Daily Papers

Despite increasing efforts on universal representations for visual recognition, few have addressed object detection. In this paper, we develop an effective and efficient universal object detection system that is capable of working on various image domains, from human faces and traffic signs to medical CT images. Unlike multi-domain models, this universal model does not require prior knowledge of the domain of interest. This is achieved by the introduction of a new family of adaptation layers, based on the principles of squeeze and excitation, and a new domain-attention mechanism. In the proposed universal detector, all parameters and computations are shared across domains, and a single network processes all domains all the time. Experiments, on a newly established universal object detection benchmark of 11 diverse datasets, show that the proposed detector outperforms a bank of individual detectors, a multi-domain detector, and a baseline universal detector, with a 1.3x parameter increase over a single-domain baseline detector. The code and benchmark will be released at http://www.svcl.ucsd.edu/projects/universal-detection/.

Visual counterfeits are increasingly causing an existential conundrum in mainstream media with rapid evolution in neural image synthesis methods. Though detection of such counterfeits has been a taxing problem in the image forensics community, a recent class of forensic detectors -- universal detectors -- are able to surprisingly spot counterfeit images regardless of generator architectures, loss functions, training datasets, and resolutions. This intriguing property suggests the possible existence of transferable forensic features (T-FF) in universal detectors. In this work, we conduct the first analytical study to discover and understand T-FF in universal detectors. Our contributions are 2-fold: 1) We propose a novel forensic feature relevance statistic (FF-RS) to quantify and discover T-FF in universal detectors and, 2) Our qualitative and quantitative investigations uncover an unexpected finding: color is a critical T-FF in universal detectors. Code and models are available at https://keshik6.github.io/transferable-forensic-features/

In this work we ask whether it is possible to create a "universal" detector for telling apart real images from these generated by a CNN, regardless of architecture or dataset used. To test this, we collect a dataset consisting of fake images generated by 11 different CNN-based image generator models, chosen to span the space of commonly used architectures today (ProGAN, StyleGAN, BigGAN, CycleGAN, StarGAN, GauGAN, DeepFakes, cascaded refinement networks, implicit maximum likelihood estimation, second-order attention super-resolution, seeing-in-the-dark). We demonstrate that, with careful pre- and post-processing and data augmentation, a standard image classifier trained on only one specific CNN generator (ProGAN) is able to generalize surprisingly well to unseen architectures, datasets, and training methods (including the just released StyleGAN2). Our findings suggest the intriguing possibility that today's CNN-generated images share some common systematic flaws, preventing them from achieving realistic image synthesis. Code and pre-trained networks are available at https://peterwang512.github.io/CNNDetection/ .

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection aims to comprehend the intricate relationships between humans and objects, predicting <human, action, object> triplets, and serving as the foundation for numerous computer vision tasks. The complexity and diversity of human-object interactions in the real world, however, pose significant challenges for both annotation and recognition, particularly in recognizing interactions within an open world context. This study explores the universal interaction recognition in an open-world setting through the use of Vision-Language (VL) foundation models and large language models (LLMs). The proposed method is dubbed as \textbf{UniHOI}. We conduct a deep analysis of the three hierarchical features inherent in visual HOI detectors and propose a method for high-level relation extraction aimed at VL foundation models, which we call HO prompt-based learning. Our design includes an HO Prompt-guided Decoder (HOPD), facilitates the association of high-level relation representations in the foundation model with various HO pairs within the image. Furthermore, we utilize a LLM (i.e. GPT) for interaction interpretation, generating a richer linguistic understanding for complex HOIs. For open-category interaction recognition, our method supports either of two input types: interaction phrase or interpretive sentence. Our efficient architecture design and learning methods effectively unleash the potential of the VL foundation models and LLMs, allowing UniHOI to surpass all existing methods with a substantial margin, under both supervised and zero-shot settings. The code and pre-trained weights are available at: https://github.com/Caoyichao/UniHOI.

This research addresses the challenge of developing a universal deepfake detector that can effectively identify unseen deepfake images despite limited training data. Existing frequency-based paradigms have relied on frequency-level artifacts introduced during the up-sampling in GAN pipelines to detect forgeries. However, the rapid advancements in synthesis technology have led to specific artifacts for each generation model. Consequently, these detectors have exhibited a lack of proficiency in learning the frequency domain and tend to overfit to the artifacts present in the training data, leading to suboptimal performance on unseen sources. To address this issue, we introduce a novel frequency-aware approach called FreqNet, centered around frequency domain learning, specifically designed to enhance the generalizability of deepfake detectors. Our method forces the detector to continuously focus on high-frequency information, exploiting high-frequency representation of features across spatial and channel dimensions. Additionally, we incorporate a straightforward frequency domain learning module to learn source-agnostic features. It involves convolutional layers applied to both the phase spectrum and amplitude spectrum between the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Inverse Fast Fourier Transform (iFFT). Extensive experimentation involving 17 GANs demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method, showcasing state-of-the-art performance (+9.8\%) while requiring fewer parameters. The code is available at {\cred https://github.com/chuangchuangtan/FreqNet-DeepfakeDetection}.

We propose a new comprehensive benchmark to revolutionize the current deepfake detection field to the next generation. Predominantly, existing works identify top-notch detection algorithms and models by adhering to the common practice: training detectors on one specific dataset (e.g., FF++) and testing them on other prevalent deepfake datasets. This protocol is often regarded as a "golden compass" for navigating SoTA detectors. But can these stand-out "winners" be truly applied to tackle the myriad of realistic and diverse deepfakes lurking in the real world? If not, what underlying factors contribute to this gap? In this work, we found the dataset (both train and test) can be the "primary culprit" due to: (1) forgery diversity: Deepfake techniques are commonly referred to as both face forgery and entire image synthesis. Most existing datasets only contain partial types of them, with limited forgery methods implemented; (2) forgery realism: The dominated training dataset, FF++, contains out-of-date forgery techniques from the past four years. "Honing skills" on these forgeries makes it difficult to guarantee effective detection generalization toward nowadays' SoTA deepfakes; (3) evaluation protocol: Most detection works perform evaluations on one type, which hinders the development of universal deepfake detectors. To address this dilemma, we construct a highly diverse deepfake detection dataset called DF40, which comprises 40 distinct deepfake techniques. We then conduct comprehensive evaluations using 4 standard evaluation protocols and 8 representative detection methods, resulting in over 2,000 evaluations. Through these evaluations, we provide an extensive analysis from various perspectives, leading to 7 new insightful findings. We also open up 4 valuable yet previously underexplored research questions to inspire future works. Our project page is https://github.com/YZY-stack/DF40.

Transformer-based detectors (DETRs) are becoming popular for their simple framework, but the large model size and heavy time consumption hinder their deployment in the real world. While knowledge distillation (KD) can be an appealing technique to compress giant detectors into small ones for comparable detection performance and low inference cost. Since DETRs formulate object detection as a set prediction problem, existing KD methods designed for classic convolution-based detectors may not be directly applicable. In this paper, we propose DETRDistill, a novel knowledge distillation method dedicated to DETR-families. Specifically, we first design a Hungarian-matching logits distillation to encourage the student model to have the exact predictions as that of teacher DETRs. Next, we propose a target-aware feature distillation to help the student model learn from the object-centric features of the teacher model. Finally, in order to improve the convergence rate of the student DETR, we introduce a query-prior assignment distillation to speed up the student model learning from well-trained queries and stable assignment of the teacher model. Extensive experimental results on the COCO dataset validate the effectiveness of our approach. Notably, DETRDistill consistently improves various DETRs by more than 2.0 mAP, even surpassing their teacher models.

The increasing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised concerns about their misuse in AI-generated plagiarism and social engineering. While various AI-generated text detectors have been proposed to mitigate these risks, many remain vulnerable to simple evasion techniques such as paraphrasing. However, recent detectors have shown greater robustness against such basic attacks. In this work, we introduce Adversarial Paraphrasing, a training-free attack framework that universally humanizes any AI-generated text to evade detection more effectively. Our approach leverages an off-the-shelf instruction-following LLM to paraphrase AI-generated content under the guidance of an AI text detector, producing adversarial examples that are specifically optimized to bypass detection. Extensive experiments show that our attack is both broadly effective and highly transferable across several detection systems. For instance, compared to simple paraphrasing attack--which, ironically, increases the true positive at 1% false positive (T@1%F) by 8.57% on RADAR and 15.03% on Fast-DetectGPT--adversarial paraphrasing, guided by OpenAI-RoBERTa-Large, reduces T@1%F by 64.49% on RADAR and a striking 98.96% on Fast-DetectGPT. Across a diverse set of detectors--including neural network-based, watermark-based, and zero-shot approaches--our attack achieves an average T@1%F reduction of 87.88% under the guidance of OpenAI-RoBERTa-Large. We also analyze the tradeoff between text quality and attack success to find that our method can significantly reduce detection rates, with mostly a slight degradation in text quality. Our adversarial setup highlights the need for more robust and resilient detection strategies in the light of increasingly sophisticated evasion techniques.

A truly universal AI-Generated Image (AIGI) detector must simultaneously generalize across diverse generative models and varied semantic content. Current state-of-the-art methods learn a single, entangled forgery representation, conflating content-dependent flaws with content-agnostic artifacts, and are further constrained by outdated benchmarks. To overcome these limitations, we propose OmniAID, a novel framework centered on a decoupled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. The core of our method is a hybrid expert system designed to decouple: (1) semantic flaws across distinct content domains, and (2) content-dependent flaws from content-agnostic universal artifacts. This system employs a set of Routable Specialized Semantic Experts, each for a distinct domain (e.g., human, animal), complemented by a Fixed Universal Artifact Expert. This architecture is trained using a novel two-stage strategy: we first train the experts independently with domain-specific hard-sampling to ensure specialization, and subsequently train a lightweight gating network for effective input routing. By explicitly decoupling "what is generated" (content-specific flaws) from "how it is generated" (universal artifacts), OmniAID achieves robust generalization. To address outdated benchmarks and validate real-world applicability, we introduce Mirage, a new large-scale, contemporary dataset. Extensive experiments, using both traditional benchmarks and our Mirage dataset, demonstrate our model surpasses existing monolithic detectors, establishing a new and robust standard for AIGI authentication against modern, in-the-wild threats.

Deepfakes have become a universal and rapidly intensifying concern of generative AI across various media types such as images, audio, and videos. Among these, audio deepfakes have been of particular concern due to the ease of high-quality voice synthesis and distribution via platforms such as social media and robocalls. Consequently, detecting audio deepfakes plays a critical role in combating the growing misuse of AI-synthesized speech. However, real-world scenarios often introduce various audio corruptions, such as noise, modification, and compression, that may significantly impact detection performance. This work systematically evaluates the robustness of 10 audio deepfake detection models against 16 common corruptions, categorized into noise perturbation, audio modification, and compression. Using both traditional deep learning models and state-of-the-art foundation models, we make four unique observations. First, our findings show that while most models demonstrate strong robustness to noise, they are notably more vulnerable to modifications and compression, especially when neural codecs are applied. Second, speech foundation models generally outperform traditional models across most scenarios, likely due to their self-supervised learning paradigm and large-scale pre-training. Third, our results show that increasing model size improves robustness, albeit with diminishing returns. Fourth, we demonstrate how targeted data augmentation during training can enhance model resilience to unseen perturbations. A case study on political speech deepfakes highlights the effectiveness of foundation models in achieving high accuracy under real-world conditions. These findings emphasize the importance of developing more robust detection frameworks to ensure reliability in practical deployment settings.

In the field of 3D object detection for autonomous driving, the sensor portfolio including multi-modality and single-modality is diverse and complex. Since the multi-modal methods have system complexity while the accuracy of single-modal ones is relatively low, how to make a tradeoff between them is difficult. In this work, we propose a universal cross-modality knowledge distillation framework (UniDistill) to improve the performance of single-modality detectors. Specifically, during training, UniDistill projects the features of both the teacher and the student detector into Bird's-Eye-View (BEV), which is a friendly representation for different modalities. Then, three distillation losses are calculated to sparsely align the foreground features, helping the student learn from the teacher without introducing additional cost during inference. Taking advantage of the similar detection paradigm of different detectors in BEV, UniDistill easily supports LiDAR-to-camera, camera-to-LiDAR, fusion-to-LiDAR and fusion-to-camera distillation paths. Furthermore, the three distillation losses can filter the effect of misaligned background information and balance between objects of different sizes, improving the distillation effectiveness. Extensive experiments on nuScenes demonstrate that UniDistill effectively improves the mAP and NDS of student detectors by 2.0%~3.2%.

Bitemporal supervised learning paradigm always dominates remote sensing change detection using numerous labeled bitemporal image pairs, especially for high spatial resolution (HSR) remote sensing imagery. However, it is very expensive and labor-intensive to label change regions in large-scale bitemporal HSR remote sensing image pairs. In this paper, we propose single-temporal supervised learning (STAR) for universal remote sensing change detection from a new perspective of exploiting changes between unpaired images as supervisory signals. STAR enables us to train a high-accuracy change detector only using unpaired labeled images and can generalize to real-world bitemporal image pairs. To demonstrate the flexibility and scalability of STAR, we design a simple yet unified change detector, termed ChangeStar2, capable of addressing binary change detection, object change detection, and semantic change detection in one architecture. ChangeStar2 achieves state-of-the-art performances on eight public remote sensing change detection datasets, covering above two supervised settings, multiple change types, multiple scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Z-Zheng/pytorch-change-models.

Adversarial camouflage has garnered attention for its ability to attack object detectors from any viewpoint by covering the entire object's surface. However, universality and robustness in existing methods often fall short as the transferability aspect is often overlooked, thus restricting their application only to a specific target with limited performance. To address these challenges, we present Adversarial Camouflage for Transferable and Intensive Vehicle Evasion (ACTIVE), a state-of-the-art physical camouflage attack framework designed to generate universal and robust adversarial camouflage capable of concealing any 3D vehicle from detectors. Our framework incorporates innovative techniques to enhance universality and robustness, including a refined texture rendering that enables common texture application to different vehicles without being constrained to a specific texture map, a novel stealth loss that renders the vehicle undetectable, and a smooth and camouflage loss to enhance the naturalness of the adversarial camouflage. Our extensive experiments on 15 different models show that ACTIVE consistently outperforms existing works on various public detectors, including the latest YOLOv7. Notably, our universality evaluations reveal promising transferability to other vehicle classes, tasks (segmentation models), and the real world, not just other vehicles.

The continued release of new and better image generation models increases the demand for synthetic image detectors. In such a dynamic field, detectors need to be able to generalize widely and be robust to uncontrolled alterations. The present work is motivated by this setting, when looking at the role of time, image transformations and data sources, for detector generalization. In these experiments, none of the evaluated detectors is found universal, but results indicate an ensemble could be. Experiments on data collected in the wild show this task to be more challenging than the one defined by large-scale datasets, pointing to a gap between experimentation and actual practice. Finally, we observe a race equilibrium effect, where better generators lead to better detectors, and vice versa. We hypothesize this pushes the field towards a perpetually close race between generators and detectors.

Object localization in general environments is a fundamental part of vision systems. While dominating on the COCO benchmark, recent Transformer-based detection methods are not competitive in diverse domains. Moreover, these methods still struggle to very accurately estimate the object bounding boxes in complex environments. We introduce Cascade-DETR for high-quality universal object detection. We jointly tackle the generalization to diverse domains and localization accuracy by proposing the Cascade Attention layer, which explicitly integrates object-centric information into the detection decoder by limiting the attention to the previous box prediction. To further enhance accuracy, we also revisit the scoring of queries. Instead of relying on classification scores, we predict the expected IoU of the query, leading to substantially more well-calibrated confidences. Lastly, we introduce a universal object detection benchmark, UDB10, that contains 10 datasets from diverse domains. While also advancing the state-of-the-art on COCO, Cascade-DETR substantially improves DETR-based detectors on all datasets in UDB10, even by over 10 mAP in some cases. The improvements under stringent quality requirements are even more pronounced. Our code and models will be released at https://github.com/SysCV/cascade-detr.

The pursuit of a universal AI-generated image (AIGI) detector often relies on aggregating data from numerous generators to improve generalization. However, this paper identifies a paradoxical phenomenon we term the Benefit then Conflict dilemma, where detector performance stagnates and eventually degrades as source diversity expands. Our systematic analysis, diagnoses this failure by identifying two core issues: severe data-level heterogeneity, which causes the feature distributions of real and synthetic images to increasingly overlap, and a critical model-level bottleneck from fixed, pretrained encoders that cannot adapt to the rising complexity. To address these challenges, we propose Generator-Aware Prototype Learning (GAPL), a framework that constrain representation with a structured learning paradigm. GAPL learns a compact set of canonical forgery prototypes to create a unified, low-variance feature space, effectively countering data heterogeneity.To resolve the model bottleneck, it employs a two-stage training scheme with Low-Rank Adaptation, enhancing its discriminative power while preserving valuable pretrained knowledge. This approach establishes a more robust and generalizable decision boundary. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that GAPL achieves state-of-the-art performance, showing superior detection accuracy across a wide variety of GAN and diffusion-based generators. Code is available at https://github.com/UltraCapture/GAPL

Safety and security remain critical concerns in AI deployment. Despite safety training through reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) [ 32], language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass safety guardrails. Universal jailbreaks - prefixes that can circumvent alignment for any payload - are particularly concerning. We show empirically that jailbreak detection systems face distribution shift, with detectors trained at one point in time performing poorly against newer exploits. To study this problem, we release JailbreaksOverTime, a comprehensive dataset of timestamped real user interactions containing both benign requests and jailbreak attempts collected over 10 months. We propose a two-pronged method for defenders to detect new jailbreaks and continuously update their detectors. First, we show how to use continuous learning to detect jailbreaks and adapt rapidly to new emerging jailbreaks. While detectors trained at a single point in time eventually fail due to drift, we find that universal jailbreaks evolve slowly enough for self-training to be effective. Retraining our detection model weekly using its own labels - with no new human labels - reduces the false negative rate from 4% to 0.3% at a false positive rate of 0.1%. Second, we introduce an unsupervised active monitoring approach to identify novel jailbreaks. Rather than classifying inputs directly, we recognize jailbreaks by their behavior, specifically, their ability to trigger models to respond to known-harmful prompts. This approach has a higher false negative rate (4.1%) than supervised methods, but it successfully identified some out-of-distribution attacks that were missed by the continuous learning approach.

The rapid evolution of generative technologies necessitates reliable methods for detecting AI-generated images. A critical limitation of current detectors is their failure to generalize to images from unseen generative models, as they often overfit to source-specific semantic cues rather than learning universal generative artifacts. To overcome this, we introduce a simple yet remarkably effective pixel-level mapping pre-processing step to disrupt the pixel value distribution of images and break the fragile, non-essential semantic patterns that detectors commonly exploit as shortcuts. This forces the detector to focus on more fundamental and generalizable high-frequency traces inherent to the image generation process. Through comprehensive experiments on GAN and diffusion-based generators, we show that our approach significantly boosts the cross-generator performance of state-of-the-art detectors. Extensive analysis further verifies our hypothesis that the disruption of semantic cues is the key to generalization.

The rapid development of generative models has made it increasingly crucial to develop detectors that can reliably detect synthetic images. Although most of the work has now focused on cross-generator generalization, we argue that this viewpoint is too limited. Detecting synthetic images involves another equally important challenge: generalization across visual domains. To bridge this gap,we present the OmniGen Benchmark. This comprehensive evaluation dataset incorporates 12 state-of-the-art generators, providing a more realistic way of evaluating detector performance under realistic conditions. In addition, we introduce a new method, FusionDetect, aimed at addressing both vectors of generalization. FusionDetect draws on the benefits of two frozen foundation models: CLIP & Dinov2. By deriving features from both complementary models,we develop a cohesive feature space that naturally adapts to changes in both thecontent and design of the generator. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that FusionDetect delivers not only a new state-of-the-art, which is 3.87% more accurate than its closest competitor and 6.13% more precise on average on established benchmarks, but also achieves a 4.48% increase in accuracy on OmniGen,along with exceptional robustness to common image perturbations. We introduce not only a top-performing detector, but also a new benchmark and framework for furthering universal AI image detection. The code and dataset are available at http://github.com/amir-aman/FusionDetect

Large language models (LLMs) often produce errors, including factual inaccuracies, biases, and reasoning failures, collectively referred to as "hallucinations". Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs' internal states encode information regarding the truthfulness of their outputs, and that this information can be utilized to detect errors. In this work, we show that the internal representations of LLMs encode much more information about truthfulness than previously recognized. We first discover that the truthfulness information is concentrated in specific tokens, and leveraging this property significantly enhances error detection performance. Yet, we show that such error detectors fail to generalize across datasets, implying that -- contrary to prior claims -- truthfulness encoding is not universal but rather multifaceted. Next, we show that internal representations can also be used for predicting the types of errors the model is likely to make, facilitating the development of tailored mitigation strategies. Lastly, we reveal a discrepancy between LLMs' internal encoding and external behavior: they may encode the correct answer, yet consistently generate an incorrect one. Taken together, these insights deepen our understanding of LLM errors from the model's internal perspective, which can guide future research on enhancing error analysis and mitigation.

Monocular 3D object detection is an essential task in autonomous driving. However, most current methods consider each 3D object in the scene as an independent training sample, while ignoring their inherent geometric relations, thus inevitably resulting in a lack of leveraging spatial constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel method that takes all the objects into consideration and explores their mutual relationships to help better estimate the 3D boxes. Moreover, since 2D detection is more reliable currently, we also investigate how to use the detected 2D boxes as guidance to globally constrain the optimization of the corresponding predicted 3D boxes. To this end, a differentiable loss function, termed as Homography Loss, is proposed to achieve the goal, which exploits both 2D and 3D information, aiming at balancing the positional relationships between different objects by global constraints, so as to obtain more accurately predicted 3D boxes. Thanks to the concise design, our loss function is universal and can be plugged into any mature monocular 3D detector, while significantly boosting the performance over their baseline. Experiments demonstrate that our method yields the best performance (Nov. 2021) compared with the other state-of-the-arts by a large margin on KITTI 3D datasets.

Despite the extensive success of pretrained language models as encoders for building NLP systems, they haven't seen prominence as decoders for sequence generation tasks. We explore the question of whether these models can be adapted to be used as universal decoders. To be considered "universal," a decoder must have an implicit representation for any target sentence s, such that it can recover that sentence exactly when conditioned on its representation. For large transformer-based language models trained on vast amounts of English text, we investigate whether such representations can be easily discovered using standard optimization methods. We present and compare three representation injection techniques for transformer-based models and three accompanying methods which map sentences to and from this representation space. Experiments show that not only do representations exist for sentences from a variety of genres. More importantly, without needing complex optimization algorithms, our methods recover these sentences almost perfectly without fine-tuning the underlying language model at all.

Universal visual anomaly detection aims to identify anomalies from novel or unseen vision domains without additional fine-tuning, which is critical in open scenarios. Recent studies have demonstrated that pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP exhibit strong generalization with just zero or a few normal images. However, existing methods struggle with designing prompt templates, complex token interactions, or requiring additional fine-tuning, resulting in limited flexibility. In this work, we present a simple yet effective method called AdaptCLIP based on two key insights. First, adaptive visual and textual representations should be learned alternately rather than jointly. Second, comparative learning between query and normal image prompt should incorporate both contextual and aligned residual features, rather than relying solely on residual features. AdaptCLIP treats CLIP models as a foundational service, adding only three simple adapters, visual adapter, textual adapter, and prompt-query adapter, at its input or output ends. AdaptCLIP supports zero-/few-shot generalization across domains and possesses a training-free manner on target domains once trained on a base dataset. AdaptCLIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on 12 anomaly detection benchmarks from industrial and medical domains, significantly outperforming existing competitive methods. We will make the code and model of AdaptCLIP available at https://github.com/gaobb/AdaptCLIP.

Universal Image Segmentation is not a new concept. Past attempts to unify image segmentation in the last decades include scene parsing, panoptic segmentation, and, more recently, new panoptic architectures. However, such panoptic architectures do not truly unify image segmentation because they need to be trained individually on the semantic, instance, or panoptic segmentation to achieve the best performance. Ideally, a truly universal framework should be trained only once and achieve SOTA performance across all three image segmentation tasks. To that end, we propose OneFormer, a universal image segmentation framework that unifies segmentation with a multi-task train-once design. We first propose a task-conditioned joint training strategy that enables training on ground truths of each domain (semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation) within a single multi-task training process. Secondly, we introduce a task token to condition our model on the task at hand, making our model task-dynamic to support multi-task training and inference. Thirdly, we propose using a query-text contrastive loss during training to establish better inter-task and inter-class distinctions. Notably, our single OneFormer model outperforms specialized Mask2Former models across all three segmentation tasks on ADE20k, CityScapes, and COCO, despite the latter being trained on each of the three tasks individually with three times the resources. With new ConvNeXt and DiNAT backbones, we observe even more performance improvement. We believe OneFormer is a significant step towards making image segmentation more universal and accessible. To support further research, we open-source our code and models at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/OneFormer

Large Language Models (LLMs) are popular for their impressive abilities, but the need for model-specific fine-tuning or task-specific prompt engineering can hinder their generalization. We propose UPRISE (Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving zero-Shot Evaluation), which tunes a lightweight and versatile retriever that automatically retrieves prompts for a given zero-shot task input. Specifically, we demonstrate universality in a cross-task and cross-model scenario: the retriever is tuned on a diverse set of tasks, but tested on unseen task types; we use a small frozen LLM, GPT-Neo-2.7B, for tuning the retriever, but test the retriever on different LLMs of much larger scales, such as BLOOM-7.1B, OPT-66B and GPT3-175B. Additionally, we show that UPRISE mitigates the hallucination problem in our experiments with ChatGPT, suggesting its potential to improve even the strongest LLMs. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.

A basic question within the emerging field of mechanistic interpretability is the degree to which neural networks learn the same underlying mechanisms. In other words, are neural mechanisms universal across different models? In this work, we study the universality of individual neurons across GPT2 models trained from different initial random seeds, motivated by the hypothesis that universal neurons are likely to be interpretable. In particular, we compute pairwise correlations of neuron activations over 100 million tokens for every neuron pair across five different seeds and find that 1-5\% of neurons are universal, that is, pairs of neurons which consistently activate on the same inputs. We then study these universal neurons in detail, finding that they usually have clear interpretations and taxonomize them into a small number of neuron families. We conclude by studying patterns in neuron weights to establish several universal functional roles of neurons in simple circuits: deactivating attention heads, changing the entropy of the next token distribution, and predicting the next token to (not) be within a particular set.

We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network predicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detectors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is far less likely to predict false detections where nothing exists. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms all other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, by a wide margin when generalizing from natural images to artwork on both the Picasso Dataset and the People-Art Dataset.

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the mainstream choice for fewshot and zeroshot learning thanks to the universality of text generation. Many users, however, do not need the broad capabilities of generative LLMs when they only want to automate a classification task. Smaller BERT-like models can also learn universal tasks, which allow them to do any text classification task without requiring fine-tuning (zeroshot classification) or to learn new tasks with only a few examples (fewshot), while being significantly more efficient than generative LLMs. This paper (1) explains how Natural Language Inference (NLI) can be used as a universal classification task that follows similar principles as instruction fine-tuning of generative LLMs, (2) provides a step-by-step guide with reusable Jupyter notebooks for building a universal classifier, and (3) shares the resulting universal classifier that is trained on 33 datasets with 389 diverse classes. Parts of the code we share has been used to train our older zeroshot classifiers that have been downloaded more than 55 million times via the Hugging Face Hub as of December 2023. Our new classifier improves zeroshot performance by 9.4%.

Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target domain without any prior knowledge about the label set. The challenge lies in how to determine whether the target samples belong to common categories. The mainstream methods make judgments based on the sample features, which overemphasizes global information while ignoring the most crucial local objects in the image, resulting in limited accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a Universal Attention Matching (UniAM) framework by exploiting the self-attention mechanism in vision transformer to capture the crucial object information. The proposed framework introduces a novel Compressive Attention Matching (CAM) approach to explore the core information by compressively representing attentions. Furthermore, CAM incorporates a residual-based measurement to determine the sample commonness. By utilizing the measurement, UniAM achieves domain-wise and category-wise Common Feature Alignment (CFA) and Target Class Separation (TCS). Notably, UniAM is the first method utilizing the attention in vision transformer directly to perform classification tasks. Extensive experiments show that UniAM outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on various benchmark datasets.

Universal transformers (UTs) have been widely used for complex reasoning tasks such as ARC-AGI and Sudoku, yet the specific sources of their performance gains remain underexplored. In this work, we systematically analyze UTs variants and show that improvements on ARC-AGI primarily arise from the recurrent inductive bias and strong nonlinear components of Transformer, rather than from elaborate architectural designs. Motivated by this finding, we propose the Universal Reasoning Model (URM), which enhances the UT with short convolution and truncated backpropagation. Our approach substantially improves reasoning performance, achieving state-of-the-art 53.8% pass@1 on ARC-AGI 1 and 16.0% pass@1 on ARC-AGI 2. Our code is avaliable at https://github.com/zitian-gao/URM.

We present a method to create universal, robust, targeted adversarial image patches in the real world. The patches are universal because they can be used to attack any scene, robust because they work under a wide variety of transformations, and targeted because they can cause a classifier to output any target class. These adversarial patches can be printed, added to any scene, photographed, and presented to image classifiers; even when the patches are small, they cause the classifiers to ignore the other items in the scene and report a chosen target class. To reproduce the results from the paper, our code is available at https://github.com/tensorflow/cleverhans/tree/master/examples/adversarial_patch

Existing image contrast enhancement methods are typically designed for specific tasks such as under-/over-exposure correction, low-light and backlit image enhancement, etc. The learned models, however, exhibit poor generalization performance across different tasks, even across different datasets of a specific task. It is important to explore whether we can learn a universal and generalized model for various contrast enhancement tasks. In this work, we observe that the common key factor of these tasks lies in the need of exposure and contrast adjustment, which can be well-addressed if high-dynamic range (HDR) inputs are available. We hence collect 46,928 HDR raw images from public sources, and render 328,496 sRGB images to build multi-exposure sequences (MES) and the corresponding pseudo sRGB ground-truths via multi-exposure fusion. Consequently, we train a network to generate an MES from a single sRGB image, followed by training another network to fuse the generated MES into an enhanced image. Our proposed method, namely UNiversal Image Contrast Enhancer (UNICE), is free of costly human labeling. However, it demonstrates significantly stronger generalization performance than existing image contrast enhancement methods across and within different tasks, even outperforming manually created ground-truths in multiple no-reference image quality metrics. The dataset, code and model are available at https://github.com/BeyondHeaven/UNICE.

Universality is a key hypothesis in mechanistic interpretability -- that different models learn similar features and circuits when trained on similar tasks. In this work, we study the universality hypothesis by examining how small neural networks learn to implement group composition. We present a novel algorithm by which neural networks may implement composition for any finite group via mathematical representation theory. We then show that networks consistently learn this algorithm by reverse engineering model logits and weights, and confirm our understanding using ablations. By studying networks of differing architectures trained on various groups, we find mixed evidence for universality: using our algorithm, we can completely characterize the family of circuits and features that networks learn on this task, but for a given network the precise circuits learned -- as well as the order they develop -- are arbitrary.

Deep research tools are among the most impactful and most commonly encountered agentic systems today. We observe, however, that each deep research agent introduced so far is hard-coded to carry out a particular research strategy using a fixed choice of tools. We introduce Universal Deep Research (UDR), a generalist agentic system that wraps around any language model and enables the user to create, edit, and refine their own entirely custom deep research strategies without any need for additional training or finetuning. To showcase the generality of our system, we equip UDR with example minimal, expansive, and intensive research strategies, and provide a user interface to facilitate experimentation with the system.

The prevailing video retrieval paradigm is structurally misaligned, as narrow benchmarks incentivize correspondingly limited data and single-task training. Therefore, universal capability is suppressed due to the absence of a diagnostic evaluation that defines and demands multi-dimensional generalization. To break this cycle, we introduce a framework built on the co-design of evaluation, data, and modeling. First, we establish the Universal Video Retrieval Benchmark (UVRB), a suite of 16 datasets designed not only to measure performance but also to diagnose critical capability gaps across tasks and domains. Second, guided by UVRB's diagnostics, we introduce a scalable synthesis workflow that generates 1.55 million high-quality pairs to populate the semantic space required for universality. Finally, we devise the Modality Pyramid, a curriculum that trains our General Video Embedder (GVE) by explicitly leveraging the latent interconnections within our diverse data. Extensive experiments show GVE achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot generalization on UVRB. In particular, our analysis reveals that popular benchmarks are poor predictors of general ability and that partially relevant retrieval is a dominant but overlooked scenario. Overall, our co-designed framework provides a practical path to escape the limited scope and advance toward truly universal video retrieval.

Recent approaches to multi-task learning (MTL) have focused on modelling connections between tasks at the decoder level. This leads to a tight coupling between tasks, which need retraining if a new task is inserted or removed. We argue that MTL is a stepping stone towards universal feature learning (UFL), which is the ability to learn generic features that can be applied to new tasks without retraining. We propose Medusa to realize this goal, designing task heads with dual attention mechanisms. The shared feature attention masks relevant backbone features for each task, allowing it to learn a generic representation. Meanwhile, a novel Multi-Scale Attention head allows the network to better combine per-task features from different scales when making the final prediction. We show the effectiveness of Medusa in UFL (+13.18% improvement), while maintaining MTL performance and being 25% more efficient than previous approaches.

Human readers or radiologists routinely perform full-body multi-organ multi-disease detection and diagnosis in clinical practice, while most medical AI systems are built to focus on single organs with a narrow list of a few diseases. This might severely limit AI's clinical adoption. A certain number of AI models need to be assembled non-trivially to match the diagnostic process of a human reading a CT scan. In this paper, we construct a Unified Tumor Transformer (UniT) model to detect (tumor existence and location) and diagnose (tumor characteristics) eight major cancer-prevalent organs in CT scans. UniT is a query-based Mask Transformer model with the output of multi-organ and multi-tumor semantic segmentation. We decouple the object queries into organ queries, detection queries and diagnosis queries, and further establish hierarchical relationships among the three groups. This clinically-inspired architecture effectively assists inter- and intra-organ representation learning of tumors and facilitates the resolution of these complex, anatomically related multi-organ cancer image reading tasks. UniT is trained end-to-end using a curated large-scale CT images of 10,042 patients including eight major types of cancers and occurring non-cancer tumors (all are pathology-confirmed with 3D tumor masks annotated by radiologists). On the test set of 631 patients, UniT has demonstrated strong performance under a set of clinically relevant evaluation metrics, substantially outperforming both multi-organ segmentation methods and an assembly of eight single-organ expert models in tumor detection, segmentation, and diagnosis. Such a unified multi-cancer image reading model (UniT) can significantly reduce the number of false positives produced by combined multi-system models. This moves one step closer towards a universal high-performance cancer screening tool.

The ability to detect learned objects regardless of their appearance is crucial for autonomous systems in real-world applications. Especially for detecting humans, which is often a fundamental task in safety-critical applications, it is vital to prevent errors. To address this challenge, we propose a self-monitoring framework that allows for the perception system to perform plausibility checks at runtime. We show that by incorporating an additional component for detecting human body parts, we are able to significantly reduce the number of missed human detections by factors of up to 9 when compared to a baseline setup, which was trained only on holistic person objects. Additionally, we found that training a model jointly on humans and their body parts leads to a substantial reduction in false positive detections by up to 50% compared to training on humans alone. We performed comprehensive experiments on the publicly available datasets DensePose and Pascal VOC in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Code is available at https://github.com/ FraunhoferIKS/smf-object-detection.

This paper proposes a simple, yet effective framework, called GiT, simultaneously applicable for various vision tasks only with a vanilla ViT. Motivated by the universality of the Multi-layer Transformer architecture (e.g, GPT) widely used in large language models (LLMs), we seek to broaden its scope to serve as a powerful vision foundation model (VFM). However, unlike language modeling, visual tasks typically require specific modules, such as bounding box heads for detection and pixel decoders for segmentation, greatly hindering the application of powerful multi-layer transformers in the vision domain. To solve this, we design a universal language interface that empowers the successful auto-regressive decoding to adeptly unify various visual tasks, from image-level understanding (e.g., captioning), over sparse perception (e.g., detection), to dense prediction (e.g., segmentation). Based on the above designs, the entire model is composed solely of a ViT, without any specific additions, offering a remarkable architectural simplification. GiT is a multi-task visual model, jointly trained across five representative benchmarks without task-specific fine-tuning. Interestingly, our GiT builds a new benchmark in generalist performance, and fosters mutual enhancement across tasks, leading to significant improvements compared to isolated training. This reflects a similar impact observed in LLMs. Further enriching training with 27 datasets, GiT achieves strong zero-shot results over various tasks. Due to its simple design, this paradigm holds promise for narrowing the architectural gap between vision and language. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/GiT.

Monocular 3D object detection is an important task for autonomous driving considering its advantage of low cost. It is much more challenging than conventional 2D cases due to its inherent ill-posed property, which is mainly reflected in the lack of depth information. Recent progress on 2D detection offers opportunities to better solving this problem. However, it is non-trivial to make a general adapted 2D detector work in this 3D task. In this paper, we study this problem with a practice built on a fully convolutional single-stage detector and propose a general framework FCOS3D. Specifically, we first transform the commonly defined 7-DoF 3D targets to the image domain and decouple them as 2D and 3D attributes. Then the objects are distributed to different feature levels with consideration of their 2D scales and assigned only according to the projected 3D-center for the training procedure. Furthermore, the center-ness is redefined with a 2D Gaussian distribution based on the 3D-center to fit the 3D target formulation. All of these make this framework simple yet effective, getting rid of any 2D detection or 2D-3D correspondence priors. Our solution achieves 1st place out of all the vision-only methods in the nuScenes 3D detection challenge of NeurIPS 2020. Code and models are released at https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmdetection3d.

We resolve an open problem of Hanneke on the subject of universally consistent online learning with non-i.i.d. processes and unbounded losses. The notion of an optimistically universal learning rule was defined by Hanneke in an effort to study learning theory under minimal assumptions. A given learning rule is said to be optimistically universal if it achieves a low long-run average loss whenever the data generating process makes this goal achievable by some learning rule. Hanneke posed as an open problem whether, for every unbounded loss, the family of processes admitting universal learning are precisely those having a finite number of distinct values almost surely. In this paper, we completely resolve this problem, showing that this is indeed the case. As a consequence, this also offers a dramatically simpler formulation of an optimistically universal learning rule for any unbounded loss: namely, the simple memorization rule already suffices. Our proof relies on constructing random measurable partitions of the instance space and could be of independent interest for solving other open questions. We extend the results to the non-realizable setting thereby providing an optimistically universal Bayes consistent learning rule.

Is it possible to detect arbitrary objects from a single example? A central problem of all existing attempts at one-shot object detection is the generalization gap: Object categories used during training are detected much more reliably than novel ones. We here show that this generalization gap can be nearly closed by increasing the number of object categories used during training. Doing so allows us to improve generalization from seen to unseen classes from 45% to 89% and improve the state-of-the-art on COCO by 5.4 %AP50 (from 22.0 to 27.5). We verify that the effect is caused by the number of categories and not the number of training samples, and that it holds for different models, backbones and datasets. This result suggests that the key to strong few-shot detection models may not lie in sophisticated metric learning approaches, but instead simply in scaling the number of categories. We hope that our findings will help to better understand the challenges of few-shot learning and encourage future data annotation efforts to focus on wider datasets with a broader set of categories rather than gathering more samples per category.

In this paper, we introduce DINO-X, which is a unified object-centric vision model developed by IDEA Research with the best open-world object detection performance to date. DINO-X employs the same Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture as Grounding DINO 1.5 to pursue an object-level representation for open-world object understanding. To make long-tailed object detection easy, DINO-X extends its input options to support text prompt, visual prompt, and customized prompt. With such flexible prompt options, we develop a universal object prompt to support prompt-free open-world detection, making it possible to detect anything in an image without requiring users to provide any prompt. To enhance the model's core grounding capability, we have constructed a large-scale dataset with over 100 million high-quality grounding samples, referred to as Grounding-100M, for advancing the model's open-vocabulary detection performance. Pre-training on such a large-scale grounding dataset leads to a foundational object-level representation, which enables DINO-X to integrate multiple perception heads to simultaneously support multiple object perception and understanding tasks, including detection, segmentation, pose estimation, object captioning, object-based QA, etc. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of DINO-X. Specifically, the DINO-X Pro model achieves 56.0 AP, 59.8 AP, and 52.4 AP on the COCO, LVIS-minival, and LVIS-val zero-shot object detection benchmarks, respectively. Notably, it scores 63.3 AP and 56.5 AP on the rare classes of LVIS-minival and LVIS-val benchmarks, both improving the previous SOTA performance by 5.8 AP. Such a result underscores its significantly improved capacity for recognizing long-tailed objects.

Unsupervised reconstruction networks using self-attention transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance for multi-class (unified) anomaly detection with a single model. However, these self-attention reconstruction models primarily operate on target features, which may result in perfect reconstruction for both normal and anomaly features due to high consistency with context, leading to failure in detecting anomalies. Additionally, these models often produce inaccurate anomaly segmentation due to performing reconstruction in a low spatial resolution latent space. To enable reconstruction models enjoying high efficiency while enhancing their generalization for unified anomaly detection, we propose a simple yet effective method that reconstructs normal features and restores anomaly features with just One Normal Image Prompt (OneNIP). In contrast to previous work, OneNIP allows for the first time to reconstruct or restore anomalies with just one normal image prompt, effectively boosting unified anomaly detection performance. Furthermore, we propose a supervised refiner that regresses reconstruction errors by using both real normal and synthesized anomalous images, which significantly improves pixel-level anomaly segmentation. OneNIP outperforms previous methods on three industry anomaly detection benchmarks: MVTec, BTAD, and VisA. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/gaobb/OneNIP.

A hallmark of modern large language models (LLMs) is their impressive general zero-shot and few-shot abilities, often elicited through in-context learning (ICL) via prompting. However, while highly coveted and being the most general, zero-shot performances in LLMs are still typically weaker due to the lack of guidance and the difficulty of applying existing automatic prompt design methods in general tasks when ground-truth labels are unavailable. In this study, we address this by presenting Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting (USP), an automatic prompt design approach specifically tailored for zero-shot learning (while compatible with few-shot). Requiring only a small amount of unlabeled data and an inference-only LLM, USP is highly versatile: to achieve universal prompting, USP categorizes a possible NLP task into one of the three possible task types and then uses a corresponding selector to select the most suitable queries and zero-shot model-generated responses as pseudo-demonstrations, thereby generalizing ICL to the zero-shot setup in a fully automated way. We evaluate USP with PaLM and PaLM 2 models and demonstrate performances that are considerably stronger than standard zero-shot baselines and often comparable to or even superior to few-shot baselines across more than 40 natural language understanding, natural language generation, and reasoning tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalizability, such as understanding arbitrary entities and relations. Instruction tuning has proven effective for distilling LLMs into more cost-efficient models such as Alpaca and Vicuna. Yet such student models still trail the original LLMs by large margins in downstream applications. In this paper, we explore targeted distillation with mission-focused instruction tuning to train student models that can excel in a broad application class such as open information extraction. Using named entity recognition (NER) for case study, we show how ChatGPT can be distilled into much smaller UniversalNER models for open NER. For evaluation, we assemble the largest NER benchmark to date, comprising 43 datasets across 9 diverse domains such as biomedicine, programming, social media, law, finance. Without using any direct supervision, UniversalNER attains remarkable NER accuracy across tens of thousands of entity types, outperforming general instruction-tuned models such as Alpaca and Vicuna by over 30 absolute F1 points in average. With a tiny fraction of parameters, UniversalNER not only acquires ChatGPT's capability in recognizing arbitrary entity types, but also outperforms its NER accuracy by 7-9 absolute F1 points in average. Remarkably, UniversalNER even outperforms by a large margin state-of-the-art multi-task instruction-tuned systems such as InstructUIE, which uses supervised NER examples. We also conduct thorough ablation studies to assess the impact of various components in our distillation approach. We will release the distillation recipe, data, and UniversalNER models to facilitate future research on targeted distillation.

The aim of this work is to explore the potential of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) for universal detection of AI-generated images. We develop a lightweight detection strategy based on CLIP features and study its performance in a wide variety of challenging scenarios. We find that, contrary to previous beliefs, it is neither necessary nor convenient to use a large domain-specific dataset for training. On the contrary, by using only a handful of example images from a single generative model, a CLIP-based detector exhibits surprising generalization ability and high robustness across different architectures, including recent commercial tools such as Dalle-3, Midjourney v5, and Firefly. We match the state-of-the-art (SoTA) on in-distribution data and significantly improve upon it in terms of generalization to out-of-distribution data (+6% AUC) and robustness to impaired/laundered data (+13%). Our project is available at https://grip-unina.github.io/ClipBased-SyntheticImageDetection/

Existing works, including ELMO and BERT, have revealed the importance of pre-training for NLP tasks. While there does not exist a single pre-training model that works best in all cases, it is of necessity to develop a framework that is able to deploy various pre-training models efficiently. For this purpose, we propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit, namely Universal Encoder Representations (UER). UER is loosely coupled, and encapsulated with rich modules. By assembling modules on demand, users can either reproduce a state-of-the-art pre-training model or develop a pre-training model that remains unexplored. With UER, we have built a model zoo, which contains pre-trained models based on different corpora, encoders, and targets (objectives). With proper pre-trained models, we could achieve new state-of-the-art results on a range of downstream datasets.

In object detection, an intersection over union (IoU) threshold is required to define positives and negatives. An object detector, trained with low IoU threshold, e.g. 0.5, usually produces noisy detections. However, detection performance tends to degrade with increasing the IoU thresholds. Two main factors are responsible for this: 1) overfitting during training, due to exponentially vanishing positive samples, and 2) inference-time mismatch between the IoUs for which the detector is optimal and those of the input hypotheses. A multi-stage object detection architecture, the Cascade R-CNN, is proposed to address these problems. It consists of a sequence of detectors trained with increasing IoU thresholds, to be sequentially more selective against close false positives. The detectors are trained stage by stage, leveraging the observation that the output of a detector is a good distribution for training the next higher quality detector. The resampling of progressively improved hypotheses guarantees that all detectors have a positive set of examples of equivalent size, reducing the overfitting problem. The same cascade procedure is applied at inference, enabling a closer match between the hypotheses and the detector quality of each stage. A simple implementation of the Cascade R-CNN is shown to surpass all single-model object detectors on the challenging COCO dataset. Experiments also show that the Cascade R-CNN is widely applicable across detector architectures, achieving consistent gains independently of the baseline detector strength. The code will be made available at https://github.com/zhaoweicai/cascade-rcnn.

When reading medical images such as a computed tomography (CT) scan, radiologists generally search across the image to find lesions, characterize and measure them, and then describe them in the radiological report. To automate this process, we propose a multitask universal lesion analysis network (MULAN) for joint detection, tagging, and segmentation of lesions in a variety of body parts, which greatly extends existing work of single-task lesion analysis on specific body parts. MULAN is based on an improved Mask R-CNN framework with three head branches and a 3D feature fusion strategy. It achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy in the detection and tagging tasks on the DeepLesion dataset, which contains 32K lesions in the whole body. We also analyze the relationship between the three tasks and show that tag predictions can improve detection accuracy via a score refinement layer.

We introduce Universal NER (UNER), an open, community-driven project to develop gold-standard NER benchmarks in many languages. The overarching goal of UNER is to provide high-quality, cross-lingually consistent annotations to facilitate and standardize multilingual NER research. UNER v1 contains 18 datasets annotated with named entities in a cross-lingual consistent schema across 12 diverse languages. In this paper, we detail the dataset creation and composition of UNER; we also provide initial modeling baselines on both in-language and cross-lingual learning settings. We release the data, code, and fitted models to the public.

Universal image restoration (UIR) aims to recover images degraded by unknown mixtures while preserving semantics -- conditions under which discriminative restorers and UNet-based diffusion priors often oversmooth, hallucinate, or drift. We present LucidFlux, a caption-free UIR framework that adapts a large diffusion transformer (Flux.1) without image captions. LucidFlux introduces a lightweight dual-branch conditioner that injects signals from the degraded input and a lightly restored proxy to respectively anchor geometry and suppress artifacts. Then, a timestep- and layer-adaptive modulation schedule is designed to route these cues across the backbone's hierarchy, in order to yield coarse-to-fine and context-aware updates that protect the global structure while recovering texture. After that, to avoid the latency and instability of text prompts or MLLM captions, we enforce caption-free semantic alignment via SigLIP features extracted from the proxy. A scalable curation pipeline further filters large-scale data for structure-rich supervision. Across synthetic and in-the-wild benchmarks, LucidFlux consistently outperforms strong open-source and commercial baselines, and ablation studies verify the necessity of each component. LucidFlux shows that, for large DiTs, when, where, and what to condition on -- rather than adding parameters or relying on text prompts -- is the governing lever for robust and caption-free universal image restoration in the wild.

Discovering the existence of universal adversarial perturbations had large theoretical and practical impacts on the field of adversarial learning. In the text domain, most universal studies focused on adversarial prefixes which are added to all texts. However, unlike the vision domain, adding the same perturbation to different inputs results in noticeably unnatural inputs. Therefore, we introduce a new universal adversarial setup - a universal adversarial policy, which has many advantages of other universal attacks but also results in valid texts - thus making it relevant in practice. We achieve this by learning a single search policy over a predefined set of semantics preserving text alterations, on many texts. This formulation is universal in that the policy is successful in finding adversarial examples on new texts efficiently. Our approach uses text perturbations which were extensively shown to produce natural attacks in the non-universal setup (specific synonym replacements). We suggest a strong baseline approach for this formulation which uses reinforcement learning. It's ability to generalise (from as few as 500 training texts) shows that universal adversarial patterns exist in the text domain as well.

The Universal Transformer (UT) is a variant of the Transformer that shares parameters across its layers. Empirical evidence shows that UTs have better compositional generalization than Vanilla Transformers (VTs) in formal language tasks. The parameter-sharing also affords it better parameter efficiency than VTs. Despite its many advantages, scaling UT parameters is much more compute and memory intensive than scaling up a VT. This paper proposes the Sparse Universal Transformer (SUT), which leverages Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) and a new stick-breaking-based dynamic halting mechanism to reduce UT's computation complexity while retaining its parameter efficiency and generalization ability. Experiments show that SUT achieves the same performance as strong baseline models while only using half computation and parameters on WMT'14 and strong generalization results on formal language tasks (Logical inference and CFQ). The new halting mechanism also enables around 50\% reduction in computation during inference with very little performance decrease on formal language tasks.

Relative Positional Encoding (RPE), which encodes the relative distance between any pair of tokens, is one of the most successful modifications to the original Transformer. As far as we know, theoretical understanding of the RPE-based Transformers is largely unexplored. In this work, we mathematically analyze the power of RPE-based Transformers regarding whether the model is capable of approximating any continuous sequence-to-sequence functions. One may naturally assume the answer is in the affirmative -- RPE-based Transformers are universal function approximators. However, we present a negative result by showing there exist continuous sequence-to-sequence functions that RPE-based Transformers cannot approximate no matter how deep and wide the neural network is. One key reason lies in that most RPEs are placed in the softmax attention that always generates a right stochastic matrix. This restricts the network from capturing positional information in the RPEs and limits its capacity. To overcome the problem and make the model more powerful, we first present sufficient conditions for RPE-based Transformers to achieve universal function approximation. With the theoretical guidance, we develop a novel attention module, called Universal RPE-based (URPE) Attention, which satisfies the conditions. Therefore, the corresponding URPE-based Transformers become universal function approximators. Extensive experiments covering typical architectures and tasks demonstrate that our model is parameter-efficient and can achieve superior performance to strong baselines in a wide range of applications. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lsj2408/URPE.

Animal visual perception is an important technique for automatically monitoring animal health, understanding animal behaviors, and assisting animal-related research. However, it is challenging to design a deep learning-based perception model that can freely adapt to different animals across various perception tasks, due to the varying poses of a large diversity of animals, lacking data on rare species, and the semantic inconsistency of different tasks. We introduce UniAP, a novel Universal Animal Perception model that leverages few-shot learning to enable cross-species perception among various visual tasks. Our proposed model takes support images and labels as prompt guidance for a query image. Images and labels are processed through a Transformer-based encoder and a lightweight label encoder, respectively. Then a matching module is designed for aggregating information between prompt guidance and the query image, followed by a multi-head label decoder to generate outputs for various tasks. By capitalizing on the shared visual characteristics among different animals and tasks, UniAP enables the transfer of knowledge from well-studied species to those with limited labeled data or even unseen species. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UniAP through comprehensive experiments in pose estimation, segmentation, and classification tasks on diverse animal species, showcasing its ability to generalize and adapt to new classes with minimal labeled examples.

Tokenizer is a crucial component for both visual understanding and generation. To advance toward the ultimate goal of universal modeling, recent research has focused on developing a unified tokenizer. However, existing tokenizers face a significant performance trade-off between understanding and generation, stemming from the inherent conflict between high-level semantic abstraction and low-level pixel reconstruction. To tackle this challenge, we propose a generic and unified tokenizer, namely UniFlow, by flexibly adapting any visual encoder with a concise reconstruction decoder. Specifically, we introduce layer-wise adaptive self-distillation applied to the well-pretrained visual encoders, which enables UniFlow to simultaneously inherit the strong semantic features for visual understanding and flexibly adapt to model fine-grained details for visual generation. Moreover, we propose a lightweight patch-wise pixel flow decoder, which efficiently achieves high-fidelity pixel reconstruction by modeling a conditional flow from the noisy state back to the patch-wise pixel domain. By leveraging the semantic features as visual conditions for the decoder, we effectively alleviate the training conflicts between understanding and generation. Furthermore, the patch-wise learning strategy simplifies the data distribution, thereby improving training efficiency. Extensive experiments across 13 challenging benchmarks spanning 7 widely studied visual understanding and generation tasks demonstrate that UniFlow achieves a win-win outcome. For instance, our 7B UniFlow-XL not only surpasses the 14B TokenFlow-XL by 7.75% on average understanding benchmarks, but also achieves competitive results in both visual reconstruction and generation, surpassing UniTok by 0.15 in rFID and 0.09 in gFID (without guidance), respectively.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has drawn urgent attention to the task of machine-generated text detection (MGTD). However, existing approaches struggle in complex real-world scenarios: zero-shot detectors rely heavily on scoring model's output distribution while training-based detectors are often constrained by overfitting to the training data, limiting generalization. We found that the performance bottleneck of training-based detectors stems from the misalignment between training objective and task needs. To address this, we propose Direct Discrepancy Learning (DDL), a novel optimization strategy that directly optimizes the detector with task-oriented knowledge. DDL enables the detector to better capture the core semantics of the detection task, thereby enhancing both robustness and generalization. Built upon this, we introduce DetectAnyLLM, a unified detection framework that achieves state-of-the-art MGTD performance across diverse LLMs. To ensure a reliable evaluation, we construct MIRAGE, the most diverse multi-task MGTD benchmark. MIRAGE samples human-written texts from 10 corpora across 5 text-domains, which are then re-generated or revised using 17 cutting-edge LLMs, covering a wide spectrum of proprietary models and textual styles. Extensive experiments on MIRAGE reveal the limitations of existing methods in complex environment. In contrast, DetectAnyLLM consistently outperforms them, achieving over a 70% performance improvement under the same training data and base scoring model, underscoring the effectiveness of our DDL. Project page: {https://fjc2005.github.io/detectanyllm}.

Universal Dependencies is an open community effort to create cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages within a dependency-based lexicalist framework. The annotation consists in a linguistically motivated word segmentation; a morphological layer comprising lemmas, universal part-of-speech tags, and standardized morphological features; and a syntactic layer focusing on syntactic relations between predicates, arguments and modifiers. In this paper, we describe version 2 of the guidelines (UD v2), discuss the major changes from UD v1 to UD v2, and give an overview of the currently available treebanks for 90 languages.

We here propose a machine learning approach for monitoring particle detectors in real-time. The goal is to assess the compatibility of incoming experimental data with a reference dataset, characterising the data behaviour under normal circumstances, via a likelihood-ratio hypothesis test. The model is based on a modern implementation of kernel methods, nonparametric algorithms that can learn any continuous function given enough data. The resulting approach is efficient and agnostic to the type of anomaly that may be present in the data. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of this strategy on multivariate data from drift tube chamber muon detectors.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns about machine-generated text (MGT), including ethical and practical issues like plagiarism and misinformation. Building a robust and highly generalizable MGT detection system has become increasingly important. This work investigates the generalization capabilities of MGT detectors in three aspects: First, we construct MGTAcademic, a large-scale dataset focused on academic writing, featuring human-written texts (HWTs) and MGTs across STEM, Humanities, and Social Sciences, paired with an extensible code framework for efficient benchmarking. Second, we investigate the transferability of detectors across domains and LLMs, leveraging fine-grained datasets to reveal insights into domain transferring and implementing few-shot techniques to improve the performance by roughly 13.2%. Third, we introduce a novel attribution task where models must adapt to new classes over time without (or with very limited) access to prior training data and benchmark detectors. We implement several adapting techniques to improve the performance by roughly 10% and highlight the inherent complexity of the task. Our findings provide insights into the generalization ability of MGT detectors across diverse scenarios and lay the foundation for building robust, adaptive detection systems.

The lottery ticket hypothesis conjectures the existence of sparse subnetworks of large randomly initialized deep neural networks that can be successfully trained in isolation. Recent work has experimentally observed that some of these tickets can be practically reused across a variety of tasks, hinting at some form of universality. We formalize this concept and theoretically prove that not only do such universal tickets exist but they also do not require further training. Our proofs introduce a couple of technical innovations related to pruning for strong lottery tickets, including extensions of subset sum results and a strategy to leverage higher amounts of depth. Our explicit sparse constructions of universal function families might be of independent interest, as they highlight representational benefits induced by univariate convolutional architectures.

With the comprehensive research conducted on various face analysis tasks, there is a growing interest among researchers to develop a unified approach to face perception. Existing methods mainly discuss unified representation and training, which lack task extensibility and application efficiency. To tackle this issue, we focus on the unified model structure, exploring a face generalist model. As an intuitive design, Naive Faceptor enables tasks with the same output shape and granularity to share the structural design of the standardized output head, achieving improved task extensibility. Furthermore, Faceptor is proposed to adopt a well-designed single-encoder dual-decoder architecture, allowing task-specific queries to represent new-coming semantics. This design enhances the unification of model structure while improving application efficiency in terms of storage overhead. Additionally, we introduce Layer-Attention into Faceptor, enabling the model to adaptively select features from optimal layers to perform the desired tasks. Through joint training on 13 face perception datasets, Faceptor achieves exceptional performance in facial landmark localization, face parsing, age estimation, expression recognition, binary attribute classification, and face recognition, achieving or surpassing specialized methods in most tasks. Our training framework can also be applied to auxiliary supervised learning, significantly improving performance in data-sparse tasks such as age estimation and expression recognition. The code and models will be made publicly available at https://github.com/lxq1000/Faceptor.

Universal Information Extraction (UIE) has garnered significant attention due to its ability to address model explosion problems effectively. Extractive UIE can achieve strong performance using a relatively small model, making it widely adopted. Extractive UIEs generally rely on task instructions for different tasks, including single-target instructions and multiple-target instructions. Single-target instruction UIE enables the extraction of only one type of relation at a time, limiting its ability to model correlations between relations and thus restricting its capability to extract complex relations. While multiple-target instruction UIE allows for the extraction of multiple relations simultaneously, the inclusion of irrelevant relations introduces decision complexity and impacts extraction accuracy. Therefore, for multi-relation extraction, we propose LDNet, which incorporates multi-aspect relation modeling and a label drop mechanism. By assigning different relations to different levels for understanding and decision-making, we reduce decision confusion. Additionally, the label drop mechanism effectively mitigates the impact of irrelevant relations. Experiments show that LDNet outperforms or achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art systems on 9 tasks, 33 datasets, in both single-modal and multi-modal, few-shot and zero-shot settings.https://github.com/Lu-Yang666/LDNet

We propose Universal Document Processing (UDOP), a foundation Document AI model which unifies text, image, and layout modalities together with varied task formats, including document understanding and generation. UDOP leverages the spatial correlation between textual content and document image to model image, text, and layout modalities with one uniform representation. With a novel Vision-Text-Layout Transformer, UDOP unifies pretraining and multi-domain downstream tasks into a prompt-based sequence generation scheme. UDOP is pretrained on both large-scale unlabeled document corpora using innovative self-supervised objectives and diverse labeled data. UDOP also learns to generate document images from text and layout modalities via masked image reconstruction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time in the field of document AI that one model simultaneously achieves high-quality neural document editing and content customization. Our method sets the state-of-the-art on 8 Document AI tasks, e.g., document understanding and QA, across diverse data domains like finance reports, academic papers, and websites. UDOP ranks first on the leaderboard of the Document Understanding Benchmark.

Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, and a thought-provoking paper by Bubeck and Sellke has analyzed this phenomenon through the lens of over-parameterization: interpolating smoothly the data requires significantly more parameters than simply memorizing it. However, this "universal" law provides only a necessary condition for robustness, and it is unable to discriminate between models. In this paper, we address these gaps by focusing on empirical risk minimization in two prototypical settings, namely, random features and the neural tangent kernel (NTK). We prove that, for random features, the model is not robust for any degree of over-parameterization, even when the necessary condition coming from the universal law of robustness is satisfied. In contrast, for even activations, the NTK model meets the universal lower bound, and it is robust as soon as the necessary condition on over-parameterization is fulfilled. This also addresses a conjecture in prior work by Bubeck, Li and Nagaraj. Our analysis decouples the effect of the kernel of the model from an "interaction matrix", which describes the interaction with the test data and captures the effect of the activation. Our theoretical results are corroborated by numerical evidence on both synthetic and standard datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10).

Fine-grained and instance-level recognition methods are commonly trained and evaluated on specific domains, in a model per domain scenario. Such an approach, however, is impractical in real large-scale applications. In this work, we address the problem of universal image embedding, where a single universal model is trained and used in multiple domains. First, we leverage existing domain-specific datasets to carefully construct a new large-scale public benchmark for the evaluation of universal image embeddings, with 241k query images, 1.4M index images and 2.8M training images across 8 different domains and 349k classes. We define suitable metrics, training and evaluation protocols to foster future research in this area. Second, we provide a comprehensive experimental evaluation on the new dataset, demonstrating that existing approaches and simplistic extensions lead to worse performance than an assembly of models trained for each domain separately. Finally, we conducted a public research competition on this topic, leveraging industrial datasets, which attracted the participation of more than 1k teams worldwide. This exercise generated many interesting research ideas and findings which we present in detail. Project webpage: https://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/univ_emb/

Machine learning models are susceptible to adversarial perturbations: small changes to input that can cause large changes in output. It is also demonstrated that there exist input-agnostic perturbations, called universal adversarial perturbations, which can change the inference of target model on most of the data samples. However, existing methods to craft universal perturbations are (i) task specific, (ii) require samples from the training data distribution, and (iii) perform complex optimizations. Additionally, because of the data dependence, fooling ability of the crafted perturbations is proportional to the available training data. In this paper, we present a novel, generalizable and data-free approaches for crafting universal adversarial perturbations. Independent of the underlying task, our objective achieves fooling via corrupting the extracted features at multiple layers. Therefore, the proposed objective is generalizable to craft image-agnostic perturbations across multiple vision tasks such as object recognition, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation. In the practical setting of black-box attack scenario (when the attacker does not have access to the target model and it's training data), we show that our objective outperforms the data dependent objectives to fool the learned models. Further, via exploiting simple priors related to the data distribution, our objective remarkably boosts the fooling ability of the crafted perturbations. Significant fooling rates achieved by our objective emphasize that the current deep learning models are now at an increased risk, since our objective generalizes across multiple tasks without the requirement of training data for crafting the perturbations. To encourage reproducible research, we have released the codes for our proposed algorithm.

Deep learning techniques are increasingly applied to scientific problems, where the precision of networks is crucial. Despite being deemed as universal function approximators, neural networks, in practice, struggle to reduce the prediction errors below O(10^{-5}) even with large network size and extended training iterations. To address this issue, we developed the multi-stage neural networks that divides the training process into different stages, with each stage using a new network that is optimized to fit the residue from the previous stage. Across successive stages, the residue magnitudes decreases substantially and follows an inverse power-law relationship with the residue frequencies. The multi-stage neural networks effectively mitigate the spectral biases associated with regular neural networks, enabling them to capture the high frequency feature of target functions. We demonstrate that the prediction error from the multi-stage training for both regression problems and physics-informed neural networks can nearly reach the machine-precision O(10^{-16}) of double-floating point within a finite number of iterations. Such levels of accuracy are rarely attainable using single neural networks alone.

Accurate uncertainty estimates are essential for deploying deep object detectors in safety-critical systems. The development and evaluation of probabilistic object detectors have been hindered by shortcomings in existing performance measures, which tend to involve arbitrary thresholds or limit the detector's choice of distributions. In this work, we propose to view object detection as a set prediction task where detectors predict the distribution over the set of objects. Using the negative log-likelihood for random finite sets, we present a proper scoring rule for evaluating and training probabilistic object detectors. The proposed method can be applied to existing probabilistic detectors, is free from thresholds, and enables fair comparison between architectures. Three different types of detectors are evaluated on the COCO dataset. Our results indicate that the training of existing detectors is optimized toward non-probabilistic metrics. We hope to encourage the development of new object detectors that can accurately estimate their own uncertainty. Code available at https://github.com/georghess/pmb-nll.

Despite considerable progress in the development of machine-text detectors, it has been suggested that the problem is inherently hard, and therefore, that stakeholders should proceed under the assumption that machine-generated text cannot be reliably detected as such. We examine a recent such claim by Nicks et al. (2024) regarding the ease with which language models can be optimized to degrade the performance of machine-text detectors, including detectors not specifically optimized against. We identify a feature spacex2013the stylistic feature spacex2013that is robust to such optimization, and show that it may be used to reliably detect samples from language models optimized to prevent detection. Furthermore, we show that even when models are explicitly optimized against stylistic detectors, detection performance remains surprisingly unaffected. We then seek to understand if stylistic detectors are inherently more robust. To study this question, we explore a new paraphrasing approach that simultaneously aims to close the gap between human writing and machine writing in stylistic feature space while avoiding detection using traditional features. We show that when only a single sample is available for detection, this attack is universally effective across all detectors considered, including those that use writing style. However, as the number of samples available for detection grows, the human and machine distributions become distinguishable. This observation encourages us to introduce AURA, a metric that estimates the overlap between human and machine-generated distributions by analyzing how detector performance improves as more samples become available. Overall, our findings underscore previous recommendations to avoid reliance on machine-text detection.

Humans recognize the visual world at multiple levels: we effortlessly categorize scenes and detect objects inside, while also identifying the textures and surfaces of the objects along with their different compositional parts. In this paper, we study a new task called Unified Perceptual Parsing, which requires the machine vision systems to recognize as many visual concepts as possible from a given image. A multi-task framework called UPerNet and a training strategy are developed to learn from heterogeneous image annotations. We benchmark our framework on Unified Perceptual Parsing and show that it is able to effectively segment a wide range of concepts from images. The trained networks are further applied to discover visual knowledge in natural scenes. Models are available at https://github.com/CSAILVision/unifiedparsing.

Zero- and few-shot visual anomaly segmentation relies on powerful vision-language models that detect unseen anomalies using manually designed textual prompts. However, visual representations are inherently independent of language. In this paper, we explore the potential of a pure visual foundation model as an alternative to widely used vision-language models for universal visual anomaly segmentation. We present a novel paradigm that unifies anomaly segmentation into change segmentation. This paradigm enables us to leverage large-scale synthetic image pairs, featuring object-level and local region changes, derived from existing image datasets, which are independent of target anomaly datasets. We propose a one-prompt Meta-learning framework for Universal Anomaly Segmentation (MetaUAS) that is trained on this synthetic dataset and then generalizes well to segment any novel or unseen visual anomalies in the real world. To handle geometrical variations between prompt and query images, we propose a soft feature alignment module that bridges paired-image change perception and single-image semantic segmentation. This is the first work to achieve universal anomaly segmentation using a pure vision model without relying on special anomaly detection datasets and pre-trained visual-language models. Our method effectively and efficiently segments any anomalies with only one normal image prompt and enjoys training-free without guidance from language. Our MetaUAS significantly outperforms previous zero-shot, few-shot, and even full-shot anomaly segmentation methods. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/gaobb/MetaUAS.

Particle tracking is crucial for almost all physics analysis programs at the Large Hadron Collider. Deep learning models are pervasively used in particle tracking related tasks. However, the current practice is to design and train one deep learning model for one task with supervised learning techniques. The trained models work well for tasks they are trained on but show no or little generalization capabilities. We propose to unify these models with a language model. In this paper, we present a tokenized detector representation that allows us to train a BERT model for particle tracking. The trained BERT model, namely TrackingBERT, offers latent detector module embedding that can be used for other tasks. This work represents the first step towards developing a foundational model for particle detector understanding.

Meta-learning has emerged as a powerful approach to train neural networks to learn new tasks quickly from limited data. Broad exposure to different tasks leads to versatile representations enabling general problem solving. But, what are the limits of meta-learning? In this work, we explore the potential of amortizing the most powerful universal predictor, namely Solomonoff Induction (SI), into neural networks via leveraging meta-learning to its limits. We use Universal Turing Machines (UTMs) to generate training data used to expose networks to a broad range of patterns. We provide theoretical analysis of the UTM data generation processes and meta-training protocols. We conduct comprehensive experiments with neural architectures (e.g. LSTMs, Transformers) and algorithmic data generators of varying complexity and universality. Our results suggest that UTM data is a valuable resource for meta-learning, and that it can be used to train neural networks capable of learning universal prediction strategies.

In the large language model (LLM) revolution, embedding is a key component of various systems. For example, it is used to retrieve knowledge or memories for LLMs, to build content moderation filters, etc. As such cases span from English to other natural or programming languages, from retrieval to classification and beyond, it is desirable to build a unified embedding model rather than dedicated ones for each scenario. In this work, we make an initial step towards this goal, demonstrating that multiple languages (both natural and programming) pre-trained transformer decoders can embed universally when finetuned on limited English data. We provide a comprehensive practice with thorough evaluations. On English MTEB, our models achieve competitive performance on different embedding tasks by minimal training data. On other benchmarks, such as multilingual classification and code search, our models (without any supervision) perform comparably to, or even surpass heavily supervised baselines and/or APIs. These results provide evidence of a promising path towards building powerful unified embedders that can be applied across tasks and languages.

Modern object detectors have taken the advantages of backbone networks pre-trained on large scale datasets. Except for the backbone networks, however, other components such as the detector head and the feature pyramid network (FPN) remain trained from scratch, which hinders fully tapping the potential of representation models. In this study, we propose to integrally migrate pre-trained transformer encoder-decoders (imTED) to a detector, constructing a feature extraction path which is ``fully pre-trained" so that detectors' generalization capacity is maximized. The essential differences between imTED with the baseline detector are twofold: (1) migrating the pre-trained transformer decoder to the detector head while removing the randomly initialized FPN from the feature extraction path; and (2) defining a multi-scale feature modulator (MFM) to enhance scale adaptability. Such designs not only reduce randomly initialized parameters significantly but also unify detector training with representation learning intendedly. Experiments on the MS COCO object detection dataset show that imTED consistently outperforms its counterparts by sim2.4 AP. Without bells and whistles, imTED improves the state-of-the-art of few-shot object detection by up to 7.6 AP. Code is available at https://github.com/LiewFeng/imTED.

While it is widely known that neural networks are universal approximators of continuous functions, a less known and perhaps more powerful result is that a neural network with a single hidden layer can approximate accurately any nonlinear continuous operator. This universal approximation theorem is suggestive of the potential application of neural networks in learning nonlinear operators from data. However, the theorem guarantees only a small approximation error for a sufficient large network, and does not consider the important optimization and generalization errors. To realize this theorem in practice, we propose deep operator networks (DeepONets) to learn operators accurately and efficiently from a relatively small dataset. A DeepONet consists of two sub-networks, one for encoding the input function at a fixed number of sensors x_i, i=1,dots,m (branch net), and another for encoding the locations for the output functions (trunk net). We perform systematic simulations for identifying two types of operators, i.e., dynamic systems and partial differential equations, and demonstrate that DeepONet significantly reduces the generalization error compared to the fully-connected networks. We also derive theoretically the dependence of the approximation error in terms of the number of sensors (where the input function is defined) as well as the input function type, and we verify the theorem with computational results. More importantly, we observe high-order error convergence in our computational tests, namely polynomial rates (from half order to fourth order) and even exponential convergence with respect to the training dataset size.

Intermediate reasoning or acting steps have successfully improved large language models (LLMs) for handling various downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. When applying LLMs for code generation, recent works mainly focus on directing the models to articulate intermediate natural-language reasoning steps, as in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, and then output code with the natural language or other structured intermediate steps. However, such output is not suitable for code translation or generation tasks since the standard CoT has different logical structures and forms of expression with the code. In this work, we introduce the universal code (UniCode) as the intermediate representation. It is a description of algorithm steps using a mix of conventions of programming languages, such as assignment operator, conditional operator, and loop. Hence, we collect an instruction dataset UniCoder-Instruct to train our model UniCoder on multi-task learning objectives. UniCoder-Instruct comprises natural-language questions, code solutions, and the corresponding universal code. The alignment between the intermediate universal code representation and the final code solution significantly improves the quality of the generated code. The experimental results demonstrate that UniCoder with the universal code significantly outperforms the previous prompting methods by a large margin, showcasing the effectiveness of the structural clues in pseudo-code.

Recently, many arbitrary-oriented object detection (AOOD) methods have been proposed and attracted widespread attention in many fields. However, most of them are based on anchor-boxes or standard Gaussian heatmaps. Such label assignment strategy may not only fail to reflect the shape and direction characteristics of arbitrary-oriented objects, but also have high parameter-tuning efforts. In this paper, a novel AOOD method called General Gaussian Heatmap Label Assignment (GGHL) is proposed. Specifically, an anchor-free object-adaptation label assignment (OLA) strategy is presented to define the positive candidates based on two-dimensional (2-D) oriented Gaussian heatmaps, which reflect the shape and direction features of arbitrary-oriented objects. Based on OLA, an oriented-bounding-box (OBB) representation component (ORC) is developed to indicate OBBs and adjust the Gaussian center prior weights to fit the characteristics of different objects adaptively through neural network learning. Moreover, a joint-optimization loss (JOL) with area normalization and dynamic confidence weighting is designed to refine the misalign optimal results of different subtasks. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed GGHL improves the AOOD performance with low parameter-tuning and time costs. Furthermore, it is generally applicable to most AOOD methods to improve their performance including lightweight models on embedded platforms.

Unsupervised domain adaptive (UDA) algorithms can markedly enhance the performance of object detectors under conditions of domain shifts, thereby reducing the necessity for extensive labeling and retraining. Current domain adaptive object detection algorithms primarily cater to two-stage detectors, which tend to offer minimal improvements when directly applied to single-stage detectors such as YOLO. Intending to benefit the YOLO detector from UDA, we build a comprehensive domain adaptive architecture using a teacher-student cooperative system for the YOLO detector. In this process, we propose uncertainty learning to cope with pseudo-labeling generated by the teacher model with extreme uncertainty and leverage dynamic data augmentation to asymptotically adapt the teacher-student system to the environment. To address the inability of single-stage object detectors to align at multiple stages, we utilize a unified visual contrastive learning paradigm that aligns instance at backbone and head respectively, which steadily improves the robustness of the detectors in cross-domain tasks. In summary, we present an unsupervised domain adaptive YOLO detector based on visual contrastive learning (CLDA-YOLO), which achieves highly competitive results across multiple domain adaptive datasets without any reduction in inference speed.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) sequentially process data by updating their state with each new data point, and have long been the de facto choice for sequence modeling tasks. However, their inherently sequential computation makes them slow to train. Feed-forward and convolutional architectures have recently been shown to achieve superior results on some sequence modeling tasks such as machine translation, with the added advantage that they concurrently process all inputs in the sequence, leading to easy parallelization and faster training times. Despite these successes, however, popular feed-forward sequence models like the Transformer fail to generalize in many simple tasks that recurrent models handle with ease, e.g. copying strings or even simple logical inference when the string or formula lengths exceed those observed at training time. We propose the Universal Transformer (UT), a parallel-in-time self-attentive recurrent sequence model which can be cast as a generalization of the Transformer model and which addresses these issues. UTs combine the parallelizability and global receptive field of feed-forward sequence models like the Transformer with the recurrent inductive bias of RNNs. We also add a dynamic per-position halting mechanism and find that it improves accuracy on several tasks. In contrast to the standard Transformer, under certain assumptions, UTs can be shown to be Turing-complete. Our experiments show that UTs outperform standard Transformers on a wide range of algorithmic and language understanding tasks, including the challenging LAMBADA language modeling task where UTs achieve a new state of the art, and machine translation where UTs achieve a 0.9 BLEU improvement over Transformers on the WMT14 En-De dataset.

In this paper, we propose a new multi-scale face detector having an extremely tiny number of parameters (EXTD),less than 0.1 million, as well as achieving comparable performance to deep heavy detectors. While existing multi-scale face detectors extract feature maps with different scales from a single backbone network, our method generates the feature maps by iteratively reusing a shared lightweight and shallow backbone network. This iterative sharing of the backbone network significantly reduces the number of parameters, and also provides the abstract image semantics captured from the higher stage of the network layers to the lower-level feature map. The proposed idea is employed by various model architectures and evaluated by extensive experiments. From the experiments from WIDER FACE dataset, we show that the proposed face detector can handle faces with various scale and conditions, and achieved comparable performance to the more massive face detectors that few hundreds and tens times heavier in model size and floating point operations.

In this work, we address the challenging and emergent problem of novel object detection (NOD), focusing on the accurate detection of both known and novel object categories during inference. Traditional object detection algorithms are inherently closed-set, limiting their capability to handle NOD. We present a novel approach to transform existing closed-set detectors into open-set detectors. This transformation is achieved by leveraging the complementary strengths of pre-trained foundational models, specifically CLIP and SAM, through our cooperative mechanism. Furthermore, by integrating this mechanism with state-of-the-art open-set detectors such as GDINO, we establish new benchmarks in object detection performance. Our method achieves 17.42 mAP in novel object detection and 42.08 mAP for known objects on the challenging LVIS dataset. Adapting our approach to the COCO OVD split, we surpass the current state-of-the-art by a margin of 7.2 AP_{50} for novel classes. Our code is available at https://github.com/rohit901/cooperative-foundational-models .

We propose Unified-IO, a model that performs a large variety of AI tasks spanning classical computer vision tasks, including pose estimation, object detection, depth estimation and image generation, vision-and-language tasks such as region captioning and referring expression, to natural language processing tasks such as question answering and paraphrasing. Developing a single unified model for such a large variety of tasks poses unique challenges due to the heterogeneous inputs and outputs pertaining to each task, including RGB images, per-pixel maps, binary masks, bounding boxes, and language. We achieve this unification by homogenizing every supported input and output into a sequence of discrete vocabulary tokens. This common representation across all tasks allows us to train a single transformer-based architecture, jointly on over 90 diverse datasets in the vision and language fields. Unified-IO is the first model capable of performing all 7 tasks on the GRIT benchmark and produces strong results across 16 diverse benchmarks like NYUv2-Depth, ImageNet, VQA2.0, OK-VQA, Swig, VizWizGround, BoolQ, and SciTail, with no task-specific fine-tuning. Code and demos for Unified-IO are available at: https://unified-io.allenai.org.

We present Segment Anything Model (SAM) 3, a unified model that detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts, which we define as either short noun phrases (e.g., "yellow school bus"), image exemplars, or a combination of both. Promptable Concept Segmentation (PCS) takes such prompts and returns segmentation masks and unique identities for all matching object instances. To advance PCS, we build a scalable data engine that produces a high-quality dataset with 4M unique concept labels, including hard negatives, across images and videos. Our model consists of an image-level detector and a memory-based video tracker that share a single backbone. Recognition and localization are decoupled with a presence head, which boosts detection accuracy. SAM 3 doubles the accuracy of existing systems in both image and video PCS, and improves previous SAM capabilities on visual segmentation tasks. We open source SAM 3 along with our new Segment Anything with Concepts (SA-Co) benchmark for promptable concept segmentation.

With the emergence of foundation models, deep learning-based object detectors have shown practical usability in closed set scenarios. However, for real-world tasks, object detectors often operate in open environments, where crucial factors (e.g., data distribution, objective) that influence model learning are often changing. The dynamic and intricate nature of the open environment poses novel and formidable challenges to object detectors. Unfortunately, current research on object detectors in open environments lacks a comprehensive analysis of their distinctive characteristics, challenges, and corresponding solutions, which hinders their secure deployment in critical real-world scenarios. This paper aims to bridge this gap by conducting a comprehensive review and analysis of object detectors in open environments. We initially identified limitations of key structural components within the existing detection pipeline and propose the open environment object detector challenge framework that includes four quadrants (i.e., out-of-domain, out-of-category, robust learning, and incremental learning) based on the dimensions of the data / target changes. For each quadrant of challenges in the proposed framework, we present a detailed description and systematic analysis of the overarching goals and core difficulties, systematically review the corresponding solutions, and benchmark their performance over multiple widely adopted datasets. In addition, we engage in a discussion of open problems and potential avenues for future research. This paper aims to provide a fresh, comprehensive, and systematic understanding of the challenges and solutions associated with open-environment object detectors, thus catalyzing the development of more solid applications in real-world scenarios. A project related to this survey can be found at https://github.com/LiangSiyuan21/OEOD_Survey.

We motivate and present feature selective anchor-free (FSAF) module, a simple and effective building block for single-shot object detectors. It can be plugged into single-shot detectors with feature pyramid structure. The FSAF module addresses two limitations brought up by the conventional anchor-based detection: 1) heuristic-guided feature selection; 2) overlap-based anchor sampling. The general concept of the FSAF module is online feature selection applied to the training of multi-level anchor-free branches. Specifically, an anchor-free branch is attached to each level of the feature pyramid, allowing box encoding and decoding in the anchor-free manner at an arbitrary level. During training, we dynamically assign each instance to the most suitable feature level. At the time of inference, the FSAF module can work jointly with anchor-based branches by outputting predictions in parallel. We instantiate this concept with simple implementations of anchor-free branches and online feature selection strategy. Experimental results on the COCO detection track show that our FSAF module performs better than anchor-based counterparts while being faster. When working jointly with anchor-based branches, the FSAF module robustly improves the baseline RetinaNet by a large margin under various settings, while introducing nearly free inference overhead. And the resulting best model can achieve a state-of-the-art 44.6% mAP, outperforming all existing single-shot detectors on COCO.

Large language models have evolved data-efficient generalists, benefiting from the universal language interface and large-scale pre-training. However, constructing a data-efficient generalist for dense visual prediction presents a distinct challenge due to the variation in label structures across different tasks. Consequently, generalization to unseen dense prediction tasks in the low-data regime is not straightforward and has received less attention from previous vision generalists. In this study, we explore a universal model that can flexibly adapt to unseen dense label structures with a few examples, enabling it to serve as a data-efficient vision generalist in diverse real-world scenarios. To this end, we base our method on a powerful meta-learning framework and explore several axes to improve its performance and versatility for real-world problems, such as flexible adaptation mechanisms and scalability. We evaluate our model across a spectrum of unseen real-world scenarios where low-shot learning is desirable, including video, 3D, medical, biological, and user-interactive tasks. Equipped with a generic architecture and an effective adaptation mechanism, our model flexibly adapts to all of these tasks with at most 50 labeled images, showcasing a significant advancement over existing data-efficient generalist approaches. Codes are available at https://github.com/GitGyun/chameleon.

This paper presents a novel joint neural networks approach to address the challenging one-shot object recognition and detection tasks. Inspired by Siamese neural networks and state-of-art multi-box detection approaches, the joint neural networks are able to perform object recognition and detection for categories that remain unseen during the training process. Following the one-shot object recognition/detection constraints, the training and testing datasets do not contain overlapped classes, in other words, all the test classes remain unseen during training. The joint networks architecture is able to effectively compare pairs of images via stacked convolutional layers of the query and target inputs, recognising patterns of the same input query category without relying on previous training around this category. The proposed approach achieves 61.41% accuracy for one-shot object recognition on the MiniImageNet dataset and 47.1% mAP for one-shot object detection when trained on the COCO dataset and tested using the Pascal VOC dataset. Code available at https://github.com/cjvargasc/JNN recog and https://github.com/cjvargasc/JNN detection/

Tracking any given object(s) spatially and temporally is a common purpose in Visual Object Tracking (VOT) and Video Object Segmentation (VOS). Joint tracking and segmentation have been attempted in some studies but they often lack full compatibility of both box and mask in initialization and prediction, and mainly focus on single-object scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a Multi-object Mask-box Integrated framework for unified Tracking and Segmentation, dubbed MITS. Firstly, the unified identification module is proposed to support both box and mask reference for initialization, where detailed object information is inferred from boxes or directly retained from masks. Additionally, a novel pinpoint box predictor is proposed for accurate multi-object box prediction, facilitating target-oriented representation learning. All target objects are processed simultaneously from encoding to propagation and decoding, as a unified pipeline for VOT and VOS. Experimental results show MITS achieves state-of-the-art performance on both VOT and VOS benchmarks. Notably, MITS surpasses the best prior VOT competitor by around 6% on the GOT-10k test set, and significantly improves the performance of box initialization on VOS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/yoxu515/MITS.

Object detection, particularly open-vocabulary object detection, plays a crucial role in Earth sciences, such as environmental monitoring, natural disaster assessment, and land-use planning. However, existing open-vocabulary detectors, primarily trained on natural-world images, struggle to generalize to remote sensing images due to a significant data domain gap. Thus, this paper aims to advance the development of open-vocabulary object detection in remote sensing community. To achieve this, we first reformulate the task as Locate Anything on Earth (LAE) with the goal of detecting any novel concepts on Earth. We then developed the LAE-Label Engine which collects, auto-annotates, and unifies up to 10 remote sensing datasets creating the LAE-1M - the first large-scale remote sensing object detection dataset with broad category coverage. Using the LAE-1M, we further propose and train the novel LAE-DINO Model, the first open-vocabulary foundation object detector for the LAE task, featuring Dynamic Vocabulary Construction (DVC) and Visual-Guided Text Prompt Learning (VisGT) modules. DVC dynamically constructs vocabulary for each training batch, while VisGT maps visual features to semantic space, enhancing text features. We comprehensively conduct experiments on established remote sensing benchmark DIOR, DOTAv2.0, as well as our newly introduced 80-class LAE-80C benchmark. Results demonstrate the advantages of the LAE-1M dataset and the effectiveness of the LAE-DINO method.

A challenging problem in many modern machine learning tasks is to process weight-space features, i.e., to transform or extract information from the weights and gradients of a neural network. Recent works have developed promising weight-space models that are equivariant to the permutation symmetries of simple feedforward networks. However, they are not applicable to general architectures, since the permutation symmetries of a weight space can be complicated by recurrence or residual connections. This work proposes an algorithm that automatically constructs permutation equivariant models, which we refer to as universal neural functionals (UNFs), for any weight space. Among other applications, we demonstrate how UNFs can be substituted into existing learned optimizer designs, and find promising improvements over prior methods when optimizing small image classifiers and language models. Our results suggest that learned optimizers can benefit from considering the (symmetry) structure of the weight space they optimize. We open-source our library for constructing UNFs at https://github.com/AllanYangZhou/universal_neural_functional.

Object detection is integral to a bevy of real-world applications, from robotics to medical image analysis. To be used reliably in such applications, models must be capable of handling unexpected - or novel - objects. The open world object detection (OWD) paradigm addresses this challenge by enabling models to detect unknown objects and learn discovered ones incrementally. However, OWD method development is hindered due to the stringent benchmark and task definitions. These definitions effectively prohibit foundation models. Here, we aim to relax these definitions and investigate the utilization of pre-trained foundation models in OWD. First, we show that existing benchmarks are insufficient in evaluating methods that utilize foundation models, as even naive integration methods nearly saturate these benchmarks. This result motivated us to curate a new and challenging benchmark for these models. Therefore, we introduce a new benchmark that includes five real-world application-driven datasets, including challenging domains such as aerial and surgical images, and establish baselines. We exploit the inherent connection between classes in application-driven datasets and introduce a novel method, Foundation Object detection Model for the Open world, or FOMO, which identifies unknown objects based on their shared attributes with the base known objects. FOMO has ~3x unknown object mAP compared to baselines on our benchmark. However, our results indicate a significant place for improvement - suggesting a great research opportunity in further scaling object detection methods to real-world domains. Our code and benchmark are available at https://orrzohar.github.io/projects/fomo/.

Most visual models are designed for sRGB images, yet RAW data offers significant advantages for object detection by preserving sensor information before ISP processing. This enables improved detection accuracy and more efficient hardware designs by bypassing the ISP. However, RAW object detection is challenging due to limited training data, unbalanced pixel distributions, and sensor noise. To address this, we propose SimROD, a lightweight and effective approach for RAW object detection. We introduce a Global Gamma Enhancement (GGE) module, which applies a learnable global gamma transformation with only four parameters, improving feature representation while keeping the model efficient. Additionally, we leverage the green channel's richer signal to enhance local details, aligning with the human eye's sensitivity and Bayer filter design. Extensive experiments on multiple RAW object detection datasets and detectors demonstrate that SimROD outperforms state-of-the-art methods like RAW-Adapter and DIAP while maintaining efficiency. Our work highlights the potential of RAW data for real-world object detection. Code is available at https://ocean146.github.io/SimROD2025/.

Recent vision foundation models can extract universal representations and show impressive abilities in various tasks. However, their application on object detection is largely overlooked, especially without fine-tuning them. In this work, we show that frozen foundation models can be a versatile feature enhancer, even though they are not pre-trained for object detection. Specifically, we explore directly transferring the high-level image understanding of foundation models to detectors in the following two ways. First, the class token in foundation models provides an in-depth understanding of the complex scene, which facilitates decoding object queries in the detector's decoder by providing a compact context. Additionally, the patch tokens in foundation models can enrich the features in the detector's encoder by providing semantic details. Utilizing frozen foundation models as plug-and-play modules rather than the commonly used backbone can significantly enhance the detector's performance while preventing the problems caused by the architecture discrepancy between the detector's backbone and the foundation model. With such a novel paradigm, we boost the SOTA query-based detector DINO from 49.0% AP to 51.9% AP (+2.9% AP) and further to 53.8% AP (+4.8% AP) by integrating one or two foundation models respectively, on the COCO validation set after training for 12 epochs with R50 as the detector's backbone.

We propose a fully convolutional one-stage object detector (FCOS) to solve object detection in a per-pixel prediction fashion, analogue to semantic segmentation. Almost all state-of-the-art object detectors such as RetinaNet, SSD, YOLOv3, and Faster R-CNN rely on pre-defined anchor boxes. In contrast, our proposed detector FCOS is anchor box free, as well as proposal free. By eliminating the predefined set of anchor boxes, FCOS completely avoids the complicated computation related to anchor boxes such as calculating overlapping during training. More importantly, we also avoid all hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often very sensitive to the final detection performance. With the only post-processing non-maximum suppression (NMS), FCOS with ResNeXt-64x4d-101 achieves 44.7% in AP with single-model and single-scale testing, surpassing previous one-stage detectors with the advantage of being much simpler. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and flexible detection framework achieving improved detection accuracy. We hope that the proposed FCOS framework can serve as a simple and strong alternative for many other instance-level tasks. Code is available at:Code is available at: https://tinyurl.com/FCOSv1

Open-vocabulary object detection aims to detect arbitrary classes via text prompts. Methods without cross-modal fusion layers (non-fusion) offer faster inference by treating recognition as a retrieval problem, \ie, matching regions to text queries in a shared embedding space. In this work, we fully explore this retrieval philosophy and demonstrate its unique advantages in efficiency and versatility through a model family named WeDetect: (1) State-of-the-art performance. WeDetect is a real-time detector with a dual-tower architecture. We show that, with well-curated data and full training, the non-fusion WeDetect surpasses other fusion models and establishes a strong open-vocabulary foundation. (2) Fast backtrack of historical data. WeDetect-Uni is a universal proposal generator based on WeDetect. We freeze the entire detector and only finetune an objectness prompt to retrieve generic object proposals across categories. Importantly, the proposal embeddings are class-specific and enable a new application, object retrieval, supporting retrieval objects in historical data. (3) Integration with LMMs for referring expression comprehension (REC). We further propose WeDetect-Ref, an LMM-based object classifier to handle complex referring expressions, which retrieves target objects from the proposal list extracted by WeDetect-Uni. It discards next-token prediction and classifies objects in a single forward pass. Together, the WeDetect family unifies detection, proposal generation, object retrieval, and REC under a coherent retrieval framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance across 15 benchmarks with high inference efficiency.

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a variety of risks, from non-faithful output to biased and toxic generations. Due to several limiting factors surrounding LLMs (training cost, API access, data availability, etc.), it may not always be feasible to impose direct safety constraints on a deployed model. Therefore, an efficient and reliable alternative is required. To this end, we present our ongoing efforts to create and deploy a library of detectors: compact and easy-to-build classification models that provide labels for various harms. In addition to the detectors themselves, we discuss a wide range of uses for these detector models - from acting as guardrails to enabling effective AI governance. We also deep dive into inherent challenges in their development and discuss future work aimed at making the detectors more reliable and broadening their scope.

Modern top-performing object detectors depend heavily on backbone networks, whose advances bring consistent performance gains through exploring more effective network structures. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible backbone framework, namely CBNetV2, to construct high-performance detectors using existing open-sourced pre-trained backbones under the pre-training fine-tuning paradigm. In particular, CBNetV2 architecture groups multiple identical backbones, which are connected through composite connections. Specifically, it integrates the high- and low-level features of multiple backbone networks and gradually expands the receptive field to more efficiently perform object detection. We also propose a better training strategy with assistant supervision for CBNet-based detectors. Without additional pre-training of the composite backbone, CBNetV2 can be adapted to various backbones (CNN-based vs. Transformer-based) and head designs of most mainstream detectors (one-stage vs. two-stage, anchor-based vs. anchor-free-based). Experiments provide strong evidence that, compared with simply increasing the depth and width of the network, CBNetV2 introduces a more efficient, effective, and resource-friendly way to build high-performance backbone networks. Particularly, our Dual-Swin-L achieves 59.4% box AP and 51.6% mask AP on COCO test-dev under the single-model and single-scale testing protocol, which is significantly better than the state-of-the-art result (57.7% box AP and 50.2% mask AP) achieved by Swin-L, while the training schedule is reduced by 6times. With multi-scale testing, we push the current best single model result to a new record of 60.1% box AP and 52.3% mask AP without using extra training data. Code is available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/CBNetV2.

We introduce AnyUp, a method for feature upsampling that can be applied to any vision feature at any resolution, without encoder-specific training. Existing learning-based upsamplers for features like DINO or CLIP need to be re-trained for every feature extractor and thus do not generalize to different feature types at inference time. In this work, we propose an inference-time feature-agnostic upsampling architecture to alleviate this limitation and improve upsampling quality. In our experiments, AnyUp sets a new state of the art for upsampled features, generalizes to different feature types, and preserves feature semantics while being efficient and easy to apply to a wide range of downstream tasks.

The task of localizing and categorizing objects in medical images often remains formulated as a semantic segmentation problem. This approach, however, only indirectly solves the coarse localization task by predicting pixel-level scores, requiring ad-hoc heuristics when mapping back to object-level scores. State-of-the-art object detectors on the other hand, allow for individual object scoring in an end-to-end fashion, while ironically trading in the ability to exploit the full pixel-wise supervision signal. This can be particularly disadvantageous in the setting of medical image analysis, where data sets are notoriously small. In this paper, we propose Retina U-Net, a simple architecture, which naturally fuses the Retina Net one-stage detector with the U-Net architecture widely used for semantic segmentation in medical images. The proposed architecture recaptures discarded supervision signals by complementing object detection with an auxiliary task in the form of semantic segmentation without introducing the additional complexity of previously proposed two-stage detectors. We evaluate the importance of full segmentation supervision on two medical data sets, provide an in-depth analysis on a series of toy experiments and show how the corresponding performance gain grows in the limit of small data sets. Retina U-Net yields strong detection performance only reached by its more complex two-staged counterparts. Our framework including all methods implemented for operation on 2D and 3D images is available at github.com/pfjaeger/medicaldetectiontoolkit.

In this manuscript we consider the problem of generalized linear estimation on Gaussian mixture data with labels given by a single-index model. Our first result is a sharp asymptotic expression for the test and training errors in the high-dimensional regime. Motivated by the recent stream of results on the Gaussian universality of the test and training errors in generalized linear estimation, we ask ourselves the question: "when is a single Gaussian enough to characterize the error?". Our formula allow us to give sharp answers to this question, both in the positive and negative directions. More precisely, we show that the sufficient conditions for Gaussian universality (or lack of thereof) crucially depend on the alignment between the target weights and the means and covariances of the mixture clusters, which we precisely quantify. In the particular case of least-squares interpolation, we prove a strong universality property of the training error, and show it follows a simple, closed-form expression. Finally, we apply our results to real datasets, clarifying some recent discussion in the literature about Gaussian universality of the errors in this context.

Simultaneous localisation and categorization of objects in medical images, also referred to as medical object detection, is of high clinical relevance because diagnostic decisions often depend on rating of objects rather than e.g. pixels. For this task, the cumbersome and iterative process of method configuration constitutes a major research bottleneck. Recently, nnU-Net has tackled this challenge for the task of image segmentation with great success. Following nnU-Net's agenda, in this work we systematize and automate the configuration process for medical object detection. The resulting self-configuring method, nnDetection, adapts itself without any manual intervention to arbitrary medical detection problems while achieving results en par with or superior to the state-of-the-art. We demonstrate the effectiveness of nnDetection on two public benchmarks, ADAM and LUNA16, and propose 11 further medical object detection tasks on public data sets for comprehensive method evaluation. Code is at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/nnDetection .

When deploying machine learning systems to the wild, it is highly desirable for them to effectively leverage prior knowledge to the unfamiliar domain while also firing alarms to anomalous inputs. In order to address these requirements, Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA) has emerged as a novel research area in computer vision, focusing on achieving both adaptation ability and robustness (i.e., the ability to detect out-of-distribution samples). While UniDA has led significant progress in computer vision, its application on language input still needs to be explored despite its feasibility. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for natural language that offers thorough viewpoints of the model's generalizability and robustness. Our benchmark encompasses multiple datasets with varying difficulty levels and characteristics, including temporal shifts and diverse domains. On top of our testbed, we validate existing UniDA methods from computer vision and state-of-the-art domain adaptation techniques from NLP literature, yielding valuable findings: We observe that UniDA methods originally designed for image input can be effectively transferred to the natural language domain while also underscoring the effect of adaptation difficulty in determining the model's performance.

Biological intelligence systems of animals perceive the world by integrating information in different modalities and processing simultaneously for various tasks. In contrast, current machine learning research follows a task-specific paradigm, leading to inefficient collaboration between tasks and high marginal costs of developing perception models for new tasks. In this paper, we present a generic perception architecture named Uni-Perceiver, which processes a variety of modalities and tasks with unified modeling and shared parameters. Specifically, Uni-Perceiver encodes different task inputs and targets from arbitrary modalities into a unified representation space with a modality-agnostic Transformer encoder and lightweight modality-specific tokenizers. Different perception tasks are modeled as the same formulation, that is, finding the maximum likelihood target for each input through the similarity of their representations. The model is pre-trained on several uni-modal and multi-modal tasks, and evaluated on a variety of downstream tasks, including novel tasks that did not appear in the pre-training stage. Results show that our pre-trained model without any tuning can achieve reasonable performance even on novel tasks. The performance can be improved to a level close to state-of-the-art methods by conducting prompt tuning on 1% of downstream task data. Full-data fine-tuning further delivers results on par with or better than state-of-the-art results. Code shall be released.

The goal of this work is to establish a scalable pipeline for expanding an object detector towards novel/unseen categories, using zero manual annotations. To achieve that, we make the following four contributions: (i) in pursuit of generalisation, we propose a two-stage open-vocabulary object detector, where the class-agnostic object proposals are classified with a text encoder from pre-trained visual-language model; (ii) To pair the visual latent space (of RPN box proposals) with that of the pre-trained text encoder, we propose the idea of regional prompt learning to align the textual embedding space with regional visual object features; (iii) To scale up the learning procedure towards detecting a wider spectrum of objects, we exploit the available online resource via a novel self-training framework, which allows to train the proposed detector on a large corpus of noisy uncurated web images. Lastly, (iv) to evaluate our proposed detector, termed as PromptDet, we conduct extensive experiments on the challenging LVIS and MS-COCO dataset. PromptDet shows superior performance over existing approaches with fewer additional training images and zero manual annotations whatsoever. Project page with code: https://fcjian.github.io/promptdet.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown the ability to produce fluent and cogent content, presenting both productivity opportunities and societal risks. To build trustworthy AI systems, it is imperative to distinguish between machine-generated and human-authored content. The leading zero-shot detector, DetectGPT, showcases commendable performance but is marred by its intensive computational costs. In this paper, we introduce the concept of conditional probability curvature to elucidate discrepancies in word choices between LLMs and humans within a given context. Utilizing this curvature as a foundational metric, we present **Fast-DetectGPT**, an optimized zero-shot detector, which substitutes DetectGPT's perturbation step with a more efficient sampling step. Our evaluations on various datasets, source models, and test conditions indicate that Fast-DetectGPT not only surpasses DetectGPT by a relative around 75% in both the white-box and black-box settings but also accelerates the detection process by a factor of 340, as detailed in Table 1. See https://github.com/baoguangsheng/fast-detect-gpt for code, data, and results.

We propose LGGPT, an LLM-based model tailored for unified layout generation. First, we propose Arbitrary Layout Instruction (ALI) and Universal Layout Response (ULR) as the uniform I/O template. ALI accommodates arbitrary layout generation task inputs across multiple layout domains, enabling LGGPT to unify both task-generic and domain-generic layout generation hitherto unexplored. Collectively, ALI and ULR boast a succinct structure that forgoes superfluous tokens typically found in existing HTML-based formats, facilitating efficient instruction tuning and boosting unified generation performance. In addition, we propose an Interval Quantization Encoding (IQE) strategy that compresses ALI into a more condensed structure. IQE precisely preserves valid layout clues while eliminating the less informative placeholders, facilitating LGGPT to capture complex and variable layout generation conditions during the unified training process. Experimental results demonstrate that LGGPT achieves superior or on par performance compared to existing methods. Notably, LGGPT strikes a prominent balance between proficiency and efficiency with a compact 1.5B parameter LLM, which beats prior 7B or 175B models even in the most extensive and challenging unified scenario. Furthermore, we underscore the necessity of employing LLMs for unified layout generation and suggest that 1.5B could be an optimal parameter size by comparing LLMs of varying scales. Code is available at https://github.com/NiceRingNode/LGGPT.

While LLMs have demonstrated impressive performance across various domains and tasks, their security issues have become increasingly severe. Machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a promising solution to address these issues by removing the influence of undesired data on the target model without compromising its utility in other aspects. MU typically assumes full access to the original training data to preserve utility, which is difficult to achieve in LLM unlearning. Existing LLM unlearning methods often assume access to data most affected by undesired data unlearning. However, this assumption underestimates the entanglement among various LLM capabilities and ignores data access limitations due to various issues. Moreover, these LLM unlearning methods do not sufficiently consider that unlearning requests in real-world scenarios are continuously emerging. To overcome these challenges and achieve practical LLM unlearning, we propose the O3 framework. The O3 framework includes an Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detector to measure the similarity between input and unlearning data, and an Orthogonal low-rank adapter (LoRA) for continuously unlearning requested data. The OOD detector is trained with a novel contrastive entropy loss and utilizes a local-global layer-aggregated scoring mechanism. The orthogonal LoRA achieves parameter disentanglement among continual unlearning requests. During inference, our O3 framework can smartly decide whether and to what extent to load the unlearning LoRA based on the OOD detector's predictions. Notably, O3's effectiveness does not rely on any retained data. We conducted extensive experiments on O3 and state-of-the-art LLM unlearning methods across three tasks and seven datasets. The results indicate that O3 consistently achieves the best trade-off between unlearning effectiveness and utility preservation, especially when facing continuous unlearning requests.

Joint image-text embedding is the bedrock for most Vision-and-Language (V+L) tasks, where multimodality inputs are simultaneously processed for joint visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we introduce UNITER, a UNiversal Image-TExt Representation, learned through large-scale pre-training over four image-text datasets (COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions), which can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. We design four pre-training tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Word-Region Alignment (WRA). Different from previous work that applies joint random masking to both modalities, we use conditional masking on pre-training tasks (i.e., masked language/region modeling is conditioned on full observation of image/text). In addition to ITM for global image-text alignment, we also propose WRA via the use of Optimal Transport (OT) to explicitly encourage fine-grained alignment between words and image regions during pre-training. Comprehensive analysis shows that both conditional masking and OT-based WRA contribute to better pre-training. We also conduct a thorough ablation study to find an optimal combination of pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments show that UNITER achieves new state of the art across six V+L tasks (over nine datasets), including Visual Question Answering, Image-Text Retrieval, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Entailment, and NLVR^2. Code is available at https://github.com/ChenRocks/UNITER.

This paper aims for high-performance offline LiDAR-based 3D object detection. We first observe that experienced human annotators annotate objects from a track-centric perspective. They first label the objects with clear shapes in a track, and then leverage the temporal coherence to infer the annotations of obscure objects. Drawing inspiration from this, we propose a high-performance offline detector in a track-centric perspective instead of the conventional object-centric perspective. Our method features a bidirectional tracking module and a track-centric learning module. Such a design allows our detector to infer and refine a complete track once the object is detected at a certain moment. We refer to this characteristic as "onCe detecTed, neveR Lost" and name the proposed system CTRL. Extensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable performance of our method, surpassing the human-level annotating accuracy and the previous state-of-the-art methods in the highly competitive Waymo Open Dataset without model ensemble. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/tusen-ai/SST.

Recent advances in detecting arbitrary objects in the real world are trained and evaluated on object detection datasets with a relatively restricted vocabulary. To facilitate the development of more general visual object detection, we propose V3Det, a vast vocabulary visual detection dataset with precisely annotated bounding boxes on massive images. V3Det has several appealing properties: 1) Vast Vocabulary: It contains bounding boxes of objects from 13,029 categories on real-world images, which is 10 times larger than the existing large vocabulary object detection dataset, e.g., LVIS. 2) Hierarchical Category Organization: The vast vocabulary of V3Det is organized by a hierarchical category tree which annotates the inclusion relationship among categories, encouraging the exploration of category relationships in vast and open vocabulary object detection. 3) Rich Annotations: V3Det comprises precisely annotated objects in 245k images and professional descriptions of each category written by human experts and a powerful chatbot. By offering a vast exploration space, V3Det enables extensive benchmarks on both vast and open vocabulary object detection, leading to new observations, practices, and insights for future research. It has the potential to serve as a cornerstone dataset for developing more general visual perception systems.

The highest accuracy object detectors to date are based on a two-stage approach popularized by R-CNN, where a classifier is applied to a sparse set of candidate object locations. In contrast, one-stage detectors that are applied over a regular, dense sampling of possible object locations have the potential to be faster and simpler, but have trailed the accuracy of two-stage detectors thus far. In this paper, we investigate why this is the case. We discover that the extreme foreground-background class imbalance encountered during training of dense detectors is the central cause. We propose to address this class imbalance by reshaping the standard cross entropy loss such that it down-weights the loss assigned to well-classified examples. Our novel Focal Loss focuses training on a sparse set of hard examples and prevents the vast number of easy negatives from overwhelming the detector during training. To evaluate the effectiveness of our loss, we design and train a simple dense detector we call RetinaNet. Our results show that when trained with the focal loss, RetinaNet is able to match the speed of previous one-stage detectors while surpassing the accuracy of all existing state-of-the-art two-stage detectors. Code is at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/Detectron.

Open World Object Detection (OWOD) is a new and challenging computer vision task that bridges the gap between classic object detection (OD) benchmarks and object detection in the real world. In addition to detecting and classifying seen/labeled objects, OWOD algorithms are expected to detect novel/unknown objects - which can be classified and incrementally learned. In standard OD, object proposals not overlapping with a labeled object are automatically classified as background. Therefore, simply applying OD methods to OWOD fails as unknown objects would be predicted as background. The challenge of detecting unknown objects stems from the lack of supervision in distinguishing unknown objects and background object proposals. Previous OWOD methods have attempted to overcome this issue by generating supervision using pseudo-labeling - however, unknown object detection has remained low. Probabilistic/generative models may provide a solution for this challenge. Herein, we introduce a novel probabilistic framework for objectness estimation, where we alternate between probability distribution estimation and objectness likelihood maximization of known objects in the embedded feature space - ultimately allowing us to estimate the objectness probability of different proposals. The resulting Probabilistic Objectness transformer-based open-world detector, PROB, integrates our framework into traditional object detection models, adapting them for the open-world setting. Comprehensive experiments on OWOD benchmarks show that PROB outperforms all existing OWOD methods in both unknown object detection (sim 2times unknown recall) and known object detection (sim 10% mAP). Our code will be made available upon publication at https://github.com/orrzohar/PROB.

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the Ultralytics YOLO(You Only Look Once) family of object detectors, focusing the architectural evolution, benchmarking, deployment perspectives, and future challenges. The review begins with the most recent release, YOLO26 (YOLOv26), which introduces key innovations including Distribution Focal Loss (DFL) removal, native NMS-free inference, Progressive Loss Balancing (ProgLoss), Small-Target-Aware Label Assignment (STAL), and the MuSGD optimizer for stable training. The progression is then traced through YOLO11, with its hybrid task assignment and efficiency-focused modules; YOLOv8, which advanced with a decoupled detection head and anchor-free predictions; and YOLOv5, which established the modular PyTorch foundation that enabled modern YOLO development. Benchmarking on the MS COCO dataset provides a detailed quantitative comparison of YOLOv5, YOLOv8, YOLO11, and YOLO26, alongside cross-comparisons with YOLOv12, YOLOv13, RT-DETR, and DEIM. Metrics including precision, recall, F1 score, mean Average Precision, and inference speed are analyzed to highlight trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. Deployment and application perspectives are further discussed, covering export formats, quantization strategies, and real-world use in robotics, agriculture, surveillance, and manufacturing. Finally, the paper identifies challenges and future directions, including dense-scene limitations, hybrid CNN-Transformer integration, open-vocabulary detection, and edge-aware training approaches.

Many modern object detectors demonstrate outstanding performances by using the mechanism of looking and thinking twice. In this paper, we explore this mechanism in the backbone design for object detection. At the macro level, we propose Recursive Feature Pyramid, which incorporates extra feedback connections from Feature Pyramid Networks into the bottom-up backbone layers. At the micro level, we propose Switchable Atrous Convolution, which convolves the features with different atrous rates and gathers the results using switch functions. Combining them results in DetectoRS, which significantly improves the performances of object detection. On COCO test-dev, DetectoRS achieves state-of-the-art 55.7% box AP for object detection, 48.5% mask AP for instance segmentation, and 50.0% PQ for panoptic segmentation. The code is made publicly available.

In this work, we tackle the limitations of current LiDAR-based 3D object detection systems, which are hindered by a restricted class vocabulary and the high costs associated with annotating new object classes. Our exploration of open-vocabulary (OV) learning in urban environments aims to capture novel instances using pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) with multi-sensor data. We design and benchmark a set of four potential solutions as baselines, categorizing them into either top-down or bottom-up approaches based on their input data strategies. While effective, these methods exhibit certain limitations, such as missing novel objects in 3D box estimation or applying rigorous priors, leading to biases towards objects near the camera or of rectangular geometries. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a universal Find n' Propagate approach for 3D OV tasks, aimed at maximizing the recall of novel objects and propagating this detection capability to more distant areas thereby progressively capturing more. In particular, we utilize a greedy box seeker to search against 3D novel boxes of varying orientations and depth in each generated frustum and ensure the reliability of newly identified boxes by cross alignment and density ranker. Additionally, the inherent bias towards camera-proximal objects is alleviated by the proposed remote simulator, which randomly diversifies pseudo-labeled novel instances in the self-training process, combined with the fusion of base samples in the memory bank. Extensive experiments demonstrate a 53% improvement in novel recall across diverse OV settings, VLMs, and 3D detectors. Notably, we achieve up to a 3.97-fold increase in Average Precision (AP) for novel object classes. The source code is made available at https://github.com/djamahl99/findnpropagate.

We propose a novel random walk-based algorithm for unbiased estimation of arbitrary functions of a weighted adjacency matrix, coined universal graph random features (u-GRFs). This includes many of the most popular examples of kernels defined on the nodes of a graph. Our algorithm enjoys subquadratic time complexity with respect to the number of nodes, overcoming the notoriously prohibitive cubic scaling of exact graph kernel evaluation. It can also be trivially distributed across machines, permitting learning on much larger networks. At the heart of the algorithm is a modulation function which upweights or downweights the contribution from different random walks depending on their lengths. We show that by parameterising it with a neural network we can obtain u-GRFs that give higher-quality kernel estimates or perform efficient, scalable kernel learning. We provide robust theoretical analysis and support our findings with experiments including pointwise estimation of fixed graph kernels, solving non-homogeneous graph ordinary differential equations, node clustering and kernel regression on triangular meshes.

The goal of this paper is to detect objects by exploiting their interrelationships. Contrary to existing methods, which learn objects and relations separately, our key idea is to learn the object-relation distribution jointly. We first propose a novel way of creating a graphical representation of an image from inter-object relation priors and initial class predictions, we call a context-likelihood graph. We then learn the joint distribution with an energy-based modeling technique which allows to sample and refine the context-likelihood graph iteratively for a given image. Our formulation of jointly learning the distribution enables us to generate a more accurate graph representation of an image which leads to a better object detection performance. We demonstrate the benefits of our context-likelihood graph formulation and the energy-based graph refinement via experiments on the Visual Genome and MS-COCO datasets where we achieve a consistent improvement over object detectors like DETR and Faster-RCNN, as well as alternative methods modeling object interrelationships separately. Our method is detector agnostic, end-to-end trainable, and especially beneficial for rare object classes.