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1. Deeply Learned Compositional Models for Human Pose Estimation

   Tang, Wei; Yu, Pei; Wu, Ying (September 2018, Proc. of European Conference on Computer Vision)

   Compositional models represent patterns with hierarchies of meaningful parts and subparts. Their ability to characterize high-order relationships among body parts helps resolve low-level ambiguities in human pose estimation (HPE). However, prior compositional models make unrealistic assumptions on subpart-part relationships, making them incapable to characterize complex compositional patterns. Moreover, state spaces of their higher-level parts can be exponentially large, complicating both inference and learning. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel framework, termed as Deeply Learned Compositional Model (DLCM), for HPE. It exploits deep neural networks to learn the compositionality of human bodies. This results in a novel network with a hierarchical compositional architecture and bottom-up/top-down inference stages. In addition, we propose a novel bone-based part representation. It not only compactly encodes orientations, scales and shapes of parts, but also avoids their potentially large state spaces. With significantly lower complexities, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets. 

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2. ConceptBed: Evaluating Concept Learning Abilities of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v38i13.29371  

   Patel, Maitreya; Gokhale, Tejas; Baral, Chitta; Yang, Yezhou (March 2024, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   The ability to understand visual concepts and replicate and compose these concepts from images is a central goal for computer vision. Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have lead to high definition and realistic image quality generation by learning from large databases of images and their descriptions. However, the evaluation of T2I models has focused on photorealism and limited qualitative measures of visual understanding. To quantify the ability of T2I models in learning and synthesizing novel visual concepts (a.k.a. personalized T2I), we introduce ConceptBed, a large-scale dataset that consists of 284 unique visual concepts, and 33K composite text prompts. Along with the dataset, we propose an evaluation metric, Concept Confidence Deviation (CCD), that uses the confidence of oracle concept classifiers to measure the alignment between concepts generated by T2I generators and concepts contained in target images. We evaluate visual concepts that are either objects, attributes, or styles, and also evaluate four dimensions of compositionality: counting, attributes, relations, and actions. Our human study shows that CCD is highly correlated with human understanding of concepts. Our results point to a trade-off between learning the concepts and preserving the compositionality which existing approaches struggle to overcome. The data, code, and interactive demo is available at: https://conceptbed.github.io/ 

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3. ThreeDWorld: A Platform for Interactive Multi-Modal Physical Simulation

   https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2007.04954  

   o Gan C, Schartz S (July 2020, ArXivorg)

   We introduce ThreeDWorld (TDW), a platform for interactive multi-modal physical simulation. TDW enables simulation of high-fidelity sensory data and physical interactions between mobile agents and objects in rich 3D environments. Unique properties include: real-time near-photo-realistic image rendering; a library of objects and environments, and routines for their customization; generative procedures for efficiently building classes of new environments; high-fidelity audio rendering; realistic physical interactions for a variety of material types, including cloths, liquid, and deformable objects; customizable agents that embody AI agents; and support for human interactions with VR devices. TDW's API enables multiple agents to interact within a simulation and returns a range of sensor and physics data representing the state of the world. We present initial experiments enabled by TDW in emerging research directions in computer vision, machine learning, and cognitive science, including multi-modal physical scene understanding, physical dynamics predictions, multi-agent interactions, models that learn like a child, and attention studies in humans and neural networks. 

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4. ThreeDWorld: A platform for interactive multi-modal physical simulation

   Gan, C.; Schwartz, J.; Alter, S.; Schrimpf, M.; Traer, J.; De Freitas, J.; Kubilius, J.; Bhandwaldar, A.; Haber, N.; Sano, M.; et al (October 2021, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS))

   We introduce ThreeDWorld (TDW), a platform for interactive multi-modal physical simulation. TDW enables the simulation of high-fidelity sensory data and physical interactions between mobile agents and objects in rich 3D environments. Unique properties include: real-time near-photo-realistic image rendering; a library of objects and environments, and routines for their customization; generative procedures for efficiently building classes of new environments; high-fidelity audio rendering; realistic physical interactions for a variety of material types, including cloths, liquid, and deformable objects; customizable avatars that embody AI agents; and support for human interactions with VR devices. TDW's API enables multiple agents to interact within a simulation and returns a range of sensor and physics data representing the state of the world. We present initial experiments enabled by TDW in emerging research directions in computer vision, machine learning, and cognitive science, including multi-modal physical scene understanding, physical dynamics predictions, multi-agent interactions, models that 'learn like a child', and attention studies in humans and neural networks. 

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5. Explainable Semantic Space by Grounding Language to Vision with Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

   Yizhen Zhang, Minkyu Choi (December 2021, Advances in neural information processing systems)

   In natural language processing, most models try to learn semantic representations merely from texts. The learned representations encode the “distributional semantics” but fail to connect to any knowledge about the physical world. In contrast, humans learn language by grounding concepts in perception and action and the brain encodes “grounded semantics” for cognition. Inspired by this notion and recent work in vision-language learning, we design a two-stream model for grounding language learning in vision. The model includes a VGG-based visual stream and a Bert-based language stream. The two streams merge into a joint representational space. Through cross-modal contrastive learning, the model first learns to align visual and language representations with the MS COCO dataset. The model further learns to retrieve visual objects with language queries through a cross-modal attention module and to infer the visual relations between the retrieved objects through a bilinear operator with the Visual Genome dataset. After training, the model’s language stream is a stand-alone language model capable of embedding concepts in a visually grounded semantic space. This semantic space manifests principal dimensions explainable with human intuition and neurobiological knowledge. Word embeddings in this semantic space are predictive of human-defined norms of semantic features and are segregated into perceptually distinctive clusters. Furthermore, the visually grounded language model also enables compositional language understanding based on visual knowledge and multimodal image search with queries based on images, texts, or their combinations. 

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