Multi-modal transformers are rapidly gaining attention in video captioning tasks. Existing multi-modal video captioning methods typically extract a fixed number of frames, which raises critical challenges. When a limited number of frames are extracted, important frames with essential information for caption generation may be missed. Conversely, extracting an excessive number of frames includes consecutive frames, potentially causing redundancy in visual tokens extracted from consecutive video frames. To extract an appropriate number of frames for each video, this paper proposes the first model-agnostic module selection framework in video captioning that has two main functions: (1) selecting a caption generation module with an appropriate size based on visual tokens extracted from video frames, and (2) constructing subsets of visual tokens for the selected caption generation module. Furthermore, we propose a new adaptive attention masking scheme that enhances attention on important visual tokens. Our experiments on three different benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly improves the performance of three recent video captioning models.

Today's most advanced vision-language models (VLMs) remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed VLMs into open ones. As a result, the community has been missing foundational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs from scratch. We present Molmo, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art in their class of openness. Our key contribution is a collection of new datasets called PixMo, including a dataset of highly detailed image captions for pre-training, a free-form image Q&A dataset for fine-tuning, and an innovative 2D pointing dataset, all collected without the use of external VLMs. The success of our approach relies on careful modeling choices, a well-tuned training pipeline, and, most critically, the quality of our newly collected datasets. Our best-in-class 72B model not only outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models, but also outperforms larger proprietary models including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro and Flash, second only to GPT-4o based on both academic benchmarks and on a large human evaluation. Our model weights, new datasets, and source code are available at https://molmo.allenai.org/blog.

We introduce OneDiffusion, a versatile, large-scale diffusion model that seamlessly supports bidirectional image synthesis and understanding across diverse tasks. It enables conditional generation from inputs such as text, depth, pose, layout, and semantic maps, while also handling tasks like image deblurring, upscaling, and reverse processes such as depth estimation and segmentation. Additionally, OneDiffusion allows for multi-view generation, camera pose estimation, and instant personalization using sequential image inputs. Our model takes a straightforward yet effective approach by treating all tasks as frame sequences with varying noise scales during training, allowing any frame to act as a conditioning image at inference time. Our unified training framework removes the need for specialized architectures, supports scalable multi-task training, and adapts smoothly to any resolution, enhancing both generalization and scalability. Experimental results demonstrate competitive performance across tasks in both generation and prediction such as text-to-image, multiview generation, ID preservation, depth estimation and camera pose estimation despite relatively small training dataset. Our code and checkpoint are freely available at https://github.com/lehduong/OneDiffusion

We present Unified-IO 2, the first autoregressive multimodal model that is capable of understanding and generating image, text, audio, and action. To unify different modalities, we tokenize inputs and outputs -- images, text, audio, action, bounding boxes, etc., into a shared semantic space and then process them with a single encoder-decoder transformer model. Since training with such diverse modalities is challenging, we propose various architectural improvements to stabilize model training. We train our model from scratch on a large multimodal pre-training corpus from diverse sources with a multimodal mixture of denoisers objective. To learn an expansive set of skills, such as following multimodal instructions, we construct and finetune on an ensemble of 120 datasets with prompts and augmentations. With a single unified model, Unified-IO 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GRIT benchmark and strong results in more than 35 benchmarks, including image generation and understanding, natural language understanding, video and audio understanding, and robotic manipulation. We release all our models to the research community.

Active collision avoidance system plays a crucial role in ensuring the lateral safety of autonomous vehicles, and it is primarily related to path planning and tracking control algorithms. In particular, the direct yaw-moment control (DYC) system can significantly improve the lateral stability of a vehicle in environments with sudden changes in road conditions. In order to apply the DYC algorithm, it is very important to accurately consider the properties of tire forces with complex nonlinearity for control to ensure the lateral stability of the vehicle. In this study, longitudinal and lateral tire forces for safety path tracking were simultaneously estimated using a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network based estimator. Furthermore, to improve path tracking performance in case of sudden changes in road conditions, a system has been developed by combining 4-wheel independent steering (4WIS) model predictive control (MPC) and 4-wheel independent drive (4WID) direct yaw-moment control (DYC). The estimation performance of the extended Kalman filter (EKF), which are commonly used for tire force estimation, was compared. In addition, the estimated longitudinal and lateral tire forces of each wheel were applied to the proposed system, and system verification was performed through simulation using a vehicle dynamics simulator. Consequently, the proposed method, the integrated path tracking algorithm with DYC and MPC using the LSTM based estimator, was validated to significantly improve the vehicle stability in suddenly changing road conditions.

As short-form funny videos on social networks are gaining popularity, it becomes demanding for AI models to understand them for better communication with humans. Unfortunately, previous video humor datasets target specific domains, such as speeches or sitcoms, and mostly focus on verbal cues. We curate a user-generated dataset of 10K multimodal funny videos from YouTube, called ExFunTube. Using a video filtering pipeline with GPT-3.5, we verify both verbal and visual elements contributing to humor. After filtering, we annotate each video with timestamps and text explanations for funny moments. Our ExFunTube is unique over existing datasets in that our videos cover a wide range of domains with various types of humor that necessitate a multimodal understanding of the content. Also, we develop a zero-shot video-to-text prompting to maximize video humor understanding of large language models (LLMs). With three different evaluation methods using automatic scores, rationale quality experiments, and human evaluations, we show that our prompting significantly improves LLMs' ability for humor explanation.

We address the problem of highlight detection from a 360◦ video by summarizing it both spatially and temporally. Given a long 360◦ video, we spatially select pleasantly-looking normal field-of-view (NFOV) segments from unlimited field of views (FOV) of the 360◦ video, and temporally summarize it into a concise and informative highlight as a selected subset of subshots. We propose a novel deep ranking model named as Composition View Score (CVS) model, which produces a spherical score map of composition per video segment, and determines which view is suitable for highlight via a sliding window kernel at inference. To evaluate the proposed framework, we perform experiments on the Pano2Vid benchmark dataset (Su, Jayaraman, and Grauman 2016) and our newly collected 360◦ video highlight dataset from YouTube and Vimeo. Through evaluation using both quantitative summarization metrics and user studies via Amazon Mechanical Turk, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art highlight detection methods.We also show that our model is 16 times faster at inference than AutoCam (Su, Jayaraman, and Grauman 2016), which is one of the first summarization algorithms of 360◦ videos.