Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Biological vision systems make adaptive use of context to recognize objects in new settings with novel contexts as well as occluded or blurry objects in familiar settings [3, 35]. In this paper, we investigate how vision models adaptively use context for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization and leverage our analysis results to improve model OOD generalization.

The human visual system can effortlessly recognize an object under different extrinsic factors such as lighting, object poses, and background, yet current computer vision systems often struggle with these variations. An important step to understanding and improving artificial vision systems is to measure image similarity purely based on intrinsic object properties that define object identity. This problem has been studied in the computer vision literature as re-identification, though mostly restricted to specific object categories such as people and cars. We propose to extend it to general object categories, exploring an image similarity metric based on object intrinsics. To benchmark such measurements, we collect the Common paired objects Under differenT Extrinsics (CUTE) dataset of 18, 000 images of 180 objects under different extrinsic factors such as lighting, poses, and imaging conditions. While existing methods such as LPIPS and CLIP scores do not measure object intrinsics well, we find that combining deep features learned from contrastive self-supervised learning with foreground filtering is a simple yet effective approach to approximating the similarity. We conduct an extensive survey of pre-trained features and foreground extraction methods to arrive at a strong baseline that best measures intrinsic object-centric image similarity among current methods. Finally, we demonstrate that our approach can aid in downstream applications such as acting as an analog for human subjects and improving generalizable re-identification.

Language models of code (LMs) work well when the surrounding code provides sufficient context. This is not true when it becomes necessary to use types, functionality or APIs defined elsewhere in the repository or a linked library, especially those not seen during training. LMs suffer from limited awareness of such global context and end up hallucinating. Integrated development environments (IDEs) assist developers in understanding repository context using static analysis. We extend this assistance, enjoyed by developers, to LMs. We propose monitor-guided decoding (MGD) where a monitor uses static analysis to guide the decoding.

Scene graph generation (SGG) analyzes images to extract meaningful information about objects and their relationships. In the dynamic visual world, it is crucial for AI systems to continuously detect new objects and establish their relationships with existing ones. Recently, numerous studies have focused on continual learning within the domains of object detection and image recognition. However, a limited amount of research focuses on a more challenging continual learning problem in SGG. This increased difficulty arises from the intricate interactions and dynamic relationships among objects, and their associated contexts. Thus, in continual learning, SGG models are often required to expand, modify, retain, and reason scene graphs within the process of adaptive visual scene understanding.

In this paper, we propose a novel benchmark, named VastTrack, aiming to facilitate the development of general visual tracking via encompassing abundant classes and videos. VastTrack consists of a few attractive properties: (1) Vast Object Category. In particular, it covers targets from 2,115 categories, significantly surpassing object classes of existing popular benchmarks (e.g., GOT-10k with 563 classes and LaSOT with 70 categories). Through providing such vast object classes, we expect to learn more general object tracking.