Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models have recently successfully facilitated many cross-modal downstream tasks. Most existing works evaluated their systems by comparing the fine-tuned downstream task performance. However, only average downstream task accuracy provides little information about the pros and cons of each VLP method, let alone provides insights on how the community can improve the systems in the future. Inspired by the CheckList for testing natural language processing, we exploit VL-CheckList, a novel framework to understand the capabilities of VLP models. The proposed method divides the image-texting ability of a VLP model into three categories: objects, attributes, and relations, and uses a novel taxonomy to further break down these three aspects. We conduct comprehensive studies to analyze seven recently popular VLP models via the proposed framework. Results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method by revealing fine-grained differences among the compared models that were not visible from downstream task-only evaluation. Further results show promising research direction in building better VLP models. Our data and code are available at: https://github.com/om-ai-lab/VL-CheckList.

Recent advances in the areas of Multimodal Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led to the development of challenging tasks at the intersection of Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Robotics. Whereas many approaches and previous survey pursuits have characterised one or two of these dimensions, there has not been a holistic analysis at the center of all three. Moreover, even when combinations of these topics are considered, more focus is placed on describing, e.g., current architectural methods, as opposed to also illustrating high-level challenges and opportunities for the field. In this survey paper, we discuss Embodied Vision-Language Planning (EVLP) tasks, a family of prominent embodied navigation and manipulation problems that jointly leverage computer vision and natural language for interaction in physical environments. We propose a taxonomy to unify these tasks and provide an in-depth analysis and comparison of the current and new algorithmic approaches, metrics, simulators, and datasets used for EVLP tasks. Finally, we present the core challenges that we believe new EVLP works should seek to address, and we advocate for task construction that enables model generalisability and furthers real-world deployment.

Advancing object detection to open-vocabulary and few-shot transfer has long been a challenge for computer vision research. This work explores a continual learning approach that enables a detector to expand its zero/few-shot capabilities via multi-dataset vision-language pre-training. Using natural language as knowledge representation, we explore methods to accumulate "visual vocabulary" from different training datasets and unify the task as a language-conditioned detection framework. Specifically, we propose a novel language-aware detector OmDet and a novel training mechanism. The proposed multimodal detection network can resolve the technical challenges in multi-dataset joint training and it can generalize to arbitrary number of training datasets without the requirements for manual label taxonomy merging. Experiment results on COCO, Pascal VOC, and Wider Face/Pedestrian confirmed the efficacy by achieving on par or higher scores in joint training compared to training separately. Moreover, we pre-train on more than 20 million images with 4 million unique object vocabulary, and the resulting model is evaluated on 35 downstream tasks of ODinW. Results show that OmDet is able to achieve the state-of-the-art fine-tuned performance on ODinW. And analysis shows that by scaling up the proposed pre-training method, OmDet continues to improve its zero/few-shot tuning performance, suggesting a promising way for further scaling.

Recent advances in the areas of multimodal machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the development of challenging tasks at the intersection of Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Embodied AI. Whereas many approaches and previous survey pursuits have characterised one or two of these dimensions, there has not been a holistic analysis at the center of all three. Moreover, even when combinations of these topics are considered, more focus is placed on describing, e.g., current architectural methods, as opposed to also illustrating high-level challenges and opportunities for the field. In this survey paper, we discuss Embodied Vision-Language Planning (EVLP) tasks, a family of prominent embodied navigation and manipulation problems that jointly use computer vision and natural language. We propose a taxonomy to unify these tasks and provide an in-depth analysis and comparison of the new and current algorithmic approaches, metrics, simulated environments, as well as the datasets used for EVLP tasks. Finally, we present the core challenges that we believe new EVLP works should seek to address, and we advocate for task construction that enables model generalizability and furthers real-world deployment.

Recent advances in the areas of multimodal machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the development of challenging tasks at the intersection of Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Embodied AI. Whereas many approaches and previous survey pursuits have characterised one or two of these dimensions, there has not been a holistic analysis at the center of all three. Moreover, even when combinations of these topics are considered, more focus is placed on describing, e.g., current architectural methods, as opposed to also illustrating high-level challenges and opportunities for the field. In this survey paper, we discuss Embodied Vision-Language Planning (EVLP) tasks, a family of prominent embodied navigation and manipulation problems that jointly use computer vision and natural language. We propose a taxonomy to unify these tasks and provide an in-depth analysis and comparison of the new and current algorithmic approaches, metrics, simulated environments, as well as the datasets used for EVLP tasks. Finally, we present the core challenges that we believe new EVLP works should seek to address, and we advocate for task construction that enables model generalizability and furthers real-world deployment.