Daily Papers

Cutting-edge robot learning techniques including foundation models and imitation learning from humans all pose huge demands on large-scale and high-quality datasets which constitute one of the bottleneck in the general intelligent robot fields. This paper presents the Kaiwu multimodal dataset to address the missing real-world synchronized multimodal data problems in the sophisticated assembling scenario,especially with dynamics information and its fine-grained labelling. The dataset first provides an integration of human,environment and robot data collection framework with 20 subjects and 30 interaction objects resulting in totally 11,664 instances of integrated actions. For each of the demonstration,hand motions,operation pressures,sounds of the assembling process,multi-view videos, high-precision motion capture information,eye gaze with first-person videos,electromyography signals are all recorded. Fine-grained multi-level annotation based on absolute timestamp,and semantic segmentation labelling are performed. Kaiwu dataset aims to facilitate robot learning,dexterous manipulation,human intention investigation and human-robot collaboration research.

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for mechanisms to verify the factual accuracy of their outputs. In this work, we present a holistic end-to-end solution for annotating the factuality of LLM-generated responses, which encompasses a multi-stage annotation scheme designed to yield detailed labels concerning the verifiability and factual inconsistencies found in LLM outputs. We design and build an annotation tool to speed up the labelling procedure and ease the workload of raters. It allows flexible incorporation of automatic results in any stage, e.g. automatically-retrieved evidence. We further construct an open-domain document-level factuality benchmark in three-level granularity: claim, sentence and document. Preliminary experiments show that FacTool, FactScore and Perplexity.ai are struggling to identify false claims with the best F1=0.53. Annotation tool, benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/yuxiaw/Factcheck-GPT.

The goal of this paper is to label all the animal individuals present in every frame of a video. Unlike previous methods that have principally concentrated on labelling face tracks, we aim to label individuals even when their faces are not visible. We make the following contributions: (i) we introduce a 'Count, Crop and Recognise' (CCR) multistage recognition process for frame level labelling. The Count and Recognise stages involve specialised CNNs for the task, and we show that this simple staging gives a substantial boost in performance; (ii) we compare the recall using frame based labelling to both face and body track based labelling, and demonstrate the advantage of frame based with CCR for the specified goal; (iii) we introduce a new dataset for chimpanzee recognition in the wild; and (iv) we apply a high-granularity visualisation technique to further understand the learned CNN features for the recognition of chimpanzee individuals.

Visually-Rich Documents (VRDs), encompassing elements like charts, tables, and references, convey complex information across various fields. However, extracting information from these rich documents is labor-intensive, especially given their inconsistent formats and domain-specific requirements. While pretrained models for VRD Understanding have progressed, their reliance on large, annotated datasets limits scalability. This paper introduces the Domain Adaptive Visually-rich Document Understanding (DAViD) framework, which utilises machine-generated synthetic data for domain adaptation. DAViD integrates fine-grained and coarse-grained document representation learning and employs synthetic annotations to reduce the need for costly manual labelling. By leveraging pretrained models and synthetic data, DAViD achieves competitive performance with minimal annotated datasets. Extensive experiments validate DAViD's effectiveness, demonstrating its ability to efficiently adapt to domain-specific VRDU tasks.

In an effort to catalog insect biodiversity, we propose a new large dataset of hand-labelled insect images, the BIOSCAN-Insect Dataset. Each record is taxonomically classified by an expert, and also has associated genetic information including raw nucleotide barcode sequences and assigned barcode index numbers, which are genetically-based proxies for species classification. This paper presents a curated million-image dataset, primarily to train computer-vision models capable of providing image-based taxonomic assessment, however, the dataset also presents compelling characteristics, the study of which would be of interest to the broader machine learning community. Driven by the biological nature inherent to the dataset, a characteristic long-tailed class-imbalance distribution is exhibited. Furthermore, taxonomic labelling is a hierarchical classification scheme, presenting a highly fine-grained classification problem at lower levels. Beyond spurring interest in biodiversity research within the machine learning community, progress on creating an image-based taxonomic classifier will also further the ultimate goal of all BIOSCAN research: to lay the foundation for a comprehensive survey of global biodiversity. This paper introduces the dataset and explores the classification task through the implementation and analysis of a baseline classifier.

The prevalence of multi-modal content on social media complicates automated moderation strategies. This calls for an enhancement in multi-modal classification and a deeper understanding of understated meanings in images and memes. Although previous efforts have aimed at improving model performance through fine-tuning, few have explored an end-to-end optimization pipeline that accounts for modalities, prompting, labeling, and fine-tuning. In this study, we propose an end-to-end conceptual framework for model optimization in complex tasks. Experiments support the efficacy of this traditional yet novel framework, achieving the highest accuracy and AUROC. Ablation experiments demonstrate that isolated optimizations are not ineffective on their own.

Understanding emotion expressed in language has a wide range of applications, from building empathetic chatbots to detecting harmful online behavior. Advancement in this area can be improved using large-scale datasets with a fine-grained typology, adaptable to multiple downstream tasks. We introduce GoEmotions, the largest manually annotated dataset of 58k English Reddit comments, labeled for 27 emotion categories or Neutral. We demonstrate the high quality of the annotations via Principal Preserved Component Analysis. We conduct transfer learning experiments with existing emotion benchmarks to show that our dataset generalizes well to other domains and different emotion taxonomies. Our BERT-based model achieves an average F1-score of .46 across our proposed taxonomy, leaving much room for improvement.

Recent multi-modal audio-language models (ALMs) excel at text-audio retrieval but struggle with frame-wise audio understanding. Prior works use temporal-aware labels or unsupervised training to improve frame-wise capabilities, but they still lack fine-grained labeling capability to pinpoint when an event occurs. While traditional sound event detection models can precisely localize events, they are limited to pre-defined categories, making them ineffective for real-world scenarios with out-of-distribution events. In this work, we introduce FLAM, an open-vocabulary contrastive audio-language model capable of localizing specific sound events. FLAM employs a memory-efficient and calibrated frame-wise objective with logit adjustment to address spurious correlations, such as event dependencies and label imbalances during training. To enable frame-wise supervision, we leverage a large-scale dataset with diverse audio events, LLM-generated captions and simulation. Experimental results and case studies demonstrate that FLAM significantly improves the open-vocabulary localization capability while maintaining strong performance in global retrieval and downstream tasks.

Fine-grained image labels are desirable for many computer vision applications, such as visual search or mobile AI assistant. These applications rely on image classification models that can produce hundreds of thousands (e.g. 100K) of diversified fine-grained image labels on input images. However, training a network at this vocabulary scale is challenging, and suffers from intolerable large model size and slow training speed, which leads to unsatisfying classification performance. A straightforward solution would be training separate expert networks (specialists), with each specialist focusing on learning one specific vertical (e.g. cars, birds...). However, deploying dozens of expert networks in a practical system would significantly increase system complexity and inference latency, and consumes large amounts of computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose a Knowledge Concentration method, which effectively transfers the knowledge from dozens of specialists (multiple teacher networks) into one single model (one student network) to classify 100K object categories. There are three salient aspects in our method: (1) a multi-teacher single-student knowledge distillation framework; (2) a self-paced learning mechanism to allow the student to learn from different teachers at various paces; (3) structurally connected layers to expand the student network capacity with limited extra parameters. We validate our method on OpenImage and a newly collected dataset, Entity-Foto-Tree (EFT), with 100K categories, and show that the proposed model performs significantly better than the baseline generalist model.

We present the first active learning tool for fine-grained 3D part labeling, a problem which challenges even the most advanced deep learning (DL) methods due to the significant structural variations among the small and intricate parts. For the same reason, the necessary data annotation effort is tremendous, motivating approaches to minimize human involvement. Our labeling tool iteratively verifies or modifies part labels predicted by a deep neural network, with human feedback continually improving the network prediction. To effectively reduce human efforts, we develop two novel features in our tool, hierarchical and symmetry-aware active labeling. Our human-in-the-loop approach, coined HAL3D, achieves 100% accuracy (barring human errors) on any test set with pre-defined hierarchical part labels, with 80% time-saving over manual effort.

Generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) texts in important works has become a common practice that can be used to misuse and abuse AI at various levels. Traditional AI detectors often rely on document-level classification, which struggles to identify AI content in hybrid or slightly edited texts designed to avoid detection, leading to concerns about the model's efficiency, which makes it hard to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated texts. A sentence-level sequence labeling model proposed to detect transitions between human- and AI-generated text, leveraging nuanced linguistic signals overlooked by document-level classifiers. By this method, detecting and segmenting AI and human-written text within a single document at the token-level granularity is achieved. Our model combines the state-of-the-art pre-trained Transformer models, incorporating Neural Networks (NN) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). This approach extends the power of transformers to extract semantic and syntactic patterns, and the neural network component to capture enhanced sequence-level representations, thereby improving the boundary predictions by the CRF layer, which enhances sequence recognition and further identification of the partition between Human- and AI-generated texts. The evaluation is performed on two publicly available benchmark datasets containing collaborative human and AI-generated texts. Our experimental comparisons are with zero-shot detectors and the existing state-of-the-art models, along with rigorous ablation studies to justify that this approach, in particular, can accurately detect the spans of AI texts in a completely collaborative text. All our source code and the processed datasets are available in our GitHub repository.

Lately, instruction-based techniques have made significant strides in improving performance in few-shot learning scenarios. They achieve this by bridging the gap between pre-trained language models and fine-tuning for specific downstream tasks. Despite these advancements, the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in information extraction tasks like Named Entity Recognition (NER), using prompts or instructions, still falls short of supervised baselines. The reason for this performance gap can be attributed to the fundamental disparity between NER and LLMs. NER is inherently a sequence labeling task, where the model must assign entity-type labels to individual tokens within a sentence. In contrast, LLMs are designed as a text generation task. This distinction between semantic labeling and text generation leads to subpar performance. In this paper, we transform the NER task into a text-generation task that can be readily adapted by LLMs. This involves enhancing source sentences with task-specific instructions and answer choices, allowing for the identification of entities and their types within natural language. We harness the strength of LLMs by integrating supervised learning within them. The goal of this combined strategy is to boost the performance of LLMs in extraction tasks like NER while simultaneously addressing hallucination issues often observed in LLM-generated content. A novel corpus Contract NER comprising seven frequently observed contract categories, encompassing named entities associated with 18 distinct legal entity types is released along with our baseline models. Our models and dataset are available to the community for future research * .

In this paper, we introduce the NER dataset from CLUE organization (CLUENER2020), a well-defined fine-grained dataset for named entity recognition in Chinese. CLUENER2020 contains 10 categories. Apart from common labels like person, organization, and location, it contains more diverse categories. It is more challenging than current other Chinese NER datasets and could better reflect real-world applications. For comparison, we implement several state-of-the-art baselines as sequence labeling tasks and report human performance, as well as its analysis. To facilitate future work on fine-grained NER for Chinese, we release our dataset, baselines, and leader-board.

Scene graph generation (SGG) models have suffered from inherent problems regarding the benchmark datasets such as the long-tailed predicate distribution and missing annotation problems. In this work, we aim to alleviate the long-tailed problem of SGG by utilizing unannotated triplets. To this end, we introduce a Self-Training framework for SGG (ST-SGG) that assigns pseudo-labels for unannotated triplets based on which the SGG models are trained. While there has been significant progress in self-training for image recognition, designing a self-training framework for the SGG task is more challenging due to its inherent nature such as the semantic ambiguity and the long-tailed distribution of predicate classes. Hence, we propose a novel pseudo-labeling technique for SGG, called Class-specific Adaptive Thresholding with Momentum (CATM), which is a model-agnostic framework that can be applied to any existing SGG models. Furthermore, we devise a graph structure learner (GSL) that is beneficial when adopting our proposed self-training framework to the state-of-the-art message-passing neural network (MPNN)-based SGG models. Our extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of ST-SGG on various SGG models, particularly in enhancing the performance on fine-grained predicate classes.

Understanding the complex urban infrastructure with centimeter-level accuracy is essential for many applications from autonomous driving to mapping, infrastructure monitoring, and urban management. Aerial images provide valuable information over a large area instantaneously; nevertheless, no current dataset captures the complexity of aerial scenes at the level of granularity required by real-world applications. To address this, we introduce SkyScapes, an aerial image dataset with highly-accurate, fine-grained annotations for pixel-level semantic labeling. SkyScapes provides annotations for 31 semantic categories ranging from large structures, such as buildings, roads and vegetation, to fine details, such as 12 (sub-)categories of lane markings. We have defined two main tasks on this dataset: dense semantic segmentation and multi-class lane-marking prediction. We carry out extensive experiments to evaluate state-of-the-art segmentation methods on SkyScapes. Existing methods struggle to deal with the wide range of classes, object sizes, scales, and fine details present. We therefore propose a novel multi-task model, which incorporates semantic edge detection and is better tuned for feature extraction from a wide range of scales. This model achieves notable improvements over the baselines in region outlines and level of detail on both tasks.

While semi-supervised learning (SSL) has yielded promising results, the more realistic SSL scenario remains to be explored, in which the unlabeled data exhibits extremely high recognition difficulty, e.g., fine-grained visual classification in the context of SSL (SS-FGVC). The increased recognition difficulty on fine-grained unlabeled data spells disaster for pseudo-labeling accuracy, resulting in poor performance of the SSL model. To tackle this challenge, we propose Soft Label Selection with Confidence-Aware Clustering based on Class Transition Tracking (SoC) by reconstructing the pseudo-label selection process by jointly optimizing Expansion Objective and Shrinkage Objective, which is based on a soft label manner. Respectively, the former objective encourages soft labels to absorb more candidate classes to ensure the attendance of ground-truth class, while the latter encourages soft labels to reject more noisy classes, which is theoretically proved to be equivalent to entropy minimization. In comparisons with various state-of-the-art methods, our approach demonstrates its superior performance in SS-FGVC. Checkpoints and source code are available at https://github.com/NJUyued/SoC4SS-FGVC.

Plankton recognition is an important computer vision problem due to plankton's essential role in ocean food webs and carbon capture, highlighting the need for species-level monitoring. However, this task is challenging due to its fine-grained nature and dataset shifts caused by different imaging instruments and varying species distributions. As new plankton image datasets are collected at an increasing pace, there is a need for general plankton recognition models that require minimal expert effort for data labeling. In this work, we study large-scale self-supervised pretraining for fine-grained plankton recognition. We first employ masked autoencoding and a large volume of diverse plankton image data to pretrain a general-purpose plankton image encoder. Then we utilize fine-tuning to obtain accurate plankton recognition models for new datasets with a very limited number of labeled training images. Our experiments show that self-supervised pretraining with diverse plankton data clearly increases plankton recognition accuracy compared to standard ImageNet pretraining when the amount of training data is limited. Moreover, the accuracy can be further improved when unlabeled target data is available and utilized during the pretraining.

As far as Scene Graph Generation (SGG), coarse and fine predicates mix in the dataset due to the crowd-sourced labeling, and the long-tail problem is also pronounced. Given this tricky situation, many existing SGG methods treat the predicates equally and learn the model under the supervision of mixed-granularity predicates in one stage, leading to relatively coarse predictions. In order to alleviate the negative impact of the suboptimum mixed-granularity annotation and long-tail effect problems, this paper proposes a novel Hierarchical Memory Learning (HML) framework to learn the model from simple to complex, which is similar to the human beings' hierarchical memory learning process. After the autonomous partition of coarse and fine predicates, the model is first trained on the coarse predicates and then learns the fine predicates. In order to realize this hierarchical learning pattern, this paper, for the first time, formulates the HML framework using the new Concept Reconstruction (CR) and Model Reconstruction (MR) constraints. It is worth noticing that the HML framework can be taken as one general optimization strategy to improve various SGG models, and significant improvement can be achieved on the SGG benchmark (i.e., Visual Genome).

Fake news has altered society in negative ways in politics and culture. It has adversely affected both online social network systems as well as offline communities and conversations. Using automatic machine learning classification models is an efficient way to combat the widespread dissemination of fake news. However, a lack of effective, comprehensive datasets has been a problem for fake news research and detection model development. Prior fake news datasets do not provide multimodal text and image data, metadata, comment data, and fine-grained fake news categorization at the scale and breadth of our dataset. We present Fakeddit, a novel multimodal dataset consisting of over 1 million samples from multiple categories of fake news. After being processed through several stages of review, the samples are labeled according to 2-way, 3-way, and 6-way classification categories through distant supervision. We construct hybrid text+image models and perform extensive experiments for multiple variations of classification, demonstrating the importance of the novel aspect of multimodality and fine-grained classification unique to Fakeddit.

Acquiring large-scale emotional speech data with strong consistency remains a challenge for speech synthesis. This paper presents MIKU-PAL, a fully automated multimodal pipeline for extracting high-consistency emotional speech from unlabeled video data. Leveraging face detection and tracking algorithms, we developed an automatic emotion analysis system using a multimodal large language model (MLLM). Our results demonstrate that MIKU-PAL can achieve human-level accuracy (68.5% on MELD) and superior consistency (0.93 Fleiss kappa score) while being much cheaper and faster than human annotation. With the high-quality, flexible, and consistent annotation from MIKU-PAL, we can annotate fine-grained speech emotion categories of up to 26 types, validated by human annotators with 83% rationality ratings. Based on our proposed system, we further released a fine-grained emotional speech dataset MIKU-EmoBench(131.2 hours) as a new benchmark for emotional text-to-speech and visual voice cloning.

Despite numerous applications for fine-grained corpus analysis, researchers continue to rely on manual labeling, which does not scale, or statistical tools like topic modeling, which are difficult to control. We propose that LLMs have the potential to scale the nuanced analyses that researchers typically conduct manually to large text corpora. To this effect, inspired by qualitative research methods, we develop HICode, a two-part pipeline that first inductively generates labels directly from analysis data and then hierarchically clusters them to surface emergent themes. We validate this approach across three diverse datasets by measuring alignment with human-constructed themes and demonstrating its robustness through automated and human evaluations. Finally, we conduct a case study of litigation documents related to the ongoing opioid crisis in the U.S., revealing aggressive marketing strategies employed by pharmaceutical companies and demonstrating HICode's potential for facilitating nuanced analyses in large-scale data.

Can humans identify AI-generated (fake) videos and provide grounded reasons? While video generation models have advanced rapidly, a critical dimension -- whether humans can detect deepfake traces within a generated video, i.e., spatiotemporal grounded visual artifacts that reveal a video as machine generated -- has been largely overlooked. We introduce DeeptraceReward, the first fine-grained, spatially- and temporally- aware benchmark that annotates human-perceived fake traces for video generation reward. The dataset comprises 4.3K detailed annotations across 3.3K high-quality generated videos. Each annotation provides a natural-language explanation, pinpoints a bounding-box region containing the perceived trace, and marks precise onset and offset timestamps. We consolidate these annotations into 9 major categories of deepfake traces that lead humans to identify a video as AI-generated, and train multimodal language models (LMs) as reward models to mimic human judgments and localizations. On DeeptraceReward, our 7B reward model outperforms GPT-5 by 34.7% on average across fake clue identification, grounding, and explanation. Interestingly, we observe a consistent difficulty gradient: binary fake v.s. real classification is substantially easier than fine-grained deepfake trace detection; within the latter, performance degrades from natural language explanations (easiest), to spatial grounding, to temporal labeling (hardest). By foregrounding human-perceived deepfake traces, DeeptraceReward provides a rigorous testbed and training signal for socially aware and trustworthy video generation.

Despite impressive advancements in video understanding, most efforts remain limited to coarse-grained or visual-only video tasks. However, real-world videos encompass omni-modal information (vision, audio, and speech) with a series of events forming a cohesive storyline. The lack of multi-modal video data with fine-grained event annotations and the high cost of manual labeling are major obstacles to comprehensive omni-modality video perception. To address this gap, we propose an automatic pipeline consisting of high-quality multi-modal video filtering, semantically coherent omni-modal event boundary detection, and cross-modal correlation-aware event captioning. In this way, we present LongVALE, the first-ever Vision-Audio-Language Event understanding benchmark comprising 105K omni-modal events with precise temporal boundaries and detailed relation-aware captions within 8.4K high-quality long videos. Further, we build a baseline that leverages LongVALE to enable video large language models (LLMs) for omni-modality fine-grained temporal video understanding for the first time. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and great potential of LongVALE in advancing comprehensive multi-modal video understanding.

Continual learning (CL) enables models to adapt to new tasks and environments without forgetting previously learned knowledge. While current CL setups have ignored the relationship between labels in the past task and the new task with or without small task overlaps, real-world scenarios often involve hierarchical relationships between old and new tasks, posing another challenge for traditional CL approaches. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multi-level hierarchical class incremental task configuration with an online learning constraint, called hierarchical label expansion (HLE). Our configuration allows a network to first learn coarse-grained classes, with data labels continually expanding to more fine-grained classes in various hierarchy depths. To tackle this new setup, we propose a rehearsal-based method that utilizes hierarchy-aware pseudo-labeling to incorporate hierarchical class information. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective memory management and sampling strategy that selectively adopts samples of newly encountered classes. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively use hierarchy on our HLE setup to improve classification accuracy across all levels of hierarchies, regardless of depth and class imbalance ratio, outperforming prior state-of-the-art works by significant margins while also outperforming them on the conventional disjoint, blurry and i-Blurry CL setups.

This report presents a unified instruction-based framework for learning generalized text embeddings optimized for both information retrieval (IR) and non-IR tasks. Built upon a decoder-only large language model (Mistral-7B), our approach combines in-context learning, soft supervision, and adaptive hard-negative mining to generate context-aware embeddings without task-specific fine-tuning. Structured instructions and few-shot examples are used to guide the model across diverse tasks, enabling strong performance on classification, semantic similarity, clustering, and reranking benchmarks. To improve semantic discrimination, we employ a soft labeling framework where continuous relevance scores, distilled from a high-performance dense retriever and reranker, serve as fine-grained supervision signals. In addition, we introduce adaptive margin-based hard-negative mining, which filters out semantically ambiguous negatives based on their similarity to positive examples, thereby enhancing training stability and retrieval robustness. Our model is evaluated on the newly introduced MTEB (English, v2) benchmark, covering 41 tasks across seven categories. Results show that our method achieves strong generalization and ranks among the top-performing models by Borda score, outperforming several larger or fully fine-tuned baselines. These findings highlight the effectiveness of combining in-context prompting, soft supervision, and adaptive sampling for scalable, high-quality embedding generation.

Automatically and accurately identifying user intents and filling the associated slots from their spoken language are critical to the success of dialogue systems. Traditional methods require manually defining the DOMAIN-INTENT-SLOT schema and asking many domain experts to annotate the corresponding utterances, upon which neural models are trained. This procedure brings the challenges of information sharing hindering, out-of-schema, or data sparsity in open-domain dialogue systems. To tackle these challenges, we explore a new task of {\em automatic intent-slot induction} and propose a novel domain-independent tool. That is, we design a coarse-to-fine three-step procedure including Role-labeling, Concept-mining, And Pattern-mining (RCAP): (1) role-labeling: extracting keyphrases from users' utterances and classifying them into a quadruple of coarsely-defined intent-roles via sequence labeling; (2) concept-mining: clustering the extracted intent-role mentions and naming them into abstract fine-grained concepts; (3) pattern-mining: applying the Apriori algorithm to mine intent-role patterns and automatically inferring the intent-slot using these coarse-grained intent-role labels and fine-grained concepts. Empirical evaluations on both real-world in-domain and out-of-domain datasets show that: (1) our RCAP can generate satisfactory SLU schema and outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised learning method; (2) our RCAP can be directly applied to out-of-domain datasets and gain at least 76\% improvement of F1-score on intent detection and 41\% improvement of F1-score on slot filling; (3) our RCAP exhibits its power in generic intent-slot extractions with less manual effort, which opens pathways for schema induction on new domains and unseen intent-slot discovery for generalizable dialogue systems.

Large language models have improved zero-shot text classification by allowing the transfer of semantic knowledge from the training data in order to classify among specific label sets in downstream tasks. We propose a simple way to further improve zero-shot accuracies with minimal effort. We curate small finetuning datasets intended to describe the labels for a task. Unlike typical finetuning data, which has texts annotated with labels, our data simply describes the labels in language, e.g., using a few related terms, dictionary/encyclopedia entries, and short templates. Across a range of topic and sentiment datasets, our method is more accurate than zero-shot by 15-17% absolute. It is also more robust to choices required for zero-shot classification, such as patterns for prompting the model to classify and mappings from labels to tokens in the model's vocabulary. Furthermore, since our data merely describes the labels but does not use input texts, finetuning on it yields a model that performs strongly on multiple text domains for a given label set, even improving over few-shot out-of-domain classification in multiple settings.

Skill Classification (SC) is the task of classifying job competences from job postings. This work is the first in SC applied to Danish job vacancy data. We release the first Danish job posting dataset: Kompetencer (en: competences), annotated for nested spans of competences. To improve upon coarse-grained annotations, we make use of The European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO; le Vrang et al., 2014) taxonomy API to obtain fine-grained labels via distant supervision. We study two setups: The zero-shot and few-shot classification setting. We fine-tune English-based models and RemBERT (Chung et al., 2020) and compare them to in-language Danish models. Our results show RemBERT significantly outperforms all other models in both the zero-shot and the few-shot setting.

Vision-language pre-training has recently gained popularity as it allows learning rich feature representations using large-scale data sources. This paradigm has quickly made its way into the medical image analysis community. In particular, there is an impressive amount of recent literature developing vision-language models for radiology. However, the available medical datasets with image-text supervision are scarce, and medical concepts are fine-grained, involving expert knowledge that existing vision-language models struggle to encode. In this paper, we propose to take a prudent step back from the literature and revisit supervised, unimodal pre-training, using fine-grained labels instead. We conduct an extensive comparison demonstrating that unimodal pre-training is highly competitive and better suited to integrating heterogeneous data sources. Our results also question the potential of recent vision-language models for open-vocabulary generalization, which have been evaluated using optimistic experimental settings. Finally, we study novel alternatives to better integrate fine-grained labels and noisy text supervision.

High-quality annotation of fine-grained visual categories demands great expert knowledge, which is taxing and time consuming. Alternatively, learning fine-grained visual representation from enormous unlabeled images (e.g., species, brands) by self-supervised learning becomes a feasible solution. However, recent researches find that existing self-supervised learning methods are less qualified to represent fine-grained categories. The bottleneck lies in that the pre-text representation is built from every patch-wise embedding, while fine-grained categories are only determined by several key patches of an image. In this paper, we propose a Cross-level Multi-instance Distillation (CMD) framework to tackle the challenge. Our key idea is to consider the importance of each image patch in determining the fine-grained pre-text representation by multiple instance learning. To comprehensively learn the relation between informative patches and fine-grained semantics, the multi-instance knowledge distillation is implemented on both the region/image crop pairs from the teacher and student net, and the region-image crops inside the teacher / student net, which we term as intra-level multi-instance distillation and inter-level multi-instance distillation. Extensive experiments on CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars and FGVC Aircraft show that the proposed method outperforms the contemporary method by upto 10.14% and existing state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches by upto 19.78% on both top-1 accuracy and Rank-1 retrieval metric.

Movie genre classification is an active research area in machine learning. However, due to the limited labels available, there can be large semantic variations between movies within a single genre definition. We expand these 'coarse' genre labels by identifying 'fine-grained' semantic information within the multi-modal content of movies. By leveraging pre-trained 'expert' networks, we learn the influence of different combinations of modes for multi-label genre classification. Using a contrastive loss, we continue to fine-tune this 'coarse' genre classification network to identify high-level intertextual similarities between the movies across all genre labels. This leads to a more 'fine-grained' and detailed clustering, based on semantic similarities while still retaining some genre information. Our approach is demonstrated on a newly introduced multi-modal 37,866,450 frame, 8,800 movie trailer dataset, MMX-Trailer-20, which includes pre-computed audio, location, motion, and image embeddings.

Data mixing augmentation has proved effective in training deep models. Recent methods mix labels mainly based on the mixture proportion of image pixels. As the main discriminative information of a fine-grained image usually resides in subtle regions, methods along this line are prone to heavy label noise in fine-grained recognition. We propose in this paper a novel scheme, termed as Semantically Proportional Mixing (SnapMix), which exploits class activation map (CAM) to lessen the label noise in augmenting fine-grained data. SnapMix generates the target label for a mixed image by estimating its intrinsic semantic composition, and allows for asymmetric mixing operations and ensures semantic correspondence between synthetic images and target labels. Experiments show that our method consistently outperforms existing mixed-based approaches on various datasets and under different network depths. Furthermore, by incorporating the mid-level features, the proposed SnapMix achieves top-level performance, demonstrating its potential to serve as a solid baseline for fine-grained recognition. Our code is available at https://github.com/Shaoli-Huang/SnapMix.git.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in vision--language tasks by pre-training solely on coarse-grained concept annotations (e.g., image captions). We hypothesize that integrating fine-grained concept annotations (e.g., object labels and object regions) will further improve performance, as both data granularities complement each other in terms of breadth and depth in concept representation. We introduce a new dataset featuring Multimodal Multi-Grained Concept annotations (MMGiC) for MLLMs. In constructing MMGiC, we explore the impact of different data recipes on multimodal comprehension and generation. Our analyses reveal that multi-grained concept annotations integrate and complement each other, under our structured template and a general MLLM framework. We clearly explore and demonstrate the potential of MMGiC to help MLLMs better locate and learn concepts, aligning vision and language at multiple granularities. We further validate our hypothesis by investigating the fair comparison and effective collaboration between MMGiC and image--caption data on 12 multimodal comprehension and generation benchmarks, e.g., their appropriate combination achieve 3.95% and 2.34% absolute improvements over image--caption data alone on POPE and SEED-Bench. Code, data and models will be available at https://github.com/LooperXX/MMGiC.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) excels in multimodal tasks such as image-text retrieval and zero-shot classification but struggles with fine-grained understanding due to its focus on coarse-grained short captions. To address this, we propose Fine-Grained CLIP (FG-CLIP), which enhances fine-grained understanding through three key innovations. First, we leverage large multimodal models to generate 1.6 billion long caption-image pairs for capturing global-level semantic details. Second, a high-quality dataset is constructed with 12 million images and 40 million region-specific bounding boxes aligned with detailed captions to ensure precise, context-rich representations. Third, 10 million hard fine-grained negative samples are incorporated to improve the model's ability to distinguish subtle semantic differences. Corresponding training methods are meticulously designed for these data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FG-CLIP outperforms the original CLIP and other state-of-the-art methods across various downstream tasks, including fine-grained understanding, open-vocabulary object detection, image-text retrieval, and general multimodal benchmarks. These results highlight FG-CLIP's effectiveness in capturing fine-grained image details and improving overall model performance. The related data, code, and models are available at https://github.com/360CVGroup/FG-CLIP.

Identifying subordinate-level categories from images is a longstanding task in computer vision and is referred to as fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR). It has tremendous significance in real-world applications since an average layperson does not excel at differentiating species of birds or mushrooms due to subtle differences among the species. A major bottleneck in developing FGVR systems is caused by the need of high-quality paired expert annotations. To circumvent the need of expert knowledge we propose Fine-grained Semantic Category Reasoning (FineR) that internally leverages the world knowledge of large language models (LLMs) as a proxy in order to reason about fine-grained category names. In detail, to bridge the modality gap between images and LLM, we extract part-level visual attributes from images as text and feed that information to a LLM. Based on the visual attributes and its internal world knowledge the LLM reasons about the subordinate-level category names. Our training-free FineR outperforms several state-of-the-art FGVR and language and vision assistant models and shows promise in working in the wild and in new domains where gathering expert annotation is arduous.

Fine-grained classification often requires recognizing specific object parts, such as beak shape and wing patterns for birds. Encouraging a fine-grained classification model to first detect such parts and then using them to infer the class could help us gauge whether the model is indeed looking at the right details better than with interpretability methods that provide a single attribution map. We propose PDiscoNet to discover object parts by using only image-level class labels along with priors encouraging the parts to be: discriminative, compact, distinct from each other, equivariant to rigid transforms, and active in at least some of the images. In addition to using the appropriate losses to encode these priors, we propose to use part-dropout, where full part feature vectors are dropped at once to prevent a single part from dominating in the classification, and part feature vector modulation, which makes the information coming from each part distinct from the perspective of the classifier. Our results on CUB, CelebA, and PartImageNet show that the proposed method provides substantially better part discovery performance than previous methods while not requiring any additional hyper-parameter tuning and without penalizing the classification performance. The code is available at https://github.com/robertdvdk/part_detection.

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.

Fine-grained recognition involves the classification of images from subordinate macro-categories, and it is challenging due to small inter-class differences. To overcome this, most methods perform discriminative feature selection enabled by a feature extraction backbone followed by a high-level feature refinement step. Recently, many studies have shown the potential behind vision transformers as a backbone for fine-grained recognition, but their usage of its attention mechanism to select discriminative tokens can be computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a novel and computationally inexpensive metric to identify discriminative regions in an image. We compare the similarity between the global representation of an image given by the CLS token, a learnable token used by transformers for classification, and the local representation of individual patches. We select the regions with the highest similarity to obtain crops, which are forwarded through the same transformer encoder. Finally, high-level features of the original and cropped representations are further refined together in order to make more robust predictions. Through extensive experimental evaluation we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, obtaining favorable results in terms of accuracy across a variety of datasets. Furthermore, our method achieves these results at a much lower computational cost compared to the alternatives. Code and checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/arkel23/GLSim.

Fine-grained classification is a challenging task that involves identifying subtle differences between objects within the same category. This task is particularly challenging in scenarios where data is scarce. Visual transformers (ViT) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for image classification, due to their ability to learn highly expressive representations of visual data using self-attention mechanisms. In this work, we explore Semi-ViT, a ViT model fine tuned using semi-supervised learning techniques, suitable for situations where we have lack of annotated data. This is particularly common in e-commerce, where images are readily available but labels are noisy, nonexistent, or expensive to obtain. Our results demonstrate that Semi-ViT outperforms traditional convolutional neural networks (CNN) and ViTs, even when fine-tuned with limited annotated data. These findings indicate that Semi-ViTs hold significant promise for applications that require precise and fine-grained classification of visual data.

Recent vision-language models outperform vision-only models on many image classification tasks. However, because of the absence of paired text/image descriptions, it remains difficult to fine-tune these models for fine-grained image classification. In this work, we propose a method, GIST, for generating image-specific fine-grained text descriptions from image-only datasets, and show that these text descriptions can be used to improve classification. Key parts of our method include 1. prompting a pretrained large language model with domain-specific prompts to generate diverse fine-grained text descriptions for each class and 2. using a pretrained vision-language model to match each image to label-preserving text descriptions that capture relevant visual features in the image. We demonstrate the utility of GIST by fine-tuning vision-language models on the image-and-generated-text pairs to learn an aligned vision-language representation space for improved classification. We evaluate our learned representation space in full-shot and few-shot scenarios across four diverse fine-grained classification datasets, each from a different domain. Our method achieves an average improvement of 4.1% in accuracy over CLIP linear probes and an average of 1.1% improvement in accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art image-text classification method on the full-shot datasets. Our method achieves similar improvements across few-shot regimes. Code is available at https://github.com/emu1729/GIST.

The iMet 2020 dataset is a valuable resource in the space of fine-grained art attribution recognition, but we believe it has yet to reach its true potential. We document the unique properties of the dataset and observe that many of the attribute labels are noisy, more than is implied by the dataset description. Oftentimes, there are also semantic relationships between the labels (e.g., identical, mutual exclusion, subsumption, overlap with uncertainty) which we believe are underutilized. We propose an approach to cleaning and structuring the iMet 2020 labels, and discuss the implications and value of doing so. Further, we demonstrate the benefits of our proposed approach through several experiments. Our code and cleaned labels are available at https://github.com/sunniesuhyoung/iMet2020cleaned.

We present an elegant and effective approach for addressing limitations in existing multi-label classification models by incorporating interaction matching, a concept shown to be useful for ad-hoc search result ranking. By performing soft n-gram interaction matching, we match labels with natural language descriptions (which are common to have in most multi-labeling tasks). Our approach can be used to enhance existing multi-label classification approaches, which are biased toward frequently-occurring labels. We evaluate our approach on two challenging tasks: automatic medical coding of clinical notes and automatic labeling of entities from software tutorial text. Our results show that our method can yield up to an 11% relative improvement in macro performance, with most of the gains stemming labels that appear infrequently in the training set (i.e., the long tail of labels).

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.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in fine-grained visual understanding across a range of tasks. However, they often encounter significant challenges due to inadequate alignment for fine-grained knowledge, which restricts their ability to accurately capture local details and attain a comprehensive global perception. While recent advancements have focused on aligning object expressions with grounding information, they typically lack explicit integration of object images, which contain affluent information beyond mere texts or coordinates. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel fine-grained visual knowledge alignment method that effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects, including texts, coordinates, and images. This innovative method is underpinned by our multi-scale fine-grained enhancement data synthesis pipeline, which provides over 300K essential training data to enhance alignment and improve overall performance. Furthermore, we present TinyGroundingGPT, a series of compact models optimized for high-level alignments. With a scale of approximately 3B parameters, TinyGroundingGPT achieves outstanding results in grounding tasks while delivering performance comparable to larger MLLMs in complex visual scenarios.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) facilitates image retrieval through a multimodal query consisting of a reference image and modification text. The reference image defines the retrieval context, while the modification text specifies desired alterations. However, existing CIR datasets predominantly employ coarse-grained modification text (CoarseMT), which inadequately captures fine-grained retrieval intents. This limitation introduces two key challenges: (1) ignoring detailed differences leads to imprecise positive samples, and (2) greater ambiguity arises when retrieving visually similar images. These issues degrade retrieval accuracy, necessitating manual result filtering or repeated queries. To address these limitations, we develop a robust fine-grained CIR data annotation pipeline that minimizes imprecise positive samples and enhances CIR systems' ability to discern modification intents accurately. Using this pipeline, we refine the FashionIQ and CIRR datasets to create two fine-grained CIR datasets: Fine-FashionIQ and Fine-CIRR. Furthermore, we introduce FineCIR, the first CIR framework explicitly designed to parse the modification text. FineCIR effectively captures fine-grained modification semantics and aligns them with ambiguous visual entities, enhancing retrieval precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FineCIR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art CIR baselines on both fine-grained and traditional CIR benchmark datasets. Our FineCIR code and fine-grained CIR datasets are available at https://github.com/SDU-L/FineCIR.git.

CLIP has shown impressive results in aligning images and texts at scale. However, its ability to capture detailed visual features remains limited because CLIP matches images and texts at a global level. To address this issue, we propose FLAIR, Fine-grained Language-informed Image Representations, an approach that utilizes long and detailed image descriptions to learn localized image embeddings. By sampling diverse sub-captions that describe fine-grained details about an image, we train our vision-language model to produce not only global embeddings but also text-specific image representations. Our model introduces text-conditioned attention pooling on top of local image tokens to produce fine-grained image representations that excel at retrieving detailed image content. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on both, existing multimodal retrieval benchmarks, as well as, our newly introduced fine-grained retrieval task which evaluates vision-language models' ability to retrieve partial image content. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FLAIR trained on 30M image-text pairs in capturing fine-grained visual information, including zero-shot semantic segmentation, outperforming models trained on billions of pairs. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/flair .

Vision language models (VLM) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various downstream tasks. However, understanding fine-grained visual-linguistic concepts, such as attributes and inter-object relationships, remains a significant challenge. While several benchmarks aim to evaluate VLMs in finer granularity, their primary focus remains on the linguistic aspect, neglecting the visual dimension. Here, we highlight the importance of evaluating VLMs from both a textual and visual perspective. We introduce a progressive pipeline to synthesize images that vary in a specific attribute while ensuring consistency in all other aspects. Utilizing this data engine, we carefully design a benchmark, SPEC, to diagnose the comprehension of object size, position, existence, and count. Subsequently, we conduct a thorough evaluation of four leading VLMs on SPEC. Surprisingly, their performance is close to random guess, revealing significant limitations. With this in mind, we propose a simple yet effective approach to optimize VLMs in fine-grained understanding, achieving significant improvements on SPEC without compromising the zero-shot performance. Results on two additional fine-grained benchmarks also show consistent improvements, further validating the transferability of our approach. Code and data are available at https://github.com/wjpoom/SPEC.

Fine-grained vision-language understanding requires precise alignment between visual content and linguistic descriptions, a capability that remains limited in current models, particularly in non-English settings. While models like CLIP perform well on global alignment, they often struggle to capture fine-grained details in object attributes, spatial relations, and linguistic expressions, with limited support for bilingual comprehension. To address these challenges, we introduce FG-CLIP 2, a bilingual vision-language model designed to advance fine-grained alignment for both English and Chinese. Our approach leverages rich fine-grained supervision, including region-text matching and long-caption modeling, alongside multiple discriminative objectives. We further introduce the Textual Intra-modal Contrastive (TIC) loss to better distinguish semantically similar captions. Trained on a carefully curated mixture of large-scale English and Chinese data, FG-CLIP 2 achieves powerful bilingual performance. To enable rigorous evaluation, we present a new benchmark for Chinese multimodal understanding, featuring long-caption retrieval and bounding box classification. Extensive experiments on 29 datasets across 8 tasks show that FG-CLIP 2 outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art results in both languages. We release the model, code, and benchmark to facilitate future research on bilingual fine-grained alignment.

This work focuses on an observed limitation of text encoders: embeddings may not be able to recognize fine-grained entities or events within the semantics, resulting in failed dense retrieval on even simple cases. To examine such behaviors, we first introduce a new evaluation dataset in Chinese, named CapRetrieval, whose passages are image captions, and queries are phrases inquiring entities or events in various forms. Zero-shot evaluation suggests that encoders may fail on these fine-grained matching, regardless of training sources or model sizes. Aiming for enhancement, we proceed to finetune encoders with our proposed data generation strategies, which obtains the best performance on CapRetrieval. Within this process, we further identify an issue of granularity dilemma, a challenge for embeddings to express fine-grained salience while aligning with overall semantics. Our dataset, code and models in this work are publicly released at https://github.com/lxucs/CapRetrieval.

CutMix is a vital augmentation strategy that determines the performance and generalization ability of vision transformers (ViTs). However, the inconsistency between the mixed images and the corresponding labels harms its efficacy. Existing CutMix variants tackle this problem by generating more consistent mixed images or more precise mixed labels, but inevitably introduce heavy training overhead or require extra information, undermining ease of use. To this end, we propose an novel and effective Self-Motivated image Mixing method (SMMix), which motivates both image and label enhancement by the model under training itself. Specifically, we propose a max-min attention region mixing approach that enriches the attention-focused objects in the mixed images. Then, we introduce a fine-grained label assignment technique that co-trains the output tokens of mixed images with fine-grained supervision. Moreover, we devise a novel feature consistency constraint to align features from mixed and unmixed images. Due to the subtle designs of the self-motivated paradigm, our SMMix is significant in its smaller training overhead and better performance than other CutMix variants. In particular, SMMix improves the accuracy of DeiT-T/S/B, CaiT-XXS-24/36, and PVT-T/S/M/L by more than +1% on ImageNet-1k. The generalization capability of our method is also demonstrated on downstream tasks and out-of-distribution datasets. Our project is anonymously available at https://github.com/ChenMnZ/SMMix.

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to align large language models (LLMs) with information extraction (IE) tasks, such as named entity recognition (NER). However, annotating such fine-grained labels and training domain-specific models is costly. Existing works typically train a unified model across multiple domains, but such approaches lack adaptation and scalability since not all training data benefits target domains and scaling trained models remains challenging. We propose the SaM framework, which dynamically Selects and Merges expert models at inference time. Specifically, for a target domain, we select domain-specific experts pre-trained on existing domains based on (i) domain similarity to the target domain and (ii) performance on sampled instances, respectively. The experts are then merged to create task-specific models optimized for the target domain. By dynamically merging experts beneficial to target domains, we improve generalization across various domains without extra training. Additionally, experts can be added or removed conveniently, leading to great scalability. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, which outperforms the unified model by an average of 10%. We further provide insights into potential improvements, practical experience, and extensions of our framework.

We introduce SPARse Fine-grained Contrastive Alignment (SPARC), a simple method for pretraining more fine-grained multimodal representations from image-text pairs. Given that multiple image patches often correspond to single words, we propose to learn a grouping of image patches for every token in the caption. To achieve this, we use a sparse similarity metric between image patches and language tokens and compute for each token a language-grouped vision embedding as the weighted average of patches. The token and language-grouped vision embeddings are then contrasted through a fine-grained sequence-wise loss that only depends on individual samples and does not require other batch samples as negatives. This enables more detailed information to be learned in a computationally inexpensive manner. SPARC combines this fine-grained loss with a contrastive loss between global image and text embeddings to learn representations that simultaneously encode global and local information. We thoroughly evaluate our proposed method and show improved performance over competing approaches both on image-level tasks relying on coarse-grained information, e.g. classification, as well as region-level tasks relying on fine-grained information, e.g. retrieval, object detection, and segmentation. Moreover, SPARC improves model faithfulness and captioning in foundational vision-language models.

Data quality is crucial for training Large Language Models (LLMs). Traditional heuristic filters often miss low-quality text or mistakenly remove valuable content. In this paper, we introduce an LLM-based line-level filtering method to enhance training data quality. We use GPT-4o mini to label a 20,000-document sample from FineWeb at the line level, allowing the model to create descriptive labels for low-quality lines. These labels are grouped into nine main categories, and we train a DeBERTa-v3 classifier to scale the filtering to a 10B-token subset of FineWeb. To test the impact of our filtering, we train GPT-2 models on both the original and the filtered datasets. The results show that models trained on the filtered data achieve higher accuracy on the HellaSwag benchmark and reach their performance targets faster, even with up to 25\% less data. This demonstrates that LLM-based line-level filtering can significantly improve data quality and training efficiency for LLMs. We release our quality-annotated dataset, FinerWeb-10BT, and the codebase to support further work in this area.

Recently, the semantics of scene text has been proven to be essential in fine-grained image classification. However, the existing methods mainly exploit the literal meaning of scene text for fine-grained recognition, which might be irrelevant when it is not significantly related to objects/scenes. We propose an end-to-end trainable network that mines implicit contextual knowledge behind scene text image and enhance the semantics and correlation to fine-tune the image representation. Unlike the existing methods, our model integrates three modalities: visual feature extraction, text semantics extraction, and correlating background knowledge to fine-grained image classification. Specifically, we employ KnowBert to retrieve relevant knowledge for semantic representation and combine it with image features for fine-grained classification. Experiments on two benchmark datasets, Con-Text, and Drink Bottle, show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 3.72\% mAP and 5.39\% mAP, respectively. To further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we create a new dataset on crowd activity recognition for the evaluation. The source code and new dataset of this work are available at https://github.com/lanfeng4659/KnowledgeMiningWithSceneText.

Image captioning systems are unable to generate fine-grained captions as they are trained on data that is either noisy (alt-text) or generic (human annotations). This is further exacerbated by maximum likelihood training that encourages generation of frequently occurring phrases. Previous works have tried to address this limitation by fine-tuning captioners with a self-retrieval (SR) reward. However, we find that SR fine-tuning has a tendency to reduce caption faithfulness and even hallucinate. In this work, we circumvent this bottleneck by improving the MLE initialization of the captioning system and designing a curriculum for the SR fine-tuning process. To this extent, we present (1) Visual Caption Boosting, a novel framework to instill fine-grainedness in generic image captioning datasets while remaining anchored in human annotations; and (2) BagCurri, a carefully designed training curriculum that more optimally leverages the contrastive nature of the self-retrieval reward. Jointly, they enable the captioner to describe fine-grained aspects in the image while preserving faithfulness to ground-truth captions. Our approach outperforms previous work by +8.9% on SR against 99 random distractors (RD100) (Dessi et al., 2023); and +7.6% on ImageCoDe. Additionally, existing metrics to evaluate captioning systems fail to reward diversity or evaluate a model's fine-grained understanding ability. Our third contribution addresses this by proposing self-retrieval from the lens of evaluation. We introduce TrueMatch, a benchmark comprising bags of highly similar images that uses SR to assess the captioner's ability to capture subtle visual distinctions. We evaluate and compare several state-of-the-art open-source MLLMs on TrueMatch, and find that our SR approach outperforms them all by a significant margin (e.g. +4.8% - 7.1% over Cambrian) while having 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer parameters.

Human action understanding is crucial for the advancement of multimodal systems. While recent developments, driven by powerful large language models (LLMs), aim to be general enough to cover a wide range of categories, they often overlook the need for more specific capabilities. In this work, we address the more challenging task of Fine-grained Action Recognition (FAR), which focuses on detailed semantic labels within shorter temporal duration (e.g., "salto backward tucked with 1 turn"). Given the high costs of annotating fine-grained labels and the substantial data needed for fine-tuning LLMs, we propose to adopt semi-supervised learning (SSL). Our framework, SeFAR, incorporates several innovative designs to tackle these challenges. Specifically, to capture sufficient visual details, we construct Dual-level temporal elements as more effective representations, based on which we design a new strong augmentation strategy for the Teacher-Student learning paradigm through involving moderate temporal perturbation. Furthermore, to handle the high uncertainty within the teacher model's predictions for FAR, we propose the Adaptive Regulation to stabilize the learning process. Experiments show that SeFAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on two FAR datasets, FineGym and FineDiving, across various data scopes. It also outperforms other semi-supervised methods on two classical coarse-grained datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51. Further analysis and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our designs. Additionally, we show that the features extracted by our SeFAR could largely promote the ability of multimodal foundation models to understand fine-grained and domain-specific semantics.

The growing capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced tasks like chart understanding. However, these models often suffer from hallucinations, where generated text sequences conflict with the provided visual data. To address this, we introduce Post-Hoc Visual Attribution for Charts, which identifies fine-grained chart elements that validate a given chart-associated response. We propose ChartLens, a novel chart attribution algorithm that uses segmentation-based techniques to identify chart objects and employs set-of-marks prompting with MLLMs for fine-grained visual attribution. Additionally, we present ChartVA-Eval, a benchmark with synthetic and real-world charts from diverse domains like finance, policy, and economics, featuring fine-grained attribution annotations. Our evaluations show that ChartLens improves fine-grained attributions by 26-66%.

This paper describes our submission on the COVID-19 literature annotation task at Biocreative VII. We proposed an approach that exploits the knowledge of the globally non-optimal weights, usually rejected, to build a rich representation of each label. Our proposed approach consists of two stages: (1) A bagging of various initializations of the training data that features weakly trained weights, (2) A stacking of heterogeneous vocabulary models based on BERT and RoBERTa Embeddings. The aggregation of these weak insights performs better than a classical globally efficient model. The purpose is the distillation of the richness of knowledge to a simpler and lighter model. Our system obtains an Instance-based F1 of 92.96 and a Label-based micro-F1 of 91.35.

Prompt tuning has been employed as an efficient way to adapt large vision-language pre-trained models (e.g. CLIP) to various downstream tasks in data-limited or label-limited settings. Nonetheless, visual data (e.g., images) is by default prerequisite for learning prompts in existing methods. In this work, we advocate that the effectiveness of image-text contrastive learning in aligning the two modalities (for training CLIP) further makes it feasible to treat texts as images for prompt tuning and introduce TaI prompting. In contrast to the visual data, text descriptions are easy to collect, and their class labels can be directly derived. Particularly, we apply TaI prompting to multi-label image recognition, where sentences in the wild serve as alternatives to images for prompt tuning. Moreover, with TaI, double-grained prompt tuning (TaI-DPT) is further presented to extract both coarse-grained and fine-grained embeddings for enhancing the multi-label recognition performance. Experimental results show that our proposed TaI-DPT outperforms zero-shot CLIP by a large margin on multiple benchmarks, e.g., MS-COCO, VOC2007, and NUS-WIDE, while it can be combined with existing methods of prompting from images to improve recognition performance further. Code is released at https://github.com/guozix/TaI-DPT.

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a pragmatic and challenging open-world task, which endeavors to cluster unlabeled samples from both novel and old classes, leveraging some labeled data of old classes. Given that knowledge learned from old classes is not fully transferable to new classes, and that novel categories are fully unlabeled, GCD inherently faces intractable problems, including imbalanced classification performance and inconsistent confidence between old and new classes, especially in the low-labeling regime. Hence, some annotations of new classes are deemed necessary. However, labeling new classes is extremely costly. To address this issue, we take the spirit of active learning and propose a new setting called Active Generalized Category Discovery (AGCD). The goal is to improve the performance of GCD by actively selecting a limited amount of valuable samples for labeling from the oracle. To solve this problem, we devise an adaptive sampling strategy, which jointly considers novelty, informativeness and diversity to adaptively select novel samples with proper uncertainty. However, owing to the varied orderings of label indices caused by the clustering of novel classes, the queried labels are not directly applicable to subsequent training. To overcome this issue, we further propose a stable label mapping algorithm that transforms ground truth labels to the label space of the classifier, thereby ensuring consistent training across different active selection stages. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both generic and fine-grained datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/mashijie1028/ActiveGCD

During the development of large language models (LLMs), pre-training data play a critical role in shaping LLMs' capabilities. In recent years several large-scale and high-quality pre-training datasets have been released to accelerate the research of LLMs, including ChineseWebText1.0, C4, Pile, WanJuan, MAPCC and others. However, as LLMs continue to evolve, focus has increasingly shifted to domain-specific capabilities and safety concerns, making those previous coarse-grained texts insufficient for meeting training requirements. Furthermore, fine-grained information, such as quality, domain and toxicity, is becoming increasingly important in building powerful and reliable LLMs for various scenarios. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a new tool-chain called MDFG-tool for constructing large-scale and high-quality Chinese datasets with multi-dimensional and fine-grained information. First, we employ manually crafted rules to discard explicit noisy texts from raw contents. Second, the quality evaluation model, domain classifier, and toxicity evaluation model are well-designed to assess the remaining cleaned data respectively. Finally, we integrate these three types of fine-grained information for each text. With this approach, we release the largest, high-quality and fine-grained Chinese text ChineseWebText2.0, which consists of 3.8TB and each text is associated with a quality score, domain labels, a toxicity label and a toxicity score, facilitating the LLM researchers to select data based on various types of fine-grained information. The data, codes and the tool-chain are available on this website https://github.com/CASIA-LM/ChineseWebText-2.0

Few-shot fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) aims to leverage limited data to enable models to discriminate subtly distinct categories. Recent works mostly finetuned the pre-trained visual language models to achieve performance gain, yet suffering from overfitting and weak generalization. To deal with this, we introduce UniFGVC, a universal training-free framework that reformulates few-shot FGVC as multimodal retrieval. First, we propose the Category-Discriminative Visual Captioner (CDV-Captioner) to exploit the open-world knowledge of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate a structured text description that captures the fine-grained attribute features distinguishing closely related classes. CDV-Captioner uses chain-of-thought prompting and visually similar reference images to reduce hallucination and enhance discrimination of generated captions. Using it we can convert each image into an image-description pair, enabling more comprehensive feature representation, and construct the multimodal category templates using few-shot samples for the subsequent retrieval pipeline. Then, off-the-shelf vision and text encoders embed query and template pairs, and FGVC is accomplished by retrieving the nearest template in the joint space. UniFGVC ensures broad compatibility with diverse MLLMs and encoders, offering reliable generalization and adaptability across few-shot FGVC scenarios. Extensive experiments on 12 FGVC benchmarks demonstrate its consistent superiority over prior few-shot CLIP-based methods and even several fully-supervised MLLMs-based approaches.

Alignment with human preference is a desired property of large language models (LLMs). Currently, the main alignment approach is based on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite the effectiveness of RLHF, it is intricate to implement and train, thus recent studies explore how to develop alternative alignment approaches based on supervised fine-tuning (SFT). A major limitation of SFT is that it essentially does imitation learning, which cannot fully understand what are the expected behaviors. To address this issue, we propose an improved alignment approach named FIGA. Different from prior methods, we incorporate fine-grained (i.e., token or phrase level) quality signals that are derived by contrasting good and bad responses. Our approach has made two major contributions. Firstly, we curate a refined alignment dataset that pairs initial responses and the corresponding revised ones. Secondly, we devise a new loss function can leverage fine-grained quality signals to instruct the learning of LLMs for alignment. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approaches by comparing a number of competitive baselines.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. To comprehend and execute diverse human instructions over image data, instruction-tuned large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been introduced. However, LVLMs may suffer from different types of object hallucinations. Nevertheless, LVLMs are evaluated for coarse-grained object hallucinations only (i.e., generated objects non-existent in the input image). The fine-grained object attributes and behaviors non-existent in the image may still be generated but not measured by the current evaluation methods. In this paper, we thus focus on reducing fine-grained hallucinations of LVLMs. We propose ReCaption, a framework that consists of two components: rewriting captions using ChatGPT and fine-tuning the instruction-tuned LVLMs on the rewritten captions. We also propose a fine-grained probing-based evaluation method named Fine-Grained Object Hallucination Evaluation (FGHE). Our experiment results demonstrate that ReCaption effectively reduces fine-grained object hallucination for different LVLM options and improves their text generation quality. The code can be found at https://github.com/Anonymousanoy/FOHE.

Fine-Grained Visual Classification(FGVC) is the task that requires recognizing the objects belonging to multiple subordinate categories of a super-category. Recent state-of-the-art methods usually design sophisticated learning pipelines to tackle this task. However, visual information alone is often not sufficient to accurately differentiate between fine-grained visual categories. Nowadays, the meta-information (e.g., spatio-temporal prior, attribute, and text description) usually appears along with the images. This inspires us to ask the question: Is it possible to use a unified and simple framework to utilize various meta-information to assist in fine-grained identification? To answer this problem, we explore a unified and strong meta-framework(MetaFormer) for fine-grained visual classification. In practice, MetaFormer provides a simple yet effective approach to address the joint learning of vision and various meta-information. Moreover, MetaFormer also provides a strong baseline for FGVC without bells and whistles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaFormer can effectively use various meta-information to improve the performance of fine-grained recognition. In a fair comparison, MetaFormer can outperform the current SotA approaches with only vision information on the iNaturalist2017 and iNaturalist2018 datasets. Adding meta-information, MetaFormer can exceed the current SotA approaches by 5.9% and 5.3%, respectively. Moreover, MetaFormer can achieve 92.3% and 92.7% on CUB-200-2011 and NABirds, which significantly outperforms the SotA approaches. The source code and pre-trained models are released athttps://github.com/dqshuai/MetaFormer.

Invoices and receipts submitted by employees are visually rich documents (VRDs) with textual, visual and layout information. To protect against the risk of fraud and abuse, it is crucial for organizations to efficiently extract desired information from submitted receipts. This helps in the assessment of key factors such as appropriateness of the expense claim, adherence to spending and transaction policies, the validity of the receipt, as well as downstream anomaly detection at various levels. These documents are heterogeneous, with multiple formats and languages, uploaded with different image qualities, and often do not contain ground truth labels for the efficient training of models. In this paper we propose Task Aware Instruction-based Labelling (TAIL), a method for synthetic label generation in VRD corpuses without labels, and fine-tune a multimodal Visually Rich Document Understanding Model (VRDU) on TAIL labels using response-based knowledge distillation without using the teacher model's weights or training dataset to conditionally generate annotations in the appropriate format. Using a benchmark external dataset where ground truth labels are available, we demonstrate conditions under which our approach performs at par with Claude 3 Sonnet through empirical studies. We then show that the resulting model performs at par or better on the internal expense documents of a large multinational organization than state-of-the-art LMM (large multimodal model) Claude 3 Sonnet while being 85% less costly and ~5X faster, and outperforms layout-aware baselines by more than 10% in Average Normalized Levenshtein Similarity (ANLS) scores due to its ability to reason and extract information from rare formats. Finally, we illustrate the usage of our approach in overpayment prevention.

Image-text retrieval, as a fundamental and important branch of information retrieval, has attracted extensive research attentions. The main challenge of this task is cross-modal semantic understanding and matching. Some recent works focus more on fine-grained cross-modal semantic matching. With the prevalence of large scale multimodal pretraining models, several state-of-the-art models (e.g. X-VLM) have achieved near-perfect performance on widely-used image-text retrieval benchmarks, i.e. MSCOCO-Test-5K and Flickr30K-Test-1K. In this paper, we review the two common benchmarks and observe that they are insufficient to assess the true capability of models on fine-grained cross-modal semantic matching. The reason is that a large amount of images and texts in the benchmarks are coarse-grained. Based on the observation, we renovate the coarse-grained images and texts in the old benchmarks and establish the improved benchmarks called MSCOCO-FG and Flickr30K-FG. Specifically, on the image side, we enlarge the original image pool by adopting more similar images. On the text side, we propose a novel semi-automatic renovation approach to refine coarse-grained sentences into finer-grained ones with little human effort. Furthermore, we evaluate representative image-text retrieval models on our new benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We also analyze the capability of models on fine-grained semantic comprehension through extensive experiments. The results show that even the state-of-the-art models have much room for improvement in fine-grained semantic understanding, especially in distinguishing attributes of close objects in images. Our code and improved benchmark datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/cwj1412/MSCOCO-Flikcr30K_FG, which we hope will inspire further in-depth research on cross-modal retrieval.

We present a systematic study on a new task called dichotomous image segmentation (DIS) , which aims to segment highly accurate objects from natural images. To this end, we collected the first large-scale DIS dataset, called DIS5K, which contains 5,470 high-resolution (e.g., 2K, 4K or larger) images covering camouflaged, salient, or meticulous objects in various backgrounds. DIS is annotated with extremely fine-grained labels. Besides, we introduce a simple intermediate supervision baseline (IS-Net) using both feature-level and mask-level guidance for DIS model training. IS-Net outperforms various cutting-edge baselines on the proposed DIS5K, making it a general self-learned supervision network that can facilitate future research in DIS. Further, we design a new metric called human correction efforts (HCE) which approximates the number of mouse clicking operations required to correct the false positives and false negatives. HCE is utilized to measure the gap between models and real-world applications and thus can complement existing metrics. Finally, we conduct the largest-scale benchmark, evaluating 16 representative segmentation models, providing a more insightful discussion regarding object complexities, and showing several potential applications (e.g., background removal, art design, 3D reconstruction). Hoping these efforts can open up promising directions for both academic and industries. Project page: https://xuebinqin.github.io/dis/index.html.

Contrastive image-text models such as CLIP form the building blocks of many state-of-the-art systems. While they excel at recognizing common generic concepts, they still struggle on fine-grained entities which are rare, or even absent from the pre-training dataset. Hence, a key ingredient to their success has been the use of large-scale curated pre-training data aiming at expanding the set of concepts that they can memorize during the pre-training stage. In this work, we explore an alternative to encoding fine-grained knowledge directly into the model's parameters: we instead train the model to retrieve this knowledge from an external memory. Specifically, we propose to equip existing vision-text models with the ability to refine their embedding with cross-modal retrieved information from a memory at inference time, which greatly improves their zero-shot predictions. Remarkably, we show that this can be done with a light-weight, single-layer, fusion transformer on top of a frozen CLIP. Our experiments validate that our retrieval-enhanced contrastive (RECO) training improves CLIP performance substantially on several challenging fine-grained tasks: for example +10.9 on Stanford Cars, +10.2 on CUB-2011 and +7.3 on the recent OVEN benchmark.

Incorporating metadata in Large Language Models (LLMs) pretraining has recently emerged as a promising approach to accelerate training. However prior work highlighted only one useful signal-URLs, leaving open the question of whether other forms of metadata could yield greater benefits. In this study, we investigate a wider range of metadata types and find other types of metadata, such as fine-grained indicators of document quality that can also accelerate pretraining when prepended. We identify a common feature among effective metadata: they encode information at a finer granularity. We further introduce metadata appending as a means of improving training efficiency, where predicting an appropriate metadata as auxiliary task can help speed up pretraining. In addition, learnable meta-tokens trained with masked loss can recover part of the speedup by inducing quality-aware latent structure. Using probing, we analyze latent representations to understand how metadata shapes learning. Together, these results yield practical guidelines for integrating metadata to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM pretraining.

Current multimodal models leveraging contrastive learning often face limitations in developing fine-grained conceptual understanding. This is due to random negative samples during pretraining, causing almost exclusively very dissimilar concepts to be compared in the loss function. Consequently, the models struggle with fine-grained semantic differences. To address this problem, we introduce a novel pretraining method incorporating synthetic hard negative text examples. The hard negatives permute terms corresponding to visual concepts, leading to a more fine-grained visual and textual concept alignment. Further, we introduce InpaintCOCO, a new challenging dataset for assessing the fine-grained alignment of colors, objects, and sizes in vision-language models. We created the dataset using generative inpainting from COCO images by changing the visual concepts so that the images no longer match their original captions. Our results show significant improvements in fine-grained concept understanding across a wide range of vision-language datasets, including our InpaintCOCO dataset.

Large-scale image databases such as ImageNet have significantly advanced image classification and other visual recognition tasks. However much of these datasets are constructed only for single-label and coarse object-level classification. For real-world applications, multiple labels and fine-grained categories are often needed, yet very few such datasets exist publicly, especially those of large-scale and high quality. In this work, we contribute to the community a new dataset called iMaterialist Fashion Attribute (iFashion-Attribute) to address this problem in the fashion domain. The dataset is constructed from over one million fashion images with a label space that includes 8 groups of 228 fine-grained attributes in total. Each image is annotated by experts with multiple, high-quality fashion attributes. The result is the first known million-scale multi-label and fine-grained image dataset. We conduct extensive experiments and provide baseline results with modern deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Additionally, we demonstrate models pre-trained on iFashion-Attribute achieve superior transfer learning performance on fashion related tasks compared with pre-training from ImageNet or other fashion datasets. Data is available at: https://github.com/visipedia/imat_fashion_comp

Product retrieval is of great importance in the ecommerce domain. This paper introduces our 1st-place solution in eBay eProduct Visual Search Challenge (FGVC9), which is featured for an ensemble of about 20 models from vision models and vision-language models. While model ensemble is common, we show that combining the vision models and vision-language models brings particular benefits from their complementarity and is a key factor to our superiority. Specifically, for the vision models, we use a two-stage training pipeline which first learns from the coarse labels provided in the training set and then conducts fine-grained self-supervised training, yielding a coarse-to-fine metric learning manner. For the vision-language models, we use the textual description of the training image as the supervision signals for fine-tuning the image-encoder (feature extractor). With these designs, our solution achieves 0.7623 MAR@10, ranking the first place among all the competitors. The code is available at: https://github.com/WangWenhao0716/V2L{V^2L}.

Many existing FL methods assume clients with fully-labeled data, while in realistic settings, clients have limited labels due to the expensive and laborious process of labeling. Limited labeled local data of the clients often leads to their local model having poor generalization abilities to their larger unlabeled local data, such as having class-distribution mismatch with the unlabeled data. As a result, clients may instead look to benefit from the global model trained across clients to leverage their unlabeled data, but this also becomes difficult due to data heterogeneity across clients. In our work, we propose FedLabel where clients selectively choose the local or global model to pseudo-label their unlabeled data depending on which is more of an expert of the data. We further utilize both the local and global models' knowledge via global-local consistency regularization which minimizes the divergence between the two models' outputs when they have identical pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data. Unlike other semi-supervised FL baselines, our method does not require additional experts other than the local or global model, nor require additional parameters to be communicated. We also do not assume any server-labeled data or fully labeled clients. For both cross-device and cross-silo settings, we show that FedLabel outperforms other semi-supervised FL baselines by 8-24%, and even outperforms standard fully supervised FL baselines (100% labeled data) with only 5-20% of labeled data.

Large Language Models (LLMs) pose significant hardware challenges related to memory requirements and computational ability. There are two mainstream quantization schemes for LLMs: coarse-grained (e.g., channel-wise) quantization and fine-grained (e.g., group-wise) quantization. Fine-grained quantization has smaller quantization loss, consequently achieving superior performance. However, when applied to weight-activation quantization, it disrupts continuous integer matrix multiplication, leading to inefficient inference. In this paper, we introduce Dual Grained Quantization (DGQ), a novel A8W4 quantization for LLM that maintains superior performance while ensuring fast inference speed. DSQ dequantizes the fine-grained INT4 weight into coarse-grained INT8 representation and preform matrix multiplication using INT8 kernels. Besides, we develop a two-phase grid search algorithm to simplify the determination of fine-grained and coarse-grained quantization scales. We also devise a percentile clipping schema for smoothing the activation outliers without the need for complex optimization techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that DGQ consistently outperforms prior methods across various LLM architectures and a wide range of tasks. Remarkably, by our implemented efficient CUTLASS kernel, we achieve 1.12 times memory reduction and 3.24 times speed gains comparing A16W4 implementation. These advancements enable efficient deployment of A8W4 LLMs for real-world applications.

Instance-level image classification tasks have traditionally relied on single-instance labels to train models, e.g., few-shot learning and transfer learning. However, set-level coarse-grained labels that capture relationships among instances can provide richer information in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel approach to enhance instance-level image classification by leveraging set-level labels. We provide a theoretical analysis of the proposed method, including recognition conditions for fast excess risk rate, shedding light on the theoretical foundations of our approach. We conducted experiments on two distinct categories of datasets: natural image datasets and histopathology image datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing improved classification performance compared to traditional single-instance label-based methods. Notably, our algorithm achieves 13% improvement in classification accuracy compared to the strongest baseline on the histopathology image classification benchmarks. Importantly, our experimental findings align with the theoretical analysis, reinforcing the robustness and reliability of our proposed method. This work bridges the gap between instance-level and set-level image classification, offering a promising avenue for advancing the capabilities of image classification models with set-level coarse-grained labels.

DeepFashion is a widely used clothing dataset with 50 categories and more than overall 200k images where each image is annotated with fine-grained attributes. This dataset is often used for clothes recognition and although it provides comprehensive annotations, the attributes distribution is unbalanced and repetitive specially for training fine-grained attribute recognition models. In this work, we tailored DeepFashion for fine-grained attribute recognition task by focusing on each category separately. After selecting categories with sufficient number of images for training, we remove very scarce attributes and merge the duplicate ones in each category, then we clean the dataset based on the new list of attributes. We use a bilinear convolutional neural network with pairwise ranking loss function for multi-label fine-grained attribute recognition and show that the new annotations improve the results for such a task. The detailed annotations for each of the selected categories are provided for public use.

Fine-grained image classification, which is a challenging task in computer vision, requires precise differentiation among visually similar object categories. In this paper, we propose 1) a novel module called Residual Relationship Attention (RRA) that leverages the relationships between images within each training batch to effectively integrate visual feature vectors of batch images and 2) a novel technique called Relationship Position Encoding (RPE), which encodes the positions of relationships between original images in a batch and effectively preserves the relationship information between images within the batch. Additionally, we design a novel framework, namely Relationship Batch Integration (RBI), which utilizes RRA in conjunction with RPE, allowing the discernment of vital visual features that may remain elusive when examining a singular image representative of a particular class. Through extensive experiments, our proposed method demonstrates significant improvements in the accuracy of different fine-grained classifiers, with an average increase of (+2.78%) and (+3.83%) on the CUB200-2011 and Stanford Dog datasets, respectively, while achieving a state-of-the-art results (95.79%) on the Stanford Dog dataset. Despite not achieving the same level of improvement as in fine-grained image classification, our method still demonstrates its prowess in leveraging general image classification by attaining a state-of-the-art result of (93.71%) on the Tiny-Imagenet dataset. Furthermore, our method serves as a plug-in refinement module and can be easily integrated into different networks.

Recently, the advent of Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs) has received increasing attention across various domains, particularly in the field of visual document understanding (VDU). Different from conventional vision-language tasks, VDU is specifically concerned with text-rich scenarios containing abundant document elements. Nevertheless, the importance of fine-grained features remains largely unexplored within the community of LVLMs, leading to suboptimal performance in text-rich scenarios. In this paper, we abbreviate it as the fine-grained feature collapse issue. With the aim of filling this gap, we propose a contrastive learning framework, termed Document Object COntrastive learning (DoCo), specifically tailored for the downstream tasks of VDU. DoCo leverages an auxiliary multimodal encoder to obtain the features of document objects and align them to the visual features generated by the vision encoder of LVLM, which enhances visual representation in text-rich scenarios. It can represent that the contrastive learning between the visual holistic representations and the multimodal fine-grained features of document objects can assist the vision encoder in acquiring more effective visual cues, thereby enhancing the comprehension of text-rich documents in LVLMs. We also demonstrate that the proposed DoCo serves as a plug-and-play pre-training method, which can be employed in the pre-training of various LVLMs without inducing any increase in computational complexity during the inference process. Extensive experimental results on multiple benchmarks of VDU reveal that LVLMs equipped with our proposed DoCo can achieve superior performance and mitigate the gap between VDU and generic vision-language tasks.

Scientific document classification is a critical task and often involves many classes. However, collecting human-labeled data for many classes is expensive and usually leads to label-scarce scenarios. Moreover, recent work has shown that sentence embedding model fine-tuning for few-shot classification is efficient, robust, and effective. In this work, we propose FusionSent (Fusion-based Sentence Embedding Fine-tuning), an efficient and prompt-free approach for few-shot classification of scientific documents with many classes. FusionSent uses available training examples and their respective label texts to contrastively fine-tune two different sentence embedding models. Afterward, the parameters of both fine-tuned models are fused to combine the complementary knowledge from the separate fine-tuning steps into a single model. Finally, the resulting sentence embedding model is frozen to embed the training instances, which are then used as input features to train a classification head. Our experiments show that FusionSent significantly outperforms strong baselines by an average of 6.0 F_{1} points across multiple scientific document classification datasets. In addition, we introduce a new dataset for multi-label classification of scientific documents, which contains 183,565 scientific articles and 130 classes from the arXiv category taxonomy. Code and data are available at https://github.com/sebischair/FusionSent.

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have been cherished for their ability to perform zero-shot visual recognition on open-vocabulary concepts. This is achieved by selecting the object category whose textual representation bears the highest similarity with the query image. While successful in some domains, this method struggles with identifying fine-grained entities as well as generalizing to unseen concepts that are not captured by the training distribution. Recent works attempt to mitigate these challenges by integrating category descriptions at test time, albeit yielding modest improvements. We attribute these limited gains to a fundamental misalignment between image and description representations, which is rooted in the pretraining structure of CLIP. In this paper, we propose GRAIN, a new pretraining strategy aimed at aligning representations at both fine and coarse levels simultaneously. Our approach learns to jointly ground textual descriptions in image regions along with aligning overarching captions with global image representations. To drive this pre-training, we leverage frozen Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to derive large-scale synthetic annotations. We demonstrate the enhanced zero-shot performance of our model compared to current state-of-the art methods across 11 diverse image classification datasets. Additionally, we introduce Products-2023, a newly curated, manually labeled dataset featuring novel concepts, and showcase our model's ability to recognize these concepts by benchmarking on it. Significant improvements achieved by our model on other downstream tasks like retrieval further highlight the superior quality of representations learned by our approach. Code available at https://github.com/shaunak27/grain-clip .

Fine-grained understanding of objects, attributes, and relationships between objects is crucial for visual-language models (VLMs). Existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating VLMs' capability to distinguish between two very similar captions given an image. In this paper, we introduce a new, challenging benchmark termed Visual Minimal-Change Understanding (VisMin), which requires models to predict the correct image-caption match given two images and two captions. The image pair and caption pair contain minimal changes, i.e., only one aspect changes at a time from among the following: object, attribute, count, and spatial relation. These changes test the models' understanding of objects, attributes (such as color, material, shape), counts, and spatial relationships between objects. We built an automatic framework using large language models and diffusion models, followed by a rigorous 4-step verification process by human annotators. Empirical experiments reveal that current VLMs exhibit notable deficiencies in understanding spatial relationships and counting abilities. We also generate a large-scale training dataset to finetune CLIP and Idefics2, showing significant improvements in fine-grained understanding across benchmarks and in CLIP's general image-text alignment. We release all resources, including the benchmark, training data, and finetuned model checkpoints, at https://vismin.net/.

To effectively reduce the visual tokens in Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs), we propose a novel approach called Window Token Concatenation (WiCo). Specifically, we employ a sliding window to concatenate spatially adjacent visual tokens. However, directly concatenating these tokens may group diverse tokens into one, and thus obscure some fine details. To address this challenge, we propose fine-tuning the last few layers of the vision encoder to adaptively adjust the visual tokens, encouraging that those within the same window exhibit similar features. To further enhance the performance on fine-grained visual understanding tasks, we introduce WiCo+, which decomposes the visual tokens in later layers of the LLM. Such a design enjoys the merits of the large perception field of the LLM for fine-grained visual understanding while keeping a small number of visual tokens for efficient inference. We perform extensive experiments on both coarse- and fine-grained visual understanding tasks based on LLaVA-1.5 and Shikra, showing better performance compared with existing token reduction projectors. The code is available: https://github.com/JackYFL/WiCo.

Webly supervised learning has attracted increasing attention for its effectiveness in exploring publicly accessible data at scale without manual annotation. However, most existing methods of learning with web datasets are faced with challenges from label noise, and they have limited assumptions on clean samples under various noise. For instance, web images retrieved with queries of tiger cat (a cat species) and drumstick (a musical instrument) are almost dominated by images of tigers and chickens, which exacerbates the challenge of fine-grained visual concept learning. In this case, exploiting both web images and their associated texts is a requisite solution to combat real-world noise. In this paper, we propose Cross-modality Aligned Prototypes (CAPro), a unified prototypical contrastive learning framework to learn visual representations with correct semantics. For one thing, we leverage textual prototypes, which stem from the distinct concept definition of classes, to select clean images by text matching and thus disambiguate the formation of visual prototypes. For another, to handle missing and mismatched noisy texts, we resort to the visual feature space to complete and enhance individual texts and thereafter improve text matching. Such semantically aligned visual prototypes are further polished up with high-quality samples, and engaged in both cluster regularization and noise removal. Besides, we propose collective bootstrapping to encourage smoother and wiser label reference from appearance-similar instances in a manner of dictionary look-up. Extensive experiments on WebVision1k and NUS-WIDE (Web) demonstrate that CAPro well handles realistic noise under both single-label and multi-label scenarios. CAPro achieves new state-of-the-art performance and exhibits robustness to open-set recognition. Codes are available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/capro.

Fine-grained classification aims at distinguishing between items with similar global perception and patterns, but that differ by minute details. Our primary challenges come from both small inter-class variations and large intra-class variations. In this article, we propose to combine several innovations to improve fine-grained classification within the use-case of wildlife, which is of practical interest for experts. We utilize geo-spatiotemporal data to enrich the picture information and further improve the performance. We also investigate state-of-the-art methods for handling the imbalanced data issue.

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.

Multi-label image classification is a prediction task that aims to identify more than one label from a given image. This paper considers the semantic consistency of the latent space between the visual patch and linguistic label domains and introduces the conditional transport (CT) theory to bridge the acknowledged gap. While recent cross-modal attention-based studies have attempted to align such two representations and achieved impressive performance, they required carefully-designed alignment modules and extra complex operations in the attention computation. We find that by formulating the multi-label classification as a CT problem, we can exploit the interactions between the image and label efficiently by minimizing the bidirectional CT cost. Specifically, after feeding the images and textual labels into the modality-specific encoders, we view each image as a mixture of patch embeddings and a mixture of label embeddings, which capture the local region features and the class prototypes, respectively. CT is then employed to learn and align those two semantic sets by defining the forward and backward navigators. Importantly, the defined navigators in CT distance model the similarities between patches and labels, which provides an interpretable tool to visualize the learned prototypes. Extensive experiments on three public image benchmarks show that the proposed model consistently outperforms the previous methods.

Coarse-grained linguistic information, such as named entities or phrases, facilitates adequately representation learning in pre-training. Previous works mainly focus on extending the objective of BERT's Masked Language Modeling (MLM) from masking individual tokens to contiguous sequences of n tokens. We argue that such contiguously masking method neglects to model the intra-dependencies and inter-relation of coarse-grained linguistic information. As an alternative, we propose ERNIE-Gram, an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance the integration of coarse-grained information into pre-training. In ERNIE-Gram, n-grams are masked and predicted directly using explicit n-gram identities rather than contiguous sequences of n tokens. Furthermore, ERNIE-Gram employs a generator model to sample plausible n-gram identities as optional n-gram masks and predict them in both coarse-grained and fine-grained manners to enable comprehensive n-gram prediction and relation modeling. We pre-train ERNIE-Gram on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tune on 19 downstream tasks. Experimental results show that ERNIE-Gram outperforms previous pre-training models like XLNet and RoBERTa by a large margin, and achieves comparable results with state-of-the-art methods. The source codes and pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/ERNIE.

Text-attributed graphs are widely used across domains, offering rich opportunities for zero-shot learning via graph-text alignment. However, existing methods struggle with tasks requiring fine-grained pattern recognition, particularly on heterophilic graphs. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we identify an over-abstraction problem: current approaches operate at excessively large hyperbolic radii, compressing multi-scale structural information into uniform high-level abstractions. This abstraction-induced information loss obscures critical local patterns essential for accurate predictions. By analyzing embeddings in hyperbolic space, we demonstrate that optimal graph learning requires faithful preservation of fine-grained structural details, better retained by representations positioned closer to the origin. To address this, we propose H4G, a framework that systematically reduces embedding radii using learnable block-diagonal scaling matrices and M\"obius matrix multiplication. This approach restores access to fine-grained patterns while maintaining global receptive ability with minimal computational overhead. Experiments show H4G achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance with 12.8\% improvement on heterophilic graphs and 8.4\% on homophilic graphs, confirming that radius reduction enables faithful multi-scale representation for advancing zero-shot graph learning.

Recently, considerable literature has grown up around the theme of few-shot named entity recognition (NER), but little published benchmark data specifically focused on the practical and challenging task. Current approaches collect existing supervised NER datasets and re-organize them to the few-shot setting for empirical study. These strategies conventionally aim to recognize coarse-grained entity types with few examples, while in practice, most unseen entity types are fine-grained. In this paper, we present Few-NERD, a large-scale human-annotated few-shot NER dataset with a hierarchy of 8 coarse-grained and 66 fine-grained entity types. Few-NERD consists of 188,238 sentences from Wikipedia, 4,601,160 words are included and each is annotated as context or a part of a two-level entity type. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER dataset. We construct benchmark tasks with different emphases to comprehensively assess the generalization capability of models. Extensive empirical results and analysis show that Few-NERD is challenging and the problem requires further research. We make Few-NERD public at https://ningding97.github.io/fewnerd/.

Labeled data are critical to modern machine learning applications, but obtaining labels can be expensive. To mitigate this cost, machine learning methods, such as transfer learning, semi-supervised learning and active learning, aim to be label-efficient: achieving high predictive performance from relatively few labeled examples. While obtaining the best label-efficiency in practice often requires combinations of these techniques, existing benchmark and evaluation frameworks do not capture a concerted combination of all such techniques. This paper addresses this deficiency by introducing LabelBench, a new computationally-efficient framework for joint evaluation of multiple label-efficient learning techniques. As an application of LabelBench, we introduce a novel benchmark of state-of-the-art active learning methods in combination with semi-supervised learning for fine-tuning pretrained vision transformers. Our benchmark demonstrates better label-efficiencies than previously reported in active learning. LabelBench's modular codebase is open-sourced for the broader community to contribute label-efficient learning methods and benchmarks. The repository can be found at: https://github.com/EfficientTraining/LabelBench.

Image classification is one of the most important areas in computer vision. Hierarchical multi-label classification applies when a multi-class image classification problem is arranged into smaller ones based upon a hierarchy or taxonomy. Thus, hierarchical classification modes generally provide multiple class predictions on each instance, whereby these are expected to reflect the structure of image classes as related to one another. In this paper, we propose a multi-label capsule network (ML-CapsNet) for hierarchical classification. Our ML-CapsNet predicts multiple image classes based on a hierarchical class-label tree structure. To this end, we present a loss function that takes into account the multi-label predictions of the network. As a result, the training approach for our ML-CapsNet uses a coarse to fine paradigm while maintaining consistency with the structure in the classification levels in the label-hierarchy. We also perform experiments using widely available datasets and compare the model with alternatives elsewhere in the literature. In our experiments, our ML-CapsNet yields a margin of improvement with respect to these alternative methods.

Conventional multi-label recognition methods often focus on label confidence, frequently overlooking the pivotal role of partial order relations consistent with human preference. To resolve these issues, we introduce a novel method for multimodal label relevance ranking, named Label Relevance Ranking with Proximal Policy Optimization (LR2PPO), which effectively discerns partial order relations among labels. LR2PPO first utilizes partial order pairs in the target domain to train a reward model, which aims to capture human preference intrinsic to the specific scenario. Furthermore, we meticulously design state representation and a policy loss tailored for ranking tasks, enabling LR2PPO to boost the performance of label relevance ranking model and largely reduce the requirement of partial order annotation for transferring to new scenes. To assist in the evaluation of our approach and similar methods, we further propose a novel benchmark dataset, LRMovieNet, featuring multimodal labels and their corresponding partial order data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LR2PPO algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance, proving its effectiveness in addressing the multimodal label relevance ranking problem. Codes and the proposed LRMovieNet dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/ChazzyGordon/LR2PPO.

Detecting fine-grained differences in content conveyed in different languages matters for cross-lingual NLP and multilingual corpora analysis, but it is a challenging machine learning problem since annotation is expensive and hard to scale. This work improves the prediction and annotation of fine-grained semantic divergences. We introduce a training strategy for multilingual BERT models by learning to rank synthetic divergent examples of varying granularity. We evaluate our models on the Rationalized English-French Semantic Divergences, a new dataset released with this work, consisting of English-French sentence-pairs annotated with semantic divergence classes and token-level rationales. Learning to rank helps detect fine-grained sentence-level divergences more accurately than a strong sentence-level similarity model, while token-level predictions have the potential of further distinguishing between coarse and fine-grained divergences.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are gaining traction for their remarkable ability to process and integrate visual and textual data. Despite their popularity, the capacity of LVLMs to generate precise, fine-grained textual descriptions has not been fully explored. This study addresses this gap by focusing on distinctiveness and fidelity, assessing how models like Open-Flamingo, IDEFICS, and MiniGPT-4 can distinguish between similar objects and accurately describe visual features. We proposed the Textual Retrieval-Augmented Classification (TRAC) framework, which, by leveraging its generative capabilities, allows us to delve deeper into analyzing fine-grained visual description generation. This research provides valuable insights into the generation quality of LVLMs, enhancing the understanding of multimodal language models. Notably, MiniGPT-4 stands out for its better ability to generate fine-grained descriptions, outperforming the other two models in this aspect. The code is provided at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Explore_FGVDs-E277.

Obtaining high-quality fine-grained annotations for traffic signs is critical for accurate and safe decision-making in autonomous driving. Widely used datasets, such as Mapillary, often provide only coarse-grained labels - without distinguishing semantically important types such as stop signs or speed limit signs. To this end, we present a new validation set for traffic signs derived from the Mapillary dataset called Mapillary Vistas Validation for Traffic Signs (MVV), where we decompose composite traffic signs into granular, semantically meaningful categories. The dataset includes pixel-level instance masks and has been manually annotated by expert annotators to ensure label fidelity. Further, we benchmark several state-of-the-art VLMs against the self-supervised DINOv2 model on this dataset and show that DINOv2 consistently outperforms all VLM baselines-not only on traffic sign recognition, but also on heavily represented categories like vehicles and humans. Our analysis reveals significant limitations in current vision-language models for fine-grained visual understanding and establishes DINOv2 as a strong baseline for dense semantic matching in autonomous driving scenarios. This dataset and evaluation framework pave the way for more reliable, interpretable, and scalable perception systems. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/nec-labs-ma/relabeling

Learning from Label Proportions (LLP) is a learning problem where only aggregate level labels are available for groups of instances, called bags, during training, and the aim is to get the best performance at the instance-level on the test data. This setting arises in domains like advertising and medicine due to privacy considerations. We propose a novel algorithmic framework for this problem that iteratively performs two main steps. For the first step (Pseudo Labeling) in every iteration, we define a Gibbs distribution over binary instance labels that incorporates a) covariate information through the constraint that instances with similar covariates should have similar labels and b) the bag level aggregated label. We then use Belief Propagation (BP) to marginalize the Gibbs distribution to obtain pseudo labels. In the second step (Embedding Refinement), we use the pseudo labels to provide supervision for a learner that yields a better embedding. Further, we iterate on the two steps again by using the second step's embeddings as new covariates for the next iteration. In the final iteration, a classifier is trained using the pseudo labels. Our algorithm displays strong gains against several SOTA baselines (up to 15%) for the LLP Binary Classification problem on various dataset types - tabular and Image. We achieve these improvements with minimal computational overhead above standard supervised learning due to Belief Propagation, for large bag sizes, even for a million samples.

In this study, we define and tackle zero shot "real" classification by description, a novel task that evaluates the ability of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP to classify objects based solely on descriptive attributes, excluding object class names. This approach highlights the current limitations of VLMs in understanding intricate object descriptions, pushing these models beyond mere object recognition. To facilitate this exploration, we introduce a new challenge and release description data for six popular fine-grained benchmarks, which omit object names to encourage genuine zero-shot learning within the research community. Additionally, we propose a method to enhance CLIP's attribute detection capabilities through targeted training using ImageNet21k's diverse object categories, paired with rich attribute descriptions generated by large language models. Furthermore, we introduce a modified CLIP architecture that leverages multiple resolutions to improve the detection of fine-grained part attributes. Through these efforts, we broaden the understanding of part-attribute recognition in CLIP, improving its performance in fine-grained classification tasks across six popular benchmarks, as well as in the PACO dataset, a widely used benchmark for object-attribute recognition. Code is available at: https://github.com/ethanbar11/grounding_ge_public.

Despite the impressive performance on information-seeking tasks, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with hallucinations. Attributed LLMs, which augment generated text with in-line citations, have shown potential in mitigating hallucinations and improving verifiability. However, current approaches suffer from suboptimal citation quality due to their reliance on in-context learning. Furthermore, the practice of citing only coarse document identifiers makes it challenging for users to perform fine-grained verification. In this work, we introduce FRONT, a training framework designed to teach LLMs to generate Fine-Grained Grounded Citations. By grounding model outputs in fine-grained supporting quotes, these quotes guide the generation of grounded and consistent responses, not only improving citation quality but also facilitating fine-grained verification. Experiments on the ALCE benchmark demonstrate the efficacy of FRONT in generating superior grounded responses and highly supportive citations. With LLaMA-2-7B, the framework significantly outperforms all the baselines, achieving an average of 14.21% improvement in citation quality across all datasets, even surpassing ChatGPT.

Transforming unstructured text into structured and meaningful forms, organized by useful category labels, is a fundamental step in text mining for downstream analysis and application. However, most existing methods for producing label taxonomies and building text-based label classifiers still rely heavily on domain expertise and manual curation, making the process expensive and time-consuming. This is particularly challenging when the label space is under-specified and large-scale data annotations are unavailable. In this paper, we address these challenges with Large Language Models (LLMs), whose prompt-based interface facilitates the induction and use of large-scale pseudo labels. We propose TnT-LLM, a two-phase framework that employs LLMs to automate the process of end-to-end label generation and assignment with minimal human effort for any given use-case. In the first phase, we introduce a zero-shot, multi-stage reasoning approach which enables LLMs to produce and refine a label taxonomy iteratively. In the second phase, LLMs are used as data labelers that yield training samples so that lightweight supervised classifiers can be reliably built, deployed, and served at scale. We apply TnT-LLM to the analysis of user intent and conversational domain for Bing Copilot (formerly Bing Chat), an open-domain chat-based search engine. Extensive experiments using both human and automatic evaluation metrics demonstrate that TnT-LLM generates more accurate and relevant label taxonomies when compared against state-of-the-art baselines, and achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency for classification at scale. We also share our practical experiences and insights on the challenges and opportunities of using LLMs for large-scale text mining in real-world applications.

Existing computer vision research in artwork struggles with artwork's fine-grained attributes recognition and lack of curated annotated datasets due to their costly creation. To the best of our knowledge, we are one of the first methods to use CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) to train a neural network on a variety of artwork images and text descriptions pairs. CLIP is able to learn directly from free-form art descriptions, or, if available, curated fine-grained labels. Model's zero-shot capability allows predicting accurate natural language description for a given image, without directly optimizing for the task. Our approach aims to solve 2 challenges: instance retrieval and fine-grained artwork attribute recognition. We use the iMet Dataset, which we consider the largest annotated artwork dataset. In this benchmark we achieved competitive results using only self-supervision.

Large language models have been widely adopted in natural language processing, yet they face the challenge of generating unreliable content. Recent works aim to reduce misinformation and hallucinations by resorting to attribution as a means to provide evidence (i.e., citations). However, current attribution methods usually focus on the retrieval stage and automatic evaluation that neglect mirroring the citation mechanisms in human scholarly writing to bolster credibility. In this paper, we address these challenges by modelling the attribution task as preference learning and introducing an Automatic Preference Optimization (APO) framework. First, we create a curated collection for post-training with 6,330 examples by collecting and filtering from existing datasets. Second, considering the high cost of labelling preference data, we further propose an automatic method to synthesize attribution preference data resulting in 95,263 pairs. Moreover, inspired by the human citation process, we further propose a progressive preference optimization method by leveraging fine-grained information. Extensive experiments on three datasets (i.e., ASQA, StrategyQA, and ELI5) demonstrate that APO achieves state-of-the-art citation F1 with higher answer quality.

Distilling knowledge from a large teacher model to a lightweight one is a widely successful approach for generating compact, powerful models in the semi-supervised learning setting where a limited amount of labeled data is available. In large-scale applications, however, the teacher tends to provide a large number of incorrect soft-labels that impairs student performance. The sheer size of the teacher additionally constrains the number of soft-labels that can be queried due to prohibitive computational and/or financial costs. The difficulty in achieving simultaneous efficiency (i.e., minimizing soft-label queries) and robustness (i.e., avoiding student inaccuracies due to incorrect labels) hurts the widespread application of knowledge distillation to many modern tasks. In this paper, we present a parameter-free approach with provable guarantees to query the soft-labels of points that are simultaneously informative and correctly labeled by the teacher. At the core of our work lies a game-theoretic formulation that explicitly considers the inherent trade-off between the informativeness and correctness of input instances. We establish bounds on the expected performance of our approach that hold even in worst-case distillation instances. We present empirical evaluations on popular benchmarks that demonstrate the improved distillation performance enabled by our work relative to that of state-of-the-art active learning and active distillation methods.

Large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become ubiquitous foundational components of other models and downstream tasks. Although powerful, our empirical results reveal that such models might not be able to identify fine-grained concepts. Specifically, the explanations of VLMs with respect to fine-grained concepts are entangled and mislocalized. To address this issue, we propose to DisEntAngle and Localize (DEAL) the concept-level explanations for VLMs without human annotations. The key idea is encouraging the concept-level explanations to be distinct while maintaining consistency with category-level explanations. We conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on a wide range of benchmark datasets and vision-language models. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the concept-level explanations of the model in terms of disentanglability and localizability. Surprisingly, the improved explainability alleviates the model's reliance on spurious correlations, which further benefits the prediction accuracy.

Language model pre-training has proven to be useful in many language understanding tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether it is still helpful to add the self-training method in the pre-training step and the fine-tuning step. Towards this goal, we propose a learning framework that making best use of the unlabel data on the low-resource and high-resource labeled dataset. In industry NLP applications, we have large amounts of data produced by users or customers. Our learning framework is based on this large amounts of unlabel data. First, We use the model fine-tuned on manually labeled dataset to predict pseudo labels for the user-generated unlabeled data. Then we use the pseudo labels to supervise the task-specific training on the large amounts of user-generated data. We consider this task-specific training step on pseudo labels as a pre-training step for the next fine-tuning step. At last, we fine-tune on the manually labeled dataset upon the pre-trained model. In this work, we first empirically show that our method is able to solidly improve the performance by 3.6%, when the manually labeled fine-tuning dataset is relatively small. Then we also show that our method still is able to improve the performance further by 0.2%, when the manually labeled fine-tuning dataset is relatively large enough. We argue that our method make the best use of the unlabel data, which is superior to either pre-training or self-training alone.

We investigate composed image retrieval with text feedback. Users gradually look for the target of interest by moving from coarse to fine-grained feedback. However, existing methods merely focus on the latter, i.e., fine-grained search, by harnessing positive and negative pairs during training. This pair-based paradigm only considers the one-to-one distance between a pair of specific points, which is not aligned with the one-to-many coarse-grained retrieval process and compromises the recall rate. In an attempt to fill this gap, we introduce a unified learning approach to simultaneously modeling the coarse- and fine-grained retrieval by considering the multi-grained uncertainty. The key idea underpinning the proposed method is to integrate fine- and coarse-grained retrieval as matching data points with small and large fluctuations, respectively. Specifically, our method contains two modules: uncertainty modeling and uncertainty regularization. (1) The uncertainty modeling simulates the multi-grained queries by introducing identically distributed fluctuations in the feature space. (2) Based on the uncertainty modeling, we further introduce uncertainty regularization to adapt the matching objective according to the fluctuation range. Compared with existing methods, the proposed strategy explicitly prevents the model from pushing away potential candidates in the early stage, and thus improves the recall rate. On the three public datasets, i.e., FashionIQ, Fashion200k, and Shoes, the proposed method has achieved +4.03%, +3.38%, and +2.40% Recall@50 accuracy over a strong baseline, respectively.

Extreme Multi-label Classification (XMC) methods predict relevant labels for a given query in an extremely large label space. Recent works in XMC address this problem using deep encoders that project text descriptions to an embedding space suitable for recovering the closest labels. However, learning deep models can be computationally expensive in large output spaces, resulting in a trade-off between high performing brute-force approaches and efficient solutions. In this paper, we propose PRIME, a XMC method that employs a novel prototypical contrastive learning technique to reconcile efficiency and performance surpassing brute-force approaches. We frame XMC as a data-to-prototype prediction task where label prototypes aggregate information from related queries. More precisely, we use a shallow transformer encoder that we coin as Label Prototype Network, which enriches label representations by aggregating text-based embeddings, label centroids and learnable free vectors. We jointly train a deep encoder and the Label Prototype Network using an adaptive triplet loss objective that better adapts to the high granularity and ambiguity of extreme label spaces. PRIME achieves state-of-the-art results in several public benchmarks of different sizes and domains, while keeping the model efficient.

As working with large datasets becomes standard, the task of accurately retrieving images containing objects of interest by an open set textual query gains practical importance. The current leading approach utilizes a pre-trained CLIP model without any adaptation to the target domain, balancing accuracy and efficiency through additional post-processing. In this work, we propose FOR: Finetuning for Object-centric Open-vocabulary Image Retrieval, which allows finetuning on a target dataset using closed-set labels while keeping the visual-language association crucial for open vocabulary retrieval. FOR is based on two design elements: a specialized decoder variant of the CLIP head customized for the intended task, and its coupling within a multi-objective training framework. Together, these design choices result in a significant increase in accuracy, showcasing improvements of up to 8 mAP@50 points over SoTA across three datasets. Additionally, we demonstrate that FOR is also effective in a semi-supervised setting, achieving impressive results even when only a small portion of the dataset is labeled.

We present EMMa, an Extensible, Multimodal dataset of Amazon product listings that contains rich Material annotations. It contains more than 2.8 million objects, each with image(s), listing text, mass, price, product ratings, and position in Amazon's product-category taxonomy. We also design a comprehensive taxonomy of 182 physical materials (e.g., Plastic rightarrow Thermoplastic rightarrow Acrylic). Objects are annotated with one or more materials from this taxonomy. With the numerous attributes available for each object, we develop a Smart Labeling framework to quickly add new binary labels to all objects with very little manual labeling effort, making the dataset extensible. Each object attribute in our dataset can be included in either the model inputs or outputs, leading to combinatorial possibilities in task configurations. For example, we can train a model to predict the object category from the listing text, or the mass and price from the product listing image. EMMa offers a new benchmark for multi-task learning in computer vision and NLP, and allows practitioners to efficiently add new tasks and object attributes at scale.

In this paper we revisit the idea of pseudo-labeling in the context of semi-supervised learning where a learning algorithm has access to a small set of labeled samples and a large set of unlabeled samples. Pseudo-labeling works by applying pseudo-labels to samples in the unlabeled set by using a model trained on the combination of the labeled samples and any previously pseudo-labeled samples, and iteratively repeating this process in a self-training cycle. Current methods seem to have abandoned this approach in favor of consistency regularization methods that train models under a combination of different styles of self-supervised losses on the unlabeled samples and standard supervised losses on the labeled samples. We empirically demonstrate that pseudo-labeling can in fact be competitive with the state-of-the-art, while being more resilient to out-of-distribution samples in the unlabeled set. We identify two key factors that allow pseudo-labeling to achieve such remarkable results (1) applying curriculum learning principles and (2) avoiding concept drift by restarting model parameters before each self-training cycle. We obtain 94.91% accuracy on CIFAR-10 using only 4,000 labeled samples, and 68.87% top-1 accuracy on Imagenet-ILSVRC using only 10% of the labeled samples. The code is available at https://github.com/uvavision/Curriculum-Labeling

Real-world objects are composed of distinctive, object-specific parts. Identifying these parts is key to performing fine-grained, compositional reasoning-yet, large multimodal models (LMMs) struggle to perform this seemingly straightforward task. In this work, we introduce PARTONOMY, an LMM benchmark designed for pixel-level part grounding. We construct PARTONOMY from existing part datasets and our own rigorously annotated set of images, encompassing 862 part labels and 534 object labels for evaluation. Unlike existing datasets that simply ask models to identify generic parts, PARTONOMY uses specialized concepts (e.g., agricultural airplane), and challenges models to compare objects' parts, consider part-whole relationships, and justify textual predictions with visual segmentations. Our experiments demonstrate significant limitations in state-of-the-art LMMs (e.g., LISA-13B achieves only 5.9% gIoU), highlighting a critical gap in their part grounding abilities. We note that existing segmentation-enabled LMMs (segmenting LMMs) have two key architectural shortcomings: they use special [SEG] tokens not seen during pretraining which induce distribution shift, and they discard predicted segmentations instead of using past predictions to guide future ones. To address these deficiencies, we train several part-centric LMMs and propose PLUM, a novel segmenting LMM that uses span tagging instead of segmentation tokens and that conditions on prior predictions in a feedback loop. We find that pretrained PLUM outperforms existing segmenting LMMs on reasoning segmentation, VQA, and visual hallucination benchmarks. In addition, PLUM finetuned on our proposed Explanatory Part Segmentation task is competitive with segmenting LMMs trained on significantly more segmentation data. Our work opens up new avenues towards enabling fine-grained, grounded visual understanding in LMMs.

Open vocabulary models (e.g. CLIP) have shown strong performance on zero-shot classification through their ability generate embeddings for each class based on their (natural language) names. Prior work has focused on improving the accuracy of these models through prompt engineering or by incorporating a small amount of labeled downstream data (via finetuning). However, there has been little focus on improving the richness of the class names themselves, which can pose issues when class labels are coarsely-defined and are uninformative. We propose Classification with Hierarchical Label Sets (or CHiLS), an alternative strategy for zero-shot classification specifically designed for datasets with implicit semantic hierarchies. CHiLS proceeds in three steps: (i) for each class, produce a set of subclasses, using either existing label hierarchies or by querying GPT-3; (ii) perform the standard zero-shot CLIP procedure as though these subclasses were the labels of interest; (iii) map the predicted subclass back to its parent to produce the final prediction. Across numerous datasets with underlying hierarchical structure, CHiLS leads to improved accuracy in situations both with and without ground-truth hierarchical information. CHiLS is simple to implement within existing zero-shot pipelines and requires no additional training cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/acmi-lab/CHILS.

We present a comprehensive system for addressing Tasks A, B, and C of the LLMs4OL 2025 challenge, which together span the full ontology construction pipeline: term extraction, typing, and taxonomy discovery. Our approach combines retrieval-augmented prompting, zero-shot classification, and attention-based graph modeling -- each tailored to the demands of the respective task. For Task A, we jointly extract domain-specific terms and their ontological types using a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Training data was reformulated into a document to terms and types correspondence, while test-time inference leverages semantically similar training examples. This single-pass method requires no model finetuning and improves overall performance through lexical augmentation Task B, which involves assigning types to given terms, is handled via a dual strategy. In the few-shot setting (for domains with labeled training data), we reuse the RAG scheme with few-shot prompting. In the zero-shot setting (for previously unseen domains), we use a zero-shot classifier that combines cosine similarity scores from multiple embedding models using confidence-based weighting. In Task C, we model taxonomy discovery as graph inference. Using embeddings of type labels, we train a lightweight cross-attention layer to predict is-a relations by approximating a soft adjacency matrix. These modular, task-specific solutions enabled us to achieve top-ranking results in the official leaderboard across all three tasks. Taken together these strategies showcase the scalability, adaptability, and robustness of LLM-based architectures for ontology learning across heterogeneous domains. Code is available at: https://github.com/BelyaevaAlex/LLMs4OL-Challenge-Alexbek

Text clustering remains valuable in real-world applications where manual labeling is cost-prohibitive. It facilitates efficient organization and analysis of information by grouping similar texts based on their representations. However, implementing this approach necessitates fine-tuned embedders for downstream data and sophisticated similarity metrics. To address this issue, this study presents a novel framework for text clustering that effectively leverages the in-context learning capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs). Instead of fine-tuning embedders, we propose to transform the text clustering into a classification task via LLM. First, we prompt LLM to generate potential labels for a given dataset. Second, after integrating similar labels generated by the LLM, we prompt the LLM to assign the most appropriate label to each sample in the dataset. Our framework has been experimentally proven to achieve comparable or superior performance to state-of-the-art clustering methods that employ embeddings, without requiring complex fine-tuning or clustering algorithms. We make our code available to the public for utilization at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Text-Clustering-via-LLM-E500.

Prompt-based fine-tuning has become an essential method for eliciting information encoded in pre-trained language models for a variety of tasks, including text classification. For multi-class classification tasks, prompt-based fine-tuning under low-resource scenarios has resulted in performance levels comparable to those of fully fine-tuning methods. Previous studies have used crafted prompt templates and verbalizers, mapping from the label terms space to the class space, to solve the classification problem as a masked language modeling task. However, cross-domain and fine-grained prompt-based fine-tuning with an automatically enriched verbalizer remains unexplored, mainly due to the difficulty and costs of manually selecting domain label terms for the verbalizer, which requires humans with domain expertise. To address this challenge, we introduce SciPrompt, a framework designed to automatically retrieve scientific topic-related terms for low-resource text classification tasks. To this end, we select semantically correlated and domain-specific label terms within the context of scientific literature for verbalizer augmentation. Furthermore, we propose a new verbalization strategy that uses correlation scores as additional weights to enhance the prediction performance of the language model during model tuning. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art, prompt-based fine-tuning methods on scientific text classification tasks under few and zero-shot settings, especially in classifying fine-grained and emerging scientific topics.

Semi-supervised learning through pseudo-labeling has become a staple of state-of-the-art monolingual speech recognition systems. In this work, we extend pseudo-labeling to massively multilingual speech recognition with 60 languages. We propose a simple pseudo-labeling recipe that works well even with low-resource languages: train a supervised multilingual model, fine-tune it with semi-supervised learning on a target language, generate pseudo-labels for that language, and train a final model using pseudo-labels for all languages, either from scratch or by fine-tuning. Experiments on the labeled Common Voice and unlabeled VoxPopuli datasets show that our recipe can yield a model with better performance for many languages that also transfers well to LibriSpeech.

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer utilizing multilingual LLMs has become a popular learning paradigm for low-resource languages with no labeled training data. However, for NLP tasks that involve fine-grained predictions on words and phrases, the performance of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning lags far behind supervised fine-tuning methods. Therefore, it is common to exploit translation and label projection to further improve the performance by (1) translating training data that is available in a high-resource language (e.g., English) together with the gold labels into low-resource languages, and/or (2) translating test data in low-resource languages to a high-source language to run inference on, then projecting the predicted span-level labels back onto the original test data. However, state-of-the-art marker-based label projection methods suffer from translation quality degradation due to the extra label markers injected in the input to the translation model. In this work, we explore a new direction that leverages constrained decoding for label projection to overcome the aforementioned issues. Our new method not only can preserve the quality of translated texts but also has the versatility of being applicable to both translating training and translating test data strategies. This versatility is crucial as our experiments reveal that translating test data can lead to a considerable boost in performance compared to translating only training data. We evaluate on two cross-lingual transfer tasks, namely Named Entity Recognition and Event Argument Extraction, spanning 20 languages. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art marker-based method by a large margin and also shows better performance than other label projection methods that rely on external word alignment.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) require high-resolution visual information to perform fine-grained perception, yet processing entire high-resolution images is computationally prohibitive. While recent methods leverage a Region-of-Interest (RoI) mechanism to focus on salient areas, they typically present a difficult trade-off: training-based approaches depend on large-scale annotated datasets, while training-free methods that utilize the model's internal attention are computationally inefficient and less accurate, requiring either multi-pass prefill stages or reliance on the slow auto-regressive decoding process. In this paper, we propose an efficient, annotation-free Self-Distilled Region Proposal Network (SD-RPN) that resolves this trade-off. The SD-RPN is built around a pipeline that transforms the noisy attention maps from the MLLM's middle layers into high-quality pseudo-RoI labels by explicitly denoising the signal and resolving ambiguity. We use these labels to train a lightweight Region Proposal Network (RPN) that learns a more precise localization. This RPN is also highly efficient, predicting the RoI in a single forward pass using features from the MLLM's middle layers, decoupling RoI identification from the auto-regressive generation and avoiding costly multi-pass operations.To validate our approach, we integrate the framework into the LLaVA-1.5 architecture. Despite being trained on only a few (e.g. 10K) question-answer pairs, our method demonstrates exceptional data efficiency and generalization, achieving over a 10% absolute accuracy improvement on unseen benchmarks, including TextVQA, DocVQA, and V-Star. Our work presents a practical and scalable solution for enhancing the fine-grained perception of MLLMs without requiring costly supervision or full model fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/YuHengsss/SD-RPN.

Generalist models have achieved remarkable success in both language and vision-language tasks, showcasing the potential of unified modeling. However, effectively integrating fine-grained perception tasks like detection and segmentation into these models remains a significant challenge. This is primarily because these tasks often rely heavily on task-specific designs and architectures that can complicate the modeling process. To address this challenge, we present \ours, a framework that Unifies Fine-grained visual perception tasks through an Open-ended language interface. By transforming all perception targets into the language space, \ours unifies object-level detection, pixel-level segmentation, and image-level vision-language tasks into a single model. Additionally, we introduce a novel embedding retrieval approach that relies solely on the language interface to support segmentation tasks. Our framework bridges the gap between fine-grained perception and vision-language tasks, significantly simplifying architectural design and training strategies while achieving comparable or superior performance to methods with intricate task-specific designs. After multi-task training on five standard visual perception datasets, \ours outperforms the previous state-of-the-art generalist models by 12.3 mAP on COCO instance segmentation and 3.3 mIoU on ADE20K semantic segmentation. Furthermore, our method seamlessly integrates with existing MLLMs, effectively combining fine-grained perception capabilities with their advanced language abilities, thereby enabling more challenging tasks such as reasoning segmentation. Code and models will be publicly available.

Unsupervised large-scale vision-language pre-training has shown promising advances on various downstream tasks. Existing methods often model the cross-modal interaction either via the similarity of the global feature of each modality which misses sufficient information, or finer-grained interactions using cross/self-attention upon visual and textual tokens. However, cross/self-attention suffers from inferior efficiency in both training and inference. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-training (FILIP) to achieve finer-level alignment through a cross-modal late interaction mechanism, which uses a token-wise maximum similarity between visual and textual tokens to guide the contrastive objective. FILIP successfully leverages the finer-grained expressiveness between image patches and textual words by modifying only contrastive loss, while simultaneously gaining the ability to pre-compute image and text representations offline at inference, keeping both large-scale training and inference efficient. Furthermore, we construct a new large-scale image-text pair dataset called FILIP300M for pre-training. Experiments show that FILIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream vision-language tasks including zero-shot image classification and image-text retrieval. The visualization on word-patch alignment further shows that FILIP can learn meaningful fine-grained features with promising localization ability.