space of novel classes. The experimental results on various OVOD benchmarks such as LVIS and COCO demonstrate superior performance on novel classes compared to the other state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/ProxyDet.

The Open Images Dataset contains approximately 9 million images and is a widely accepted dataset for computer vision research. As is common practice for large datasets, the annotations are not exhaustive, with bounding boxes and attribute labels for only a subset of the classes in each image. In this paper, we present a new set of annotations on a subset of the Open Images dataset called the MIAP (More Inclusive Annotations for People) subset, containing bounding boxes and attributes for all of the people visible in those images. The attributes and labeling methodology for the MIAP subset were designed to enable research into model fairness. In addition, we analyze the original annotation methodology for the person class and its subclasses, discussing the resulting patterns in order to inform future annotation efforts. By considering both the original and exhaustive annotation sets, researchers can also now study how systematic patterns in training annotations affect modeling.

Before deployment in the real-world deep neural networks require thorough evaluation of how they handle both knowns, inputs represented in the training data, and unknowns (anomalies). This is especially important for scene understanding tasks with safety critical applications, such as in autonomous driving. Existing datasets allow evaluation of only knowns or unknowns - but not both, which is required to establish "in the wild" suitability of deep neural network models. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel anomaly segmentation dataset, ISSU, that features a diverse set of anomaly inputs from cluttered real-world environments. The dataset is twice larger than existing anomaly segmentation datasets, and provides a training, validation and test set for controlled in-domain evaluation. The test set consists of a static and temporal part, with the latter comprised of videos. The dataset provides annotations for both closed-set (knowns) and anomalies, enabling closed-set and open-set evaluation. The dataset covers diverse conditions, such as domain and cross-sensor shift, illumination variation and allows ablation of anomaly detection methods with respect to these variations. Evaluation results of current state-of-the-art methods confirm the need for improvements especially in domain-generalization, small and large object segmentation.

Open-vocabulary object detection aims to provide object detectors trained on a fixed set of object categories with the generalizability to detect objects described by arbitrary text queries. Previous methods adopt knowledge distillation to extract knowledge from Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models (PVLMs) and transfer it to detectors. However, due to the non-adaptive proposal cropping and single-level feature mimicking processes, they suffer from information destruction during knowledge extraction and inefficient knowledge transfer. To remedy these limitations, we propose an Object-Aware Distillation Pyramid (OADP) framework, including an Object-Aware Knowledge Extraction (OAKE) module and a Distillation Pyramid (DP) mechanism. When extracting object knowledge from PVLMs, the former adaptively transforms object proposals and adopts object-aware mask attention to obtain precise and complete knowledge of objects. The latter introduces global and block distillation for more comprehensive knowledge transfer to compensate for the missing relation information in object distillation. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvement compared to current methods. Especially on the MS-COCO dataset, our OADP framework reaches 35.6 mAP^{N}_{50}, surpassing the current state-of-the-art method by 3.3 mAP^{N}_{50}. Code is released at https://github.com/LutingWang/OADP.

Mathematical reasoning continues to be a critical challenge in large language model (LLM) development with significant interest. However, most of the cutting-edge progress in mathematical reasoning with LLMs has become closed-source due to lack of access to training data. This lack of data access limits researchers from understanding the impact of different choices for synthesizing and utilizing the data. With the goal of creating a high-quality finetuning (SFT) dataset for math reasoning, we conduct careful ablation experiments on data synthesis using the recently released Llama3.1 family of models. Our experiments show that: (a) solution format matters, with excessively verbose solutions proving detrimental to SFT performance, (b) data generated by a strong teacher outperforms on-policy data generated by a weak student model, (c) SFT is robust to low-quality solutions, allowing for imprecise data filtering, and (d) question diversity is crucial for achieving data scaling gains. Based on these insights, we create the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset, which consists of 14M question-solution pairs (approx 600K unique questions), making it nearly eight times larger than the previous largest open-source math reasoning dataset. Finetuning the Llama-3.1-8B-Base using OpenMathInstruct-2 outperforms Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on MATH by an absolute 15.9\% (51.9\% rightarrow 67.8\%). Finally, to accelerate the open-source efforts, we release the code, the finetuned models, and the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset under a commercially permissive license.

Open-Vocabulary Segmentation (OVS) aims to segment classes that are not present in the training dataset. However, most existing studies assume that the training data is fixed in advance, overlooking more practical scenarios where new datasets are continuously collected over time. To address this, we first analyze how existing OVS models perform under such conditions. In this context, we explore several approaches such as retraining, fine-tuning, and continual learning but find that each of them has clear limitations. To address these issues, we propose ConOVS, a novel continual learning method based on a Mixture-of-Experts framework. ConOVS dynamically combines expert decoders based on the probability that an input sample belongs to the distribution of each incremental dataset. Through extensive experiments, we show that ConOVS consistently outperforms existing methods across pre-training, incremental, and zero-shot test datasets, effectively expanding the recognition capabilities of OVS models when data is collected sequentially.

Recent works on open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation show strong promise, but at the cost of slow inference speed and high computation requirements. This high computation cost is typically due to their heavy reliance on 3D clip features, which require computationally expensive 2D foundation models like Segment Anything (SAM) and CLIP for multi-view aggregation into 3D. As a consequence, this hampers their applicability in many real-world applications that require both fast and accurate predictions. To this end, we propose a fast yet accurate open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation approach, named Open-YOLO 3D, that effectively leverages only 2D object detection from multi-view RGB images for open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation. We address this task by generating class-agnostic 3D masks for objects in the scene and associating them with text prompts. We observe that the projection of class-agnostic 3D point cloud instances already holds instance information; thus, using SAM might only result in redundancy that unnecessarily increases the inference time. We empirically find that a better performance of matching text prompts to 3D masks can be achieved in a faster fashion with a 2D object detector. We validate our Open-YOLO 3D on two benchmarks, ScanNet200 and Replica, under two scenarios: (i) with ground truth masks, where labels are required for given object proposals, and (ii) with class-agnostic 3D proposals generated from a 3D proposal network. Our Open-YOLO 3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets while obtaining up to sim16times speedup compared to the best existing method in literature. On ScanNet200 val. set, our Open-YOLO 3D achieves mean average precision (mAP) of 24.7\% while operating at 22 seconds per scene. Code and model are available at github.com/aminebdj/OpenYOLO3D.

Curriculum design is a fundamental component of education. For example, when we learn mathematics at school, we build upon our knowledge of addition to learn multiplication. These and other concepts must be mastered before our first algebra lesson, which also reinforces our addition and multiplication skills. Designing a curriculum for teaching either a human or a machine shares the underlying goal of maximizing knowledge transfer from earlier to later tasks, while also minimizing forgetting of learned tasks. Prior research on curriculum design for image classification focuses on the ordering of training examples during a single offline task. Here, we investigate the effect of the order in which multiple distinct tasks are learned in a sequence. We focus on the online class-incremental continual learning setting, where algorithms or humans must learn image classes one at a time during a single pass through a dataset. We find that curriculum consistently influences learning outcomes for humans and for multiple continual machine learning algorithms across several benchmark datasets. We introduce a novel-object recognition dataset for human curriculum learning experiments and observe that curricula that are effective for humans are highly correlated with those that are effective for machines. As an initial step towards automated curriculum design for online class-incremental learning, we propose a novel algorithm, dubbed Curriculum Designer (CD), that designs and ranks curricula based on inter-class feature similarities. We find significant overlap between curricula that are empirically highly effective and those that are highly ranked by our CD. Our study establishes a framework for further research on teaching humans and machines to learn continuously using optimized curricula.

A coreset is a tiny weighted subset of an input set, that closely resembles the loss function, with respect to a certain set of queries. Coresets became prevalent in machine learning as they have shown to be advantageous for many applications. While coreset research is an active research area, unfortunately, coresets are constructed in a problem-dependent manner, where for each problem, a new coreset construction algorithm is usually suggested, a process that may take time or may be hard for new researchers in the field. Even the generic frameworks require additional (problem-dependent) computations or proofs to be done by the user. Besides, many problems do not have (provable) small coresets, limiting their applicability. To this end, we suggest an automatic practical framework for constructing coresets, which requires (only) the input data and the desired cost function from the user, without the need for any other task-related computation to be done by the user. To do so, we reduce the problem of approximating a loss function to an instance of vector summation approximation, where the vectors we aim to sum are loss vectors of a specific subset of the queries, such that we aim to approximate the image of the function on this subset. We show that while this set is limited, the coreset is quite general. An extensive experimental study on various machine learning applications is also conducted. Finally, we provide a ``plug and play" style implementation, proposing a user-friendly system that can be easily used to apply coresets for many problems. Full open source code can be found at https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset{https://github.com/alaamaalouf/AutoCoreset}. We believe that these contributions enable future research and easier use and applications of coresets.

Many machine learning tasks such as multiple instance learning, 3D shape recognition, and few-shot image classification are defined on sets of instances. Since solutions to such problems do not depend on the order of elements of the set, models used to address them should be permutation invariant. We present an attention-based neural network module, the Set Transformer, specifically designed to model interactions among elements in the input set. The model consists of an encoder and a decoder, both of which rely on attention mechanisms. In an effort to reduce computational complexity, we introduce an attention scheme inspired by inducing point methods from sparse Gaussian process literature. It reduces the computation time of self-attention from quadratic to linear in the number of elements in the set. We show that our model is theoretically attractive and we evaluate it on a range of tasks, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance compared to recent methods for set-structured data.

We present a set-theoretic, proof-irrelevant model for Calculus of Constructions (CC) with predicative induction and judgmental equality in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with an axiom for countably many inaccessible cardinals. We use Aczel's trace encoding which is universally defined for any function type, regardless of being impredicative. Direct and concrete interpretations of simultaneous induction and mutually recursive functions are also provided by extending Dybjer's interpretations on the basis of Aczel's rule sets. Our model can be regarded as a higher-order generalization of the truth-table methods. We provide a relatively simple consistency proof of type theory, which can be used as the basis for a theorem prover.

In this work we explore recent advances in instruction-tuning language models on a range of open instruction-following datasets. Despite recent claims that open models can be on par with state-of-the-art proprietary models, these claims are often accompanied by limited evaluation, making it difficult to compare models across the board and determine the utility of various resources. We provide a large set of instruction-tuned models from 6.7B to 65B parameters in size, trained on 12 instruction datasets ranging from manually curated (e.g., OpenAssistant) to synthetic and distilled (e.g., Alpaca) and systematically evaluate them on their factual knowledge, reasoning, multilinguality, coding, and open-ended instruction following abilities through a collection of automatic, model-based, and human-based metrics. We further introduce T\"ulu, our best performing instruction-tuned model suite finetuned on a combination of high-quality open resources. Our experiments show that different instruction-tuning datasets can uncover or enhance specific skills, while no single dataset (or combination) provides the best performance across all evaluations. Interestingly, we find that model and human preference-based evaluations fail to reflect differences in model capabilities exposed by benchmark-based evaluations, suggesting the need for the type of systemic evaluation performed in this work. Our evaluations show that the best model in any given evaluation reaches on average 83% of ChatGPT performance, and 68% of GPT-4 performance, suggesting that further investment in building better base models and instruction-tuning data is required to close the gap. We release our instruction-tuned models, including a fully finetuned 65B T\"ulu, along with our code, data, and evaluation framework at https://github.com/allenai/open-instruct to facilitate future research.

A major open problem on the road to artificial intelligence is the development of incrementally learning systems that learn about more and more concepts over time from a stream of data. In this work, we introduce a new training strategy, iCaRL, that allows learning in such a class-incremental way: only the training data for a small number of classes has to be present at the same time and new classes can be added progressively. iCaRL learns strong classifiers and a data representation simultaneously. This distinguishes it from earlier works that were fundamentally limited to fixed data representations and therefore incompatible with deep learning architectures. We show by experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet ILSVRC 2012 data that iCaRL can learn many classes incrementally over a long period of time where other strategies quickly fail.

Reverse derivative categories (RDCs) have recently been shown to be a suitable semantic framework for studying machine learning algorithms. Whereas emphasis has been put on training methodologies, less attention has been devoted to particular model classes: the concrete categories whose morphisms represent machine learning models. In this paper we study presentations by generators and equations of classes of RDCs. In particular, we propose polynomial circuits as a suitable machine learning model. We give an axiomatisation for these circuits and prove a functional completeness result. Finally, we discuss the use of polynomial circuits over specific semirings to perform machine learning with discrete values.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed software development by enabling code generation, automated debugging, and complex reasoning. However, their continued advancement is constrained by the scarcity of high-quality, publicly available supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets tailored for coding tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce OpenCodeInstruct, the largest open-access instruction tuning dataset, comprising 5 million diverse samples. Each sample includes a programming question, solution, test cases, execution feedback, and LLM-generated quality assessments. We fine-tune various base models, including LLaMA and Qwen, across multiple scales (1B+, 3B+, and 7B+) using our dataset. Comprehensive evaluations on popular benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench) demonstrate substantial performance improvements achieved by SFT with OpenCodeInstruct. We also present a detailed methodology encompassing seed data curation, synthetic instruction and solution generation, and filtering.