Daily Papers

We present a fast bottom-up method that jointly detects over 100 keypoints on humans or objects, also referred to as human/object pose estimation. We model all keypoints belonging to a human or an object -- the pose -- as a graph and leverage insights from community detection to quantify the independence of keypoints. We use a graph centrality measure to assign training weights to different parts of a pose. Our proposed measure quantifies how tightly a keypoint is connected to its neighborhood. Our experiments show that our method outperforms all previous methods for human pose estimation with fine-grained keypoint annotations on the face, the hands and the feet with a total of 133 keypoints. We also show that our method generalizes to car poses.

3D pose transfer is a challenging generation task that aims to transfer the pose of a source geometry onto a target geometry with the target identity preserved. Many prior methods require keypoint annotations to find correspondence between the source and target. Current pose transfer methods allow end-to-end correspondence learning but require the desired final output as ground truth for supervision. Unsupervised methods have been proposed for graph convolutional models but they require ground truth correspondence between the source and target inputs. We present a novel self-supervised framework for 3D pose transfer which can be trained in unsupervised, semi-supervised, or fully supervised settings without any correspondence labels. We introduce two contrastive learning constraints in the latent space: a mesh-level loss for disentangling global patterns including pose and identity, and a point-level loss for discriminating local semantics. We demonstrate quantitatively and qualitatively that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in supervised 3D pose transfer, with comparable results in unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. Our method is also generalisable to unseen human and animal data with complex topologies.

We present a method for joint alignment of sparse in-the-wild image collections of an object category. Most prior works assume either ground-truth keypoint annotations or a large dataset of images of a single object category. However, neither of the above assumptions hold true for the long-tail of the objects present in the world. We present a self-supervised technique that directly optimizes on a sparse collection of images of a particular object/object category to obtain consistent dense correspondences across the collection. We use pairwise nearest neighbors obtained from deep features of a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT) model as noisy and sparse keypoint matches and make them dense and accurate matches by optimizing a neural network that jointly maps the image collection into a learned canonical grid. Experiments on CUB and SPair-71k benchmarks demonstrate that our method can produce globally consistent and higher quality correspondences across the image collection when compared to existing self-supervised methods. Code and other material will be made available at https://kampta.github.io/asic.

In recent years, the application of machine learning to minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has attracted considerable interest. Datasets are critical to the use of such techniques. This paper presents a unique dataset recorded during ex vivo pseudo-cholecystectomy procedures on pig livers using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK). Unlike existing datasets, it addresses a critical gap by providing comprehensive kinematic data, recordings of all pedal inputs, and offers a time-stamped record of the endoscope's movements. This expanded version also includes segmentation and keypoint annotations of images, enhancing its utility for computer vision applications. Contributed by seven surgeons with varied backgrounds and experience levels that are provided as a part of this expanded version, the dataset is an important new resource for surgical robotics research. It enables the development of advanced methods for evaluating surgeon skills, tools for providing better context awareness, and automation of surgical tasks. Our work overcomes the limitations of incomplete recordings and imprecise kinematic data found in other datasets. To demonstrate the potential of the dataset for advancing automation in surgical robotics, we introduce two models that predict clutch usage and camera activation, a 3D scene reconstruction example, and the results from our keypoint and segmentation models.

3D human whole-body pose estimation aims to localize precise 3D keypoints on the entire human body, including the face, hands, body, and feet. Due to the lack of a large-scale fully annotated 3D whole-body dataset, a common approach has been to train several deep networks separately on datasets dedicated to specific body parts, and combine them during inference. This approach suffers from complex training and inference pipelines because of the different biases in each dataset used. It also lacks a common benchmark which makes it difficult to compare different methods. To address these issues, we introduce Human3.6M 3D WholeBody (H3WB) which provides whole-body annotations for the Human3.6M dataset using the COCO Wholebody layout. H3WB is a large scale dataset with 133 whole-body keypoint annotations on 100K images, made possible by our new multi-view pipeline. Along with H3WB, we propose 3 tasks: i) 3D whole-body pose lifting from 2D complete whole-body pose, ii) 3D whole-body pose lifting from 2D incomplete whole-body pose, iii) 3D whole-body pose estimation from a single RGB image. We also report several baselines from popular methods for these tasks. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/wholebody3d/wholebody3d.

Existing methods for reconstructing animatable 3D animals from videos typically rely on sparse semantic keypoints to fit parametric models. However, obtaining such keypoints is labor-intensive, and keypoint detectors trained on limited animal data are often unreliable. To address this, we propose 4D-Animal, a novel framework that reconstructs animatable 3D animals from videos without requiring sparse keypoint annotations. Our approach introduces a dense feature network that maps 2D representations to SMAL parameters, enhancing both the efficiency and stability of the fitting process. Furthermore, we develop a hierarchical alignment strategy that integrates silhouette, part-level, pixel-level, and temporal cues from pre-trained 2D visual models to produce accurate and temporally coherent reconstructions across frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 4D-Animal outperforms both model-based and model-free baselines. Moreover, the high-quality 3D assets generated by our method can benefit other 3D tasks, underscoring its potential for large-scale applications. The code is released at https://github.com/zhongshsh/4D-Animal.

In this paper, we present UniPose, a unified cross-modality pose prior propagation method for weakly supervised 3D human pose estimation (HPE) using unannotated single-view RGB-D sequences (RGB, depth, and point cloud data). UniPose transfers 2D HPE annotations from large-scale RGB datasets (e.g., MS COCO) to the 3D domain via self-supervised learning on easily acquired RGB-D sequences, eliminating the need for labor-intensive 3D keypoint annotations. This approach bridges the gap between 2D and 3D domains without suffering from issues related to multi-view camera calibration or synthetic-to-real data shifts. During training, UniPose leverages off-the-shelf 2D pose estimations as weak supervision for point cloud networks, incorporating spatial-temporal constraints like body symmetry and joint motion. The 2D-to-3D back-projection loss and cross-modality interaction further enhance this process. By treating the point cloud network's 3D HPE results as pseudo ground truth, our anchor-to-joint prediction method performs 3D lifting on RGB and depth networks, making it more robust against inaccuracies in 2D HPE results compared to state-of-the-art methods. Experiments on CMU Panoptic and ITOP datasets show that UniPose achieves comparable performance to fully supervised methods. Incorporating large-scale unlabeled data (e.g., NTU RGB+D 60) enhances its performance under challenging conditions, demonstrating its potential for practical applications. Our proposed 3D lifting method also achieves state-of-the-art results.

Smell gestures play a crucial role in the investigation of past smells in the visual arts yet their automated recognition poses significant challenges. This paper introduces the SniffyArt dataset, consisting of 1941 individuals represented in 441 historical artworks. Each person is annotated with a tightly fitting bounding box, 17 pose keypoints, and a gesture label. By integrating these annotations, the dataset enables the development of hybrid classification approaches for smell gesture recognition. The datasets high-quality human pose estimation keypoints are achieved through the merging of five separate sets of keypoint annotations per person. The paper also presents a baseline analysis, evaluating the performance of representative algorithms for detection, keypoint estimation, and classification tasks, showcasing the potential of combining keypoint estimation with smell gesture classification. The SniffyArt dataset lays a solid foundation for future research and the exploration of multi-task approaches leveraging pose keypoints and person boxes to advance human gesture and olfactory dimension analysis in historical artworks.

Human pose estimation (HPE) in the top-view using fisheye cameras presents a promising and innovative application domain. However, the availability of datasets capturing this viewpoint is extremely limited, especially those with high-quality 2D and 3D keypoint annotations. Addressing this gap, we leverage the capabilities of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) technique to establish a comprehensive pipeline for generating human pose datasets from existing 2D and 3D datasets, specifically tailored for the top-view fisheye perspective. Through this pipeline, we create a novel dataset NToP570K (NeRF-powered Top-view human Pose dataset for fisheye cameras with over 570 thousand images), and conduct an extensive evaluation of its efficacy in enhancing neural networks for 2D and 3D top-view human pose estimation. A pretrained ViTPose-B model achieves an improvement in AP of 33.3 % on our validation set for 2D HPE after finetuning on our training set. A similarly finetuned HybrIK-Transformer model gains 53.7 mm reduction in PA-MPJPE for 3D HPE on the validation set.

We present an approach that can reconstruct hands in 3D from monocular input. Our approach for Hand Mesh Recovery, HaMeR, follows a fully transformer-based architecture and can analyze hands with significantly increased accuracy and robustness compared to previous work. The key to HaMeR's success lies in scaling up both the data used for training and the capacity of the deep network for hand reconstruction. For training data, we combine multiple datasets that contain 2D or 3D hand annotations. For the deep model, we use a large scale Vision Transformer architecture. Our final model consistently outperforms the previous baselines on popular 3D hand pose benchmarks. To further evaluate the effect of our design in non-controlled settings, we annotate existing in-the-wild datasets with 2D hand keypoint annotations. On this newly collected dataset of annotations, HInt, we demonstrate significant improvements over existing baselines. We make our code, data and models available on the project website: https://geopavlakos.github.io/hamer/.

Animal Pose Estimation and Tracking (APT) is a critical task in detecting and monitoring the keypoints of animals across a series of video frames, which is essential for understanding animal behavior. Past works relating to animals have primarily focused on either animal tracking or single-frame animal pose estimation only, neglecting the integration of both aspects. The absence of comprehensive APT datasets inhibits the progression and evaluation of animal pose estimation and tracking methods based on videos, thereby constraining their real-world applications. To fill this gap, we introduce APTv2, the pioneering large-scale benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. APTv2 comprises 2,749 video clips filtered and collected from 30 distinct animal species. Each video clip includes 15 frames, culminating in a total of 41,235 frames. Following meticulous manual annotation and stringent verification, we provide high-quality keypoint and tracking annotations for a total of 84,611 animal instances, split into easy and hard subsets based on the number of instances that exists in the frame. With APTv2 as the foundation, we establish a simple baseline method named \posetrackmethodname and provide benchmarks for representative models across three tracks: (1) single-frame animal pose estimation track to evaluate both intra- and inter-domain transfer learning performance, (2) low-data transfer and generalization track to evaluate the inter-species domain generalization performance, and (3) animal pose tracking track. Our experimental results deliver key empirical insights, demonstrating that APTv2 serves as a valuable benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. It also presents new challenges and opportunities for future research. The code and dataset are released at https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/APTv2{https://github.com/ViTAE-Transformer/APTv2}.

Animal pose estimation and tracking (APT) is a fundamental task for detecting and tracking animal keypoints from a sequence of video frames. Previous animal-related datasets focus either on animal tracking or single-frame animal pose estimation, and never on both aspects. The lack of APT datasets hinders the development and evaluation of video-based animal pose estimation and tracking methods, limiting real-world applications, e.g., understanding animal behavior in wildlife conservation. To fill this gap, we make the first step and propose APT-36K, i.e., the first large-scale benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. Specifically, APT-36K consists of 2,400 video clips collected and filtered from 30 animal species with 15 frames for each video, resulting in 36,000 frames in total. After manual annotation and careful double-check, high-quality keypoint and tracking annotations are provided for all the animal instances. Based on APT-36K, we benchmark several representative models on the following three tracks: (1) supervised animal pose estimation on a single frame under intra- and inter-domain transfer learning settings, (2) inter-species domain generalization test for unseen animals, and (3) animal pose estimation with animal tracking. Based on the experimental results, we gain some empirical insights and show that APT-36K provides a valuable animal pose estimation and tracking benchmark, offering new challenges and opportunities for future research. The code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/pandorgan/APT-36K.

Occluded Person Re-Identification (ReID) is a metric learning task that involves matching occluded individuals based on their appearance. While many studies have tackled occlusions caused by objects, multi-person occlusions remain less explored. In this work, we identify and address a critical challenge overlooked by previous occluded ReID methods: the Multi-Person Ambiguity (MPA) arising when multiple individuals are visible in the same bounding box, making it impossible to determine the intended ReID target among the candidates. Inspired by recent work on prompting in vision, we introduce Keypoint Promptable ReID (KPR), a novel formulation of the ReID problem that explicitly complements the input bounding box with a set of semantic keypoints indicating the intended target. Since promptable re-identification is an unexplored paradigm, existing ReID datasets lack the pixel-level annotations necessary for prompting. To bridge this gap and foster further research on this topic, we introduce Occluded-PoseTrack ReID, a novel ReID dataset with keypoints labels, that features strong inter-person occlusions. Furthermore, we release custom keypoint labels for four popular ReID benchmarks. Experiments on person retrieval, but also on pose tracking, demonstrate that our method systematically surpasses previous state-of-the-art approaches on various occluded scenarios. Our code, dataset and annotations are available at https://github.com/VlSomers/keypoint_promptable_reidentification.

In this paper, we studied the problem of localizing a generic set of keypoints across multiple quadruped or four-legged animal species from images. Due to the lack of large scale animal keypoint dataset with ground truth annotations, we developed a novel dataset, AwA Pose, for keypoint detection of quadruped animals from images. Our dataset contains significantly more keypoints per animal and has much more diverse animals than the existing datasets for animal keypoint detection. We benchmarked the dataset with a state-of-the-art deep learning model for different keypoint detection tasks, including both seen and unseen animal cases. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of the dataset. We believe that this dataset will help the computer vision community in the design and evaluation of improved models for the generalized quadruped animal keypoint detection problem.

Recent work leverages the expressive power of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate labeled synthetic datasets. These dataset generation methods often require new annotations of synthetic images, which forces practitioners to seek out annotators, curate a set of synthetic images, and ensure the quality of generated labels. We introduce the HandsOff framework, a technique capable of producing an unlimited number of synthetic images and corresponding labels after being trained on less than 50 pre-existing labeled images. Our framework avoids the practical drawbacks of prior work by unifying the field of GAN inversion with dataset generation. We generate datasets with rich pixel-wise labels in multiple challenging domains such as faces, cars, full-body human poses, and urban driving scenes. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in semantic segmentation, keypoint detection, and depth estimation compared to prior dataset generation approaches and transfer learning baselines. We additionally showcase its ability to address broad challenges in model development which stem from fixed, hand-annotated datasets, such as the long-tail problem in semantic segmentation. Project page: austinxu87.github.io/handsoff.

Canonical surface mapping generalizes keypoint detection by assigning each pixel of an object to a corresponding point in a 3D template. Popularised by DensePose for the analysis of humans, authors have since attempted to apply the concept to more categories, but with limited success due to the high cost of manual supervision. In this work, we introduce SHIC, a method to learn canonical maps without manual supervision which achieves better results than supervised methods for most categories. Our idea is to leverage foundation computer vision models such as DINO and Stable Diffusion that are open-ended and thus possess excellent priors over natural categories. SHIC reduces the problem of estimating image-to-template correspondences to predicting image-to-image correspondences using features from the foundation models. The reduction works by matching images of the object to non-photorealistic renders of the template, which emulates the process of collecting manual annotations for this task. These correspondences are then used to supervise high-quality canonical maps for any object of interest. We also show that image generators can further improve the realism of the template views, which provide an additional source of supervision for the model.

We introduce SAM 3D Body (3DB), a promptable model for single-image full-body 3D human mesh recovery (HMR) that demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, with strong generalization and consistent accuracy in diverse in-the-wild conditions. 3DB estimates the human pose of the body, feet, and hands. It is the first model to use a new parametric mesh representation, Momentum Human Rig (MHR), which decouples skeletal structure and surface shape. 3DB employs an encoder-decoder architecture and supports auxiliary prompts, including 2D keypoints and masks, enabling user-guided inference similar to the SAM family of models. We derive high-quality annotations from a multi-stage annotation pipeline that uses various combinations of manual keypoint annotation, differentiable optimization, multi-view geometry, and dense keypoint detection. Our data engine efficiently selects and processes data to ensure data diversity, collecting unusual poses and rare imaging conditions. We present a new evaluation dataset organized by pose and appearance categories, enabling nuanced analysis of model behavior. Our experiments demonstrate superior generalization and substantial improvements over prior methods in both qualitative user preference studies and traditional quantitative analysis. Both 3DB and MHR are open-source.

Modeling spinal motion is fundamental to understanding human biomechanics, yet remains underexplored in computer vision due to the spine's complex multi-joint kinematics and the lack of large-scale 3D annotations. We present a biomechanics-aware keypoint simulation framework that augments existing human pose datasets with anatomically consistent 3D spinal keypoints derived from musculoskeletal modeling. Using this framework, we create the first open dataset, named SIMSPINE, which provides sparse vertebra-level 3D spinal annotations for natural full-body motions in indoor multi-camera capture without external restraints. With 2.14 million frames, this enables data-driven learning of vertebral kinematics from subtle posture variations and bridges the gap between musculoskeletal simulation and computer vision. In addition, we release pretrained baselines covering fine-tuned 2D detectors, monocular 3D pose lifting models, and multi-view reconstruction pipelines, establishing a unified benchmark for biomechanically valid spine motion estimation. Specifically, our 2D spine baselines improve the state-of-the-art from 0.63 to 0.80 AUC in controlled environments, and from 0.91 to 0.93 AP for in-the-wild spine tracking. Together, the simulation framework and SIMSPINE dataset advance research in vision-based biomechanics, motion analysis, and digital human modeling by enabling reproducible, anatomically grounded 3D spine estimation under natural conditions.

We present ClothesNet: a large-scale dataset of 3D clothes objects with information-rich annotations. Our dataset consists of around 4400 models covering 11 categories annotated with clothes features, boundary lines, and keypoints. ClothesNet can be used to facilitate a variety of computer vision and robot interaction tasks. Using our dataset, we establish benchmark tasks for clothes perception, including classification, boundary line segmentation, and keypoint detection, and develop simulated clothes environments for robotic interaction tasks, including rearranging, folding, hanging, and dressing. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our ClothesNet in real-world experiments. Supplemental materials and dataset are available on our project webpage.

Group Activity Recognition aims to understand collective activities from videos. Existing solutions primarily rely on the RGB modality, which encounters challenges such as background variations, occlusions, motion blurs, and significant computational overhead. Meanwhile, current keypoint-based methods offer a lightweight and informative representation of human motions but necessitate accurate individual annotations and specialized interaction reasoning modules. To address these limitations, we design a panoramic graph that incorporates multi-person skeletons and objects to encapsulate group activity, offering an effective alternative to RGB video. This panoramic graph enables Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to unify intra-person, inter-person, and person-object interactive modeling through spatial-temporal graph convolutions. In practice, we develop a novel pipeline that extracts skeleton coordinates using pose estimation and tracking algorithms and employ Multi-person Panoramic GCN (MP-GCN) to predict group activities. Extensive experiments on Volleyball and NBA datasets demonstrate that the MP-GCN achieves state-of-the-art performance in both accuracy and efficiency. Notably, our method outperforms RGB-based approaches by using only estimated 2D keypoints as input. Code is available at https://github.com/mgiant/MP-GCN

Whole-body pose estimation is a challenging task that requires simultaneous prediction of keypoints for the body, hands, face, and feet. Whole-body pose estimation aims to predict fine-grained pose information for the human body, including the face, torso, hands, and feet, which plays an important role in the study of human-centric perception and generation and in various applications. In this work, we present RTMW (Real-Time Multi-person Whole-body pose estimation models), a series of high-performance models for 2D/3D whole-body pose estimation. We incorporate RTMPose model architecture with FPN and HEM (Hierarchical Encoding Module) to better capture pose information from different body parts with various scales. The model is trained with a rich collection of open-source human keypoint datasets with manually aligned annotations and further enhanced via a two-stage distillation strategy. RTMW demonstrates strong performance on multiple whole-body pose estimation benchmarks while maintaining high inference efficiency and deployment friendliness. We release three sizes: m/l/x, with RTMW-l achieving a 70.2 mAP on the COCO-Wholebody benchmark, making it the first open-source model to exceed 70 mAP on this benchmark. Meanwhile, we explored the performance of RTMW in the task of 3D whole-body pose estimation, conducting image-based monocular 3D whole-body pose estimation in a coordinate classification manner. We hope this work can benefit both academic research and industrial applications. The code and models have been made publicly available at: https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmpose/tree/main/projects/rtmpose

We present EgoExo-Fitness, a new full-body action understanding dataset, featuring fitness sequence videos recorded from synchronized egocentric and fixed exocentric (third-person) cameras. Compared with existing full-body action understanding datasets, EgoExo-Fitness not only contains videos from first-person perspectives, but also provides rich annotations. Specifically, two-level temporal boundaries are provided to localize single action videos along with sub-steps of each action. More importantly, EgoExo-Fitness introduces innovative annotations for interpretable action judgement--including technical keypoint verification, natural language comments on action execution, and action quality scores. Combining all of these, EgoExo-Fitness provides new resources to study egocentric and exocentric full-body action understanding across dimensions of "what", "when", and "how well". To facilitate research on egocentric and exocentric full-body action understanding, we construct benchmarks on a suite of tasks (i.e., action classification, action localization, cross-view sequence verification, cross-view skill determination, and a newly proposed task of guidance-based execution verification), together with detailed analysis. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/iSEE-Laboratory/EgoExo-Fitness/tree/main.

Turning garments right-side out is a challenging manipulation task: it is highly dynamic, entails rapid contact changes, and is subject to severe visual occlusion. We introduce Right-Side-Out, a zero-shot sim-to-real framework that effectively solves this challenge by exploiting task structures. We decompose the task into Drag/Fling to create and stabilize an access opening, followed by Insert&Pull to invert the garment. Each step uses a depth-inferred, keypoint-parameterized bimanual primitive that sharply reduces the action space while preserving robustness. Efficient data generation is enabled by our custom-built, high-fidelity, GPU-parallel Material Point Method (MPM) simulator that models thin-shell deformation and provides robust and efficient contact handling for batched rollouts. Built on the simulator, our fully automated pipeline scales data generation by randomizing garment geometry, material parameters, and viewpoints, producing depth, masks, and per-primitive keypoint labels without any human annotations. With a single depth camera, policies trained entirely in simulation deploy zero-shot on real hardware, achieving up to 81.3% success rate. By employing task decomposition and high fidelity simulation, our framework enables tackling highly dynamic, severely occluded tasks without laborious human demonstrations.

We present the system description for our submission towards the Key Point Analysis Shared Task at ArgMining 2021. Track 1 of the shared task requires participants to develop methods to predict the match score between each pair of arguments and keypoints, provided they belong to the same topic under the same stance. We leveraged existing state of the art pre-trained language models along with incorporating additional data and features extracted from the inputs (topics, key points, and arguments) to improve performance. We were able to achieve mAP strict and mAP relaxed score of 0.872 and 0.966 respectively in the evaluation phase, securing 5th place on the leaderboard. In the post evaluation phase, we achieved a mAP strict and mAP relaxed score of 0.921 and 0.982 respectively. All the codes to generate reproducible results on our models are available on Github.

Keyphrase generation is the task of predicting a set of lexical units that conveys the main content of a source text. Existing datasets for keyphrase generation are only readily available for the scholarly domain and include non-expert annotations. In this paper we present KPTimes, a large-scale dataset of news texts paired with editor-curated keyphrases. Exploring the dataset, we show how editors tag documents, and how their annotations differ from those found in existing datasets. We also train and evaluate state-of-the-art neural keyphrase generation models on KPTimes to gain insights on how well they perform on the news domain. The dataset is available online at https://github.com/ygorg/KPTimes .

With the immense growth of dataset sizes and computing resources in recent years, so-called foundation models have become popular in NLP and vision tasks. In this work, we propose to explore foundation models for the task of keypoint detection on 3D shapes. A unique characteristic of keypoint detection is that it requires semantic and geometric awareness while demanding high localization accuracy. To address this problem, we propose, first, to back-project features from large pre-trained 2D vision models onto 3D shapes and employ them for this task. We show that we obtain robust 3D features that contain rich semantic information and analyze multiple candidate features stemming from different 2D foundation models. Second, we employ a keypoint candidate optimization module which aims to match the average observed distribution of keypoints on the shape and is guided by the back-projected features. The resulting approach achieves a new state of the art for few-shot keypoint detection on the KeyPointNet dataset, almost doubling the performance of the previous best methods.

The remarkable capabilities of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for tackling image segmentation tasks in an intuitive and interactive manner has sparked interest in the design of effective visual prompts. Such interest has led to the creation of automated point prompt selection strategies, typically motivated from a feature extraction perspective. However, there is still very little understanding of how appropriate these automated visual prompting strategies are, particularly when compared to humans, across diverse image domains. Additionally, the performance benefits of including such automated visual prompting strategies within the finetuning process of SAM also remains unexplored, as does the effect of interpretable factors like distance between the prompt points on segmentation performance. To bridge these gaps, we leverage a recently released visual prompting dataset, PointPrompt, and introduce a number of benchmarking tasks that provide an array of opportunities to improve the understanding of the way human prompts differ from automated ones and what underlying factors make for effective visual prompts. We demonstrate that the resulting segmentation scores obtained by humans are approximately 29% higher than those given by automated strategies and identify potential features that are indicative of prompting performance with R^2 scores over 0.5. Additionally, we demonstrate that performance when using automated methods can be improved by up to 68% via a finetuning approach. Overall, our experiments not only showcase the existing gap between human prompts and automated methods, but also highlight potential avenues through which this gap can be leveraged to improve effective visual prompt design. Further details along with the dataset links and codes are available at https://github.com/olivesgatech/PointPrompt

The capacity of existing human keypoint localization models is limited by keypoint priors provided by the training data. To alleviate this restriction and pursue more general model, this work studies keypoint localization from a different perspective by reasoning locations based on keypiont clues in text descriptions. We propose LocLLM, the first Large-Language Model (LLM) based keypoint localization model that takes images and text instructions as inputs and outputs the desired keypoint coordinates. LocLLM leverages the strong reasoning capability of LLM and clues of keypoint type, location, and relationship in textual descriptions for keypoint localization. To effectively tune LocLLM, we construct localization-based instruction conversations to connect keypoint description with corresponding coordinates in input image, and fine-tune the whole model in a parameter-efficient training pipeline. LocLLM shows remarkable performance on standard 2D/3D keypoint localization benchmarks. Moreover, incorporating language clues into the localization makes LocLLM show superior flexibility and generalizable capability in cross dataset keypoint localization, and even detecting novel type of keypoints unseen during training.

This work proposes a unified framework called UniPose to detect keypoints of any articulated (e.g., human and animal), rigid, and soft objects via visual or textual prompts for fine-grained vision understanding and manipulation. Keypoint is a structure-aware, pixel-level, and compact representation of any object, especially articulated objects. Existing fine-grained promptable tasks mainly focus on object instance detection and segmentation but often fail to identify fine-grained granularity and structured information of image and instance, such as eyes, leg, paw, etc. Meanwhile, prompt-based keypoint detection is still under-explored. To bridge the gap, we make the first attempt to develop an end-to-end prompt-based keypoint detection framework called UniPose to detect keypoints of any objects. As keypoint detection tasks are unified in this framework, we can leverage 13 keypoint detection datasets with 338 keypoints across 1,237 categories over 400K instances to train a generic keypoint detection model. UniPose can effectively align text-to-keypoint and image-to-keypoint due to the mutual enhancement of textual and visual prompts based on the cross-modality contrastive learning optimization objectives. Our experimental results show that UniPose has strong fine-grained localization and generalization abilities across image styles, categories, and poses. Based on UniPose as a generalist keypoint detector, we hope it could serve fine-grained visual perception, understanding, and generation.

Conventional 2D pose estimation models are constrained by their design to specific object categories. This limits their applicability to predefined objects. To overcome these limitations, category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) emerged as a solution. CAPE aims to facilitate keypoint localization for diverse object categories using a unified model, which can generalize from minimal annotated support images. Recent CAPE works have produced object poses based on arbitrary keypoint definitions annotated on a user-provided support image. Our work departs from conventional CAPE methods, which require a support image, by adopting a text-based approach instead of the support image. Specifically, we use a pose-graph, where nodes represent keypoints that are described with text. This representation takes advantage of the abstraction of text descriptions and the structure imposed by the graph. Our approach effectively breaks symmetry, preserves structure, and improves occlusion handling. We validate our novel approach using the MP-100 benchmark, a comprehensive dataset spanning over 100 categories and 18,000 images. Under a 1-shot setting, our solution achieves a notable performance boost of 1.07\%, establishing a new state-of-the-art for CAPE. Additionally, we enrich the dataset by providing text description annotations, further enhancing its utility for future research.

Identifying keyphrases (KPs) from text documents is a fundamental task in natural language processing and information retrieval. Vast majority of the benchmark datasets for this task are from the scientific domain containing only the document title and abstract information. This limits keyphrase extraction (KPE) and keyphrase generation (KPG) algorithms to identify keyphrases from human-written summaries that are often very short (approx 8 sentences). This presents three challenges for real-world applications: human-written summaries are unavailable for most documents, the documents are almost always long, and a high percentage of KPs are directly found beyond the limited context of title and abstract. Therefore, we release two extensive corpora mapping KPs of ~1.3M and ~100K scientific articles with their fully extracted text and additional metadata including publication venue, year, author, field of study, and citations for facilitating research on this real-world problem.

Fusing sentences containing disparate content is a remarkable human ability that helps create informative and succinct summaries. Such a simple task for humans has remained challenging for modern abstractive summarizers, substantially restricting their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present an investigation into fusing sentences drawn from a document by introducing the notion of points of correspondence, which are cohesive devices that tie any two sentences together into a coherent text. The types of points of correspondence are delineated by text cohesion theory, covering pronominal and nominal referencing, repetition and beyond. We create a dataset containing the documents, source and fusion sentences, and human annotations of points of correspondence between sentences. Our dataset bridges the gap between coreference resolution and summarization. It is publicly shared to serve as a basis for future work to measure the success of sentence fusion systems. (https://github.com/ucfnlp/points-of-correspondence)

This work proposes an end-to-end neural interactive keypoint detection framework named Click-Pose, which can significantly reduce more than 10 times labeling costs of 2D keypoint annotation compared with manual-only annotation. Click-Pose explores how user feedback can cooperate with a neural keypoint detector to correct the predicted keypoints in an interactive way for a faster and more effective annotation process. Specifically, we design the pose error modeling strategy that inputs the ground truth pose combined with four typical pose errors into the decoder and trains the model to reconstruct the correct poses, which enhances the self-correction ability of the model. Then, we attach an interactive human-feedback loop that allows receiving users' clicks to correct one or several predicted keypoints and iteratively utilizes the decoder to update all other keypoints with a minimum number of clicks (NoC) for efficient annotation. We validate Click-Pose in in-domain, out-of-domain scenes, and a new task of keypoint adaptation. For annotation, Click-Pose only needs 1.97 and 6.45 NoC@95 (at precision 95%) on COCO and Human-Art, reducing 31.4% and 36.3% efforts than the SOTA model (ViTPose) with manual correction, respectively. Besides, without user clicks, Click-Pose surpasses the previous end-to-end model by 1.4 AP on COCO and 3.0 AP on Human-Art. The code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-Research/Click-Pose.

Keypoint detection, integral to modern machine perception, faces challenges in few-shot learning, particularly when source data from the same distribution as the query is unavailable. This gap is addressed by leveraging sketches, a popular form of human expression, providing a source-free alternative. However, challenges arise in mastering cross-modal embeddings and handling user-specific sketch styles. Our proposed framework overcomes these hurdles with a prototypical setup, combined with a grid-based locator and prototypical domain adaptation. We also demonstrate success in few-shot convergence across novel keypoints and classes through extensive experiments.

In recent years, the challenge of extracting information from business documents has emerged as a critical task, finding applications across numerous domains. This effort has attracted substantial interest from both industry and academy, highlighting its significance in the current technological landscape. Most datasets in this area are primarily focused on Key Information Extraction (KIE), where the extraction process revolves around extracting information using a specific, predefined set of keys. Unlike most existing datasets and benchmarks, our focus is on discovering key-value pairs (KVPs) without relying on predefined keys, navigating through an array of diverse templates and complex layouts. This task presents unique challenges, primarily due to the absence of comprehensive datasets and benchmarks tailored for non-predetermined KVP extraction. To address this gap, we introduce KVP10k , a new dataset and benchmark specifically designed for KVP extraction. The dataset contains 10707 richly annotated images. In our benchmark, we also introduce a new challenging task that combines elements of KIE as well as KVP in a single task. KVP10k sets itself apart with its extensive diversity in data and richly detailed annotations, paving the way for advancements in the field of information extraction from complex business documents.

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

We introduce RIPE, an innovative reinforcement learning-based framework for weakly-supervised training of a keypoint extractor that excels in both detection and description tasks. In contrast to conventional training regimes that depend heavily on artificial transformations, pre-generated models, or 3D data, RIPE requires only a binary label indicating whether paired images represent the same scene. This minimal supervision significantly expands the pool of training data, enabling the creation of a highly generalized and robust keypoint extractor. RIPE utilizes the encoder's intermediate layers for the description of the keypoints with a hyper-column approach to integrate information from different scales. Additionally, we propose an auxiliary loss to enhance the discriminative capability of the learned descriptors. Comprehensive evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that RIPE simplifies data preparation while achieving competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, marking a significant advancement in robust keypoint extraction and description. To support further research, we have made our code publicly available at https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/RIPE.

Interest point detection and local feature description are fundamental steps in many computer vision applications. Classical methods for these tasks are based on a detect-then-describe paradigm where separate handcrafted methods are used to first identify repeatable keypoints and then represent them with a local descriptor. Neural networks trained with metric learning losses have recently caught up with these techniques, focusing on learning repeatable saliency maps for keypoint detection and learning descriptors at the detected keypoint locations. In this work, we argue that salient regions are not necessarily discriminative, and therefore can harm the performance of the description. Furthermore, we claim that descriptors should be learned only in regions for which matching can be performed with high confidence. We thus propose to jointly learn keypoint detection and description together with a predictor of the local descriptor discriminativeness. This allows us to avoid ambiguous areas and leads to reliable keypoint detections and descriptions. Our detection-and-description approach, trained with self-supervision, can simultaneously output sparse, repeatable and reliable keypoints that outperforms state-of-the-art detectors and descriptors on the HPatches dataset. It also establishes a record on the recently released Aachen Day-Night localization dataset.

Presenting high-level arguments is a crucial task for fostering participation in online societal discussions. Current argument summarization approaches miss an important facet of this task -- capturing diversity -- which is important for accommodating multiple perspectives. We introduce three aspects of diversity: those of opinions, annotators, and sources. We evaluate approaches to a popular argument summarization task called Key Point Analysis, which shows how these approaches struggle to (1) represent arguments shared by few people, (2) deal with data from various sources, and (3) align with subjectivity in human-provided annotations. We find that both general-purpose LLMs and dedicated KPA models exhibit this behavior, but have complementary strengths. Further, we observe that diversification of training data may ameliorate generalization. Addressing diversity in argument summarization requires a mix of strategies to deal with subjectivity.

Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.

Keypoint detection & descriptors are foundational tech-nologies for computer vision tasks like image matching, 3D reconstruction and visual odometry. Hand-engineered methods like Harris corners, SIFT, and HOG descriptors have been used for decades; more recently, there has been a trend to introduce learning in an attempt to improve keypoint detectors. On inspection however, the results are difficult to interpret; recent learning-based methods employ a vast diversity of experimental setups and design choices: empirical results are often reported using different backbones, protocols, datasets, types of supervisions or tasks. Since these differences are often coupled together, it raises a natural question on what makes a good learned keypoint detector. In this work, we revisit the design of existing keypoint detectors by deconstructing their methodologies and identifying the key components. We re-design each component from first-principle and propose Simple Learned Keypoints (SiLK) that is fully-differentiable, lightweight, and flexible. Despite its simplicity, SiLK advances new state-of-the-art on Detection Repeatability and Homography Estimation tasks on HPatches and 3D Point-Cloud Registration task on ScanNet, and achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art on camera pose estimation in 2022 Image Matching Challenge and ScanNet.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in constructing passage retrieval datasets. However, existing methods still face limitations in expressing cross-doc query needs and controlling annotation quality. To address these issues, this paper proposes a bidirectional generation pipeline, which aims to generate 3-level hierarchical queries for both intra-doc and cross-doc scenarios and mine additional relevance labels on top of direct mapping annotation. The pipeline introduces two query generation methods: bottom-up from single-doc text and top-down from multi-doc titles. The bottom-up method uses LLMs to disassemble and generate structured queries at both sentence-level and passage-level simultaneously from intra-doc passages. The top-down approach incorporates three key financial elements--industry, topic, and time--to divide report titles into clusters and prompts LLMs to generate topic-level queries from each cluster. For relevance annotation, our pipeline not only relies on direct mapping annotation from the generation relationship but also implements an indirect positives mining method to enrich the relevant query-passage pairs. Using this pipeline, we constructed a Financial Passage Retrieval Generated dataset (FinCPRG) from almost 1.3k Chinese financial research reports, which includes hierarchical queries and rich relevance labels. Through evaluations of mined relevance labels, benchmarking and training experiments, we assessed the quality of FinCPRG and validated its effectiveness as a passage retrieval dataset for both training and benchmarking.

Retrieval models are often evaluated on partially-annotated datasets. Each query is mapped to a few relevant texts and the remaining corpus is assumed to be irrelevant. As a result, models that successfully retrieve false negatives are punished in evaluation. Unfortunately, completely annotating all texts for every query is not resource efficient. In this work, we show that using partially-annotated datasets in evaluation can paint a distorted picture. We curate D-MERIT, a passage retrieval evaluation set from Wikipedia, aspiring to contain all relevant passages for each query. Queries describe a group (e.g., ``journals about linguistics'') and relevant passages are evidence that entities belong to the group (e.g., a passage indicating that Language is a journal about linguistics). We show that evaluating on a dataset containing annotations for only a subset of the relevant passages might result in misleading ranking of the retrieval systems and that as more relevant texts are included in the evaluation set, the rankings converge. We propose our dataset as a resource for evaluation and our study as a recommendation for balance between resource-efficiency and reliable evaluation when annotating evaluation sets for text retrieval.

We present a corpus of 5,000 richly annotated abstracts of medical articles describing clinical randomized controlled trials. Annotations include demarcations of text spans that describe the Patient population enrolled, the Interventions studied and to what they were Compared, and the Outcomes measured (the `PICO' elements). These spans are further annotated at a more granular level, e.g., individual interventions within them are marked and mapped onto a structured medical vocabulary. We acquired annotations from a diverse set of workers with varying levels of expertise and cost. We describe our data collection process and the corpus itself in detail. We then outline a set of challenging NLP tasks that would aid searching of the medical literature and the practice of evidence-based medicine.

We propose a Transformer-based approach for information extraction from digitized handwritten documents. Our approach combines, in a single model, the different steps that were so far performed by separate models: feature extraction, handwriting recognition and named entity recognition. We compare this integrated approach with traditional two-stage methods that perform handwriting recognition before named entity recognition, and present results at different levels: line, paragraph, and page. Our experiments show that attention-based models are especially interesting when applied on full pages, as they do not require any prior segmentation step. Finally, we show that they are able to learn from key-value annotations: a list of important words with their corresponding named entities. We compare our models to state-of-the-art methods on three public databases (IAM, ESPOSALLES, and POPP) and outperform previous performances on all three datasets.

Information retrieval in real-time search presents unique challenges distinct from those encountered in classical web search. These challenges are particularly pronounced due to the rapid change of user search intent, which is influenced by the occurrence and evolution of breaking news events, such as earthquakes, elections, and wars. Previous dense retrieval methods, which primarily focused on static semantic representation, lack the capacity to capture immediate search intent, leading to inferior performance in retrieving the most recent event-related documents in time-sensitive scenarios. To address this issue, this paper expands the query with event information that represents real-time search intent. The Event information is then integrated with the query through a cross-attention mechanism, resulting in a time-context query representation. We further enhance the model's capacity for event representation through multi-task training. Since publicly available datasets such as MS-MARCO do not contain any event information on the query side and have few time-sensitive queries, we design an automatic data collection and annotation pipeline to address this issue, which includes ModelZoo-based Coarse Annotation and LLM-driven Fine Annotation processes. In addition, we share the training tricks such as two-stage training and hard negative sampling. Finally, we conduct a set of offline experiments on a million-scale production dataset to evaluate our approach and deploy an A/B testing in a real online system to verify the performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Analyses based on the body posture are crucial for top-class athletes in many sports disciplines. If at all, coaches label only the most important keypoints, since manual annotations are very costly. This paper proposes a method to detect arbitrary keypoints on the limbs and skis of professional ski jumpers that requires a few, only partly correct segmentation masks during training. Our model is based on the Vision Transformer architecture with a special design for the input tokens to query for the desired keypoints. Since we use segmentation masks only to generate ground truth labels for the freely selectable keypoints, partly correct segmentation masks are sufficient for our training procedure. Hence, there is no need for costly hand-annotated segmentation masks. We analyze different training techniques for freely selected and standard keypoints, including pseudo labels, and show in our experiments that only a few partly correct segmentation masks are sufficient for learning to detect arbitrary keypoints on limbs and skis.

The exponential growth of scientific literature has made it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep up with the literature. In an attempt to alleviate this problem, we propose CASPER, a sparse retrieval model for scientific search that utilizes tokens and keyphrases as representation units (i.e. dimensions in the sparse embedding space), enabling it to represent queries and documents with research concepts and match them at both granular and conceptual levels. To overcome the lack of suitable training data, we propose mining training data by leveraging scholarly references (i.e. signals that capture how research concepts of papers are expressed in different settings), including titles, citation contexts, author-assigned keyphrases, and co-citations. CASPER outperforms strong dense and sparse retrieval baselines on eight scientific retrieval benchmarks. Moreover, we demonstrate that through simple post-processing, CASPER can be effectively used for the keyphrase generation tasks, achieving competitive performance with the established CopyRNN while producing more diverse keyphrases and being nearly four times faster.

Pointing serves as a fundamental and intuitive mechanism for grounding language within visual contexts, with applications spanning robotics, assistive technologies, and interactive AI systems. While recent multimodal models have started to support pointing capabilities, existing benchmarks typically focus only on referential object localization tasks. We introduce PointArena, a comprehensive platform for evaluating multimodal pointing across diverse reasoning scenarios. PointArena comprises three components: (1) Point-Bench, a curated dataset containing approximately 1,000 pointing tasks across five reasoning categories; (2) Point-Battle, an interactive, web-based arena facilitating blind, pairwise model comparisons, which has already gathered over 4,500 anonymized votes; and (3) Point-Act, a real-world robotic manipulation system allowing users to directly evaluate multimodal model pointing capabilities in practical settings. We conducted extensive evaluations of both state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary multimodal models. Results indicate that Molmo-72B consistently outperforms other models, though proprietary models increasingly demonstrate comparable performance. Additionally, we find that supervised training specifically targeting pointing tasks significantly enhances model performance. Across our multi-stage evaluation pipeline, we also observe strong correlations, underscoring the critical role of precise pointing capabilities in enabling multimodal models to effectively bridge abstract reasoning with concrete, real-world actions. Project page: https://pointarena.github.io/

Today's image generation systems are capable of producing realistic and high-quality images. However, user prompts often contain ambiguities, making it difficult for these systems to interpret users' actual intentions. Consequently, many users must modify their prompts several times to ensure the generated images meet their expectations. While some methods focus on enhancing prompts to make the generated images fit user needs, the model is still hard to understand users' real needs, especially for non-expert users. In this research, we aim to enhance the visual parameter-tuning process, making the model user-friendly for individuals without specialized knowledge and better understand user needs. We propose a human-machine co-adaption strategy using mutual information between the user's prompts and the pictures under modification as the optimizing target to make the system better adapt to user needs. We find that an improved model can reduce the necessity for multiple rounds of adjustments. We also collect multi-round dialogue datasets with prompts and images pairs and user intent. Various experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in our proposed dataset. Our annotation tools and several examples of our dataset are available at https://zenodo.org/records/14876029 for easier review. We will make open source our full dataset and code.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) for visually rich document understanding (VRDU) has kindled a need for prompt-response, document-based datasets. As annotating new datasets from scratch is labor-intensive, the existing literature has generated prompt-response datasets from available resources using simple templates. For the case of key information extraction (KIE), one of the most common VRDU tasks, past work has typically employed the template "What is the value for the {key}?". However, given the variety of questions encountered in the wild, simple and uniform templates are insufficient for creating robust models in research and industrial contexts. In this work, we present K2Q, a diverse collection of five datasets converted from KIE to a prompt-response format using a plethora of bespoke templates. The questions in K2Q can span multiple entities and be extractive or boolean. We empirically compare the performance of seven baseline generative models on K2Q with zero-shot prompting. We further compare three of these models when training on K2Q versus training on simpler templates to motivate the need of our work. We find that creating diverse and intricate KIE questions enhances the performance and robustness of VRDU models. We hope this work encourages future studies on data quality for generative model training.

Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks rely on labeled data to train machine learning models to achieve high performance. However, data annotation can be a time-consuming and expensive process, especially when the task involves a large amount of data or requires specialized domains. Recently, GPT-3.5 series models have demonstrated remarkable few-shot and zero-shot ability across various NLP tasks. In this paper, we first claim that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, can serve as an excellent crowdsourced annotator by providing them with sufficient guidance and demonstrated examples. To make LLMs to be better annotators, we propose a two-step approach, 'explain-then-annotate'. To be more precise, we begin by creating prompts for every demonstrated example, which we subsequently utilize to prompt a LLM to provide an explanation for why the specific ground truth answer/label was chosen for that particular example. Following this, we construct the few-shot chain-of-thought prompt with the self-generated explanation and employ it to annotate the unlabeled data. We conduct experiments on three tasks, including user input and keyword relevance assessment, BoolQ and WiC. The annotation results from GPT-3.5 surpasses those from crowdsourced annotation for user input and keyword relevance assessment. Additionally, for the other two tasks, GPT-3.5 achieves results that are comparable to those obtained through crowdsourced annotation.

Manually annotating object bounding boxes is central to building computer vision datasets, and it is very time consuming (annotating ILSVRC [53] took 35s for one high-quality box [62]). It involves clicking on imaginary corners of a tight box around the object. This is difficult as these corners are often outside the actual object and several adjustments are required to obtain a tight box. We propose extreme clicking instead: we ask the annotator to click on four physical points on the object: the top, bottom, left- and right-most points. This task is more natural and these points are easy to find. We crowd-source extreme point annotations for PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 and show that (1) annotation time is only 7s per box, 5x faster than the traditional way of drawing boxes [62]; (2) the quality of the boxes is as good as the original ground-truth drawn the traditional way; (3) detectors trained on our annotations are as accurate as those trained on the original ground-truth. Moreover, our extreme clicking strategy not only yields box coordinates, but also four accurate boundary points. We show (4) how to incorporate them into GrabCut to obtain more accurate segmentations than those delivered when initializing it from bounding boxes; (5) semantic segmentations models trained on these segmentations outperform those trained on segmentations derived from bounding boxes.

Prompt highlighting steers a large language model to prioritize user-specified text spans during generation. A key challenge is extracting steering directions that capture the difference between relevant and irrelevant contexts, rather than shared structural patterns common to both. We propose PRISM-Δ (Projection-based Relevance-Informed Steering Method), which decomposes the difference between positive and negative cross-covariance matrices to maximize discriminative energy while eliminating shared directions. Each attention head receives a continuous softplus importance weight, letting weak-but-useful heads contribute at reduced strength. The framework extends naturally to Value representations, capturing content-channel signal that Key-only methods leave unused. Across four benchmarks and five models, PRISM-Δ matches or exceeds the best existing method on 19 of 20 configurations, with relative gains up to +10.6%, while halving the fluency cost of steering. PRISM-Δ also scales to long-context retrieval, outperforming the best existing method by up to +4.8% relative gain. PRISM-Δ is compatible with FlashAttention and adds negligible memory overhead.

3D scene understanding is a long-standing challenge in computer vision and a key component in enabling mixed reality, wearable computing, and embodied AI. Providing a solution to these applications requires a multifaceted approach that covers scene-centric, object-centric, as well as interaction-centric capabilities. While there exist numerous datasets approaching the former two problems, the task of understanding interactable and articulated objects is underrepresented and only partly covered by current works. In this work, we address this shortcoming and introduce (1) an expertly curated dataset in the Universal Scene Description (USD) format, featuring high-quality manual annotations, for instance, segmentation and articulation on 280 indoor scenes; (2) a learning-based model together with a novel baseline capable of predicting part segmentation along with a full specification of motion attributes, including motion type, articulated and interactable parts, and motion parameters; (3) a benchmark serving to compare upcoming methods for the task at hand. Overall, our dataset provides 8 types of annotations - object and part segmentations, motion types, movable and interactable parts, motion parameters, connectivity, and object mass annotations. With its broad and high-quality annotations, the data provides the basis for holistic 3D scene understanding models. All data is provided in the USD format, allowing interoperability and easy integration with downstream tasks. We provide open access to our dataset, benchmark, and method's source code.

We address the problem of Embodied Reference Understanding, which involves predicting the object that a person in the scene is referring to through both pointing gesture and language. Accurately identifying the referent requires multimodal understanding: integrating textual instructions, visual pointing, and scene context. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively leverage visual clues for disambiguation. We also observe that, while the referent is often aligned with the head-to-fingertip line, it occasionally aligns more closely with the wrist-to-fingertip line. Therefore, relying on a single line assumption can be overly simplistic and may lead to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a dual-model framework, where one model learns from the head-to-fingertip direction and the other from the wrist-to-fingertip direction. We further introduce a Gaussian ray heatmap representation of these lines and use them as input to provide a strong supervisory signal that encourages the model to better attend to pointing cues. To combine the strengths of both models, we present the CLIP-Aware Pointing Ensemble module, which performs a hybrid ensemble based on CLIP features. Additionally, we propose an object center prediction head as an auxiliary task to further enhance referent localization. We validate our approach through extensive experiments and analysis on the benchmark YouRefIt dataset, achieving an improvement of approximately 4 mAP at the 0.25 IoU threshold.

The limited generalization of coreference resolution (CR) models has been a major bottleneck in the task's broad application. Prior work has identified annotation differences, especially for mention detection, as one of the main reasons for the generalization gap and proposed using additional annotated target domain data. Rather than relying on this additional annotation, we propose an alternative referential task, Major Entity Identification (MEI), where we: (a) assume the target entities to be specified in the input, and (b) limit the task to only the frequent entities. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that MEI models generalize well across domains on multiple datasets with supervised models and LLM-based few-shot prompting. Additionally, MEI fits the classification framework, which enables the use of robust and intuitive classification-based metrics. Finally, MEI is also of practical use as it allows a user to search for all mentions of a particular entity or a group of entities of interest.

In this work, we focus on the problem of retrieving relevant arguments for a query claim covering diverse aspects. State-of-the-art methods rely on explicit mappings between claims and premises, and thus are unable to utilize large available collections of premises without laborious and costly manual annotation. Their diversity approach relies on removing duplicates via clustering which does not directly ensure that the selected premises cover all aspects. This work introduces a new multi-step approach for the argument retrieval problem. Rather than relying on ground-truth assignments, our approach employs a machine learning model to capture semantic relationships between arguments. Beyond that, it aims to cover diverse facets of the query, instead of trying to identify duplicates explicitly. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach leads to a significant improvement in the argument retrieval task even though it requires less data.

Mathematical symbols and descriptions appear in various forms across document section boundaries without explicit markup. In this paper, we present a new large-scale dataset that emphasizes extracting symbols and descriptions in scientific documents. Symlink annotates scientific papers of 5 different domains (i.e., computer science, biology, physics, mathematics, and economics). Our experiments on Symlink demonstrate the challenges of the symbol-description linking task for existing models and call for further research effort in this area. We will publicly release Symlink to facilitate future research.

POI tagging aims to annotate a point of interest (POI) with some informative tags, which facilitates many services related to POIs, including search, recommendation, and so on. Most of the existing solutions neglect the significance of POI images and seldom fuse the textual and visual features of POIs, resulting in suboptimal tagging performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Model for POI Tagging, namely M3PT, which achieves enhanced POI tagging through fusing the target POI's textual and visual features, and the precise matching between the multi-modal representations. Specifically, we first devise a domain-adaptive image encoder (DIE) to obtain the image embeddings aligned to their gold tags' semantics. Then, in M3PT's text-image fusion module (TIF), the textual and visual representations are fully fused into the POIs' content embeddings for the subsequent matching. In addition, we adopt a contrastive learning strategy to further bridge the gap between the representations of different modalities. To evaluate the tagging models' performance, we have constructed two high-quality POI tagging datasets from the real-world business scenario of Ali Fliggy. Upon the datasets, we conducted the extensive experiments to demonstrate our model's advantage over the baselines of uni-modality and multi-modality, and verify the effectiveness of important components in M3PT, including DIE, TIF and the contrastive learning strategy.

Data annotation is the labeling or tagging of raw data with relevant information, essential for improving the efficacy of machine learning models. The process, however, is labor-intensive and expensive. The emergence of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by GPT-4, presents an unprecedented opportunity to revolutionize and automate the intricate process of data annotation. While existing surveys have extensively covered LLM architecture, training, and general applications, this paper uniquely focuses on their specific utility for data annotation. This survey contributes to three core aspects: LLM-Based Data Annotation, Assessing LLM-generated Annotations, and Learning with LLM-generated annotations. Furthermore, the paper includes an in-depth taxonomy of methodologies employing LLMs for data annotation, a comprehensive review of learning strategies for models incorporating LLM-generated annotations, and a detailed discussion on primary challenges and limitations associated with using LLMs for data annotation. As a key guide, this survey aims to direct researchers and practitioners in exploring the potential of the latest LLMs for data annotation, fostering future advancements in this critical domain. We provide a comprehensive papers list at https://github.com/Zhen-Tan-dmml/LLM4Annotation.git.

Keyphrases are crucial for searching and systematizing scholarly documents. Most current methods for keyphrase extraction are aimed at the extraction of the most significant words in the text. But in practice, the list of keyphrases often includes words that do not appear in the text explicitly. In this case, the list of keyphrases represents an abstractive summary of the source text. In this paper, we experiment with popular transformer-based models for abstractive text summarization using four benchmark datasets for keyphrase extraction. We compare the results obtained with the results of common unsupervised and supervised methods for keyphrase extraction. Our evaluation shows that summarization models are quite effective in generating keyphrases in the terms of the full-match F1-score and BERTScore. However, they produce a lot of words that are absent in the author's list of keyphrases, which makes summarization models ineffective in terms of ROUGE-1. We also investigate several ordering strategies to concatenate target keyphrases. The results showed that the choice of strategy affects the performance of keyphrase generation.

We provide a literature review about Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) systems. We consider a citation-based approach. We start with some popular and well-known papers that we have in hand about each topic we want to cover and we have tracked the "backward citations" (papers that are cited by the set of papers we knew beforehand) and the "forward citations" (newer papers that cite the set of papers we knew beforehand). In order to organize the different methods, we present the diverse approaches to ATS guided by the mechanisms they use to generate a summary. Besides presenting the methods, we also present an extensive review of the datasets available for summarization tasks and the methods used to evaluate the quality of the summaries. Finally, we present an empirical exploration of these methods using the CNN Corpus dataset that provides golden summaries for extractive and abstractive methods.

Diderot's Encyclop\'edie is a reference work from XVIIIth century in Europe that aimed at collecting the knowledge of its era. Wikipedia has the same ambition with a much greater scope. However, the lack of digital connection between the two encyclopedias may hinder their comparison and the study of how knowledge has evolved. A key element of Wikipedia is Wikidata that backs the articles with a graph of structured data. In this paper, we describe the annotation of more than 10,300 of the Encyclop\'edie entries with Wikidata identifiers enabling us to connect these entries to the graph. We considered geographic and human entities. The Encyclop\'edie does not contain biographic entries as they mostly appear as subentries of locations. We extracted all the geographic entries and we completely annotated all the entries containing a description of human entities. This represents more than 2,600 links referring to locations or human entities. In addition, we annotated more than 9,500 entries having a geographic content only. We describe the annotation process as well as application examples. This resource is available at https://github.com/pnugues/encyclopedie_1751

Significant progress has been achieved in Computer Vision by leveraging large-scale image datasets. However, large-scale datasets for complex Computer Vision tasks beyond classification are still limited. This paper proposed a large-scale dataset named AIC (AI Challenger) with three sub-datasets, human keypoint detection (HKD), large-scale attribute dataset (LAD) and image Chinese captioning (ICC). In this dataset, we annotate class labels (LAD), keypoint coordinate (HKD), bounding box (HKD and LAD), attribute (LAD) and caption (ICC). These rich annotations bridge the semantic gap between low-level images and high-level concepts. The proposed dataset is an effective benchmark to evaluate and improve different computational methods. In addition, for related tasks, others can also use our dataset as a new resource to pre-train their models.

Query suggestion, a technique widely adopted in information retrieval, enhances system interactivity and the browsing experience of document collections. In cross-modal retrieval, many works have focused on retrieving relevant items from natural language queries, while few have explored query suggestion solutions. In this work, we address query suggestion in cross-modal retrieval, introducing a novel task that focuses on suggesting minimal textual modifications needed to explore visually consistent subsets of the collection, following the premise of ''Maybe you are looking for''. To facilitate the evaluation and development of methods, we present a tailored benchmark named CroQS. This dataset comprises initial queries, grouped result sets, and human-defined suggested queries for each group. We establish dedicated metrics to rigorously evaluate the performance of various methods on this task, measuring representativeness, cluster specificity, and similarity of the suggested queries to the original ones. Baseline methods from related fields, such as image captioning and content summarization, are adapted for this task to provide reference performance scores. Although relatively far from human performance, our experiments reveal that both LLM-based and captioning-based methods achieve competitive results on CroQS, improving the recall on cluster specificity by more than 115% and representativeness mAP by more than 52% with respect to the initial query. The dataset, the implementation of the baseline methods and the notebooks containing our experiments are available here: https://paciosoft.com/CroQS-benchmark/

We present POTATO, the Portable text annotation tool, a free, fully open-sourced annotation system that 1) supports labeling many types of text and multimodal data; 2) offers easy-to-configure features to maximize the productivity of both deployers and annotators (convenient templates for common ML/NLP tasks, active learning, keypress shortcuts, keyword highlights, tooltips); and 3) supports a high degree of customization (editable UI, inserting pre-screening questions, attention and qualification tests). Experiments over two annotation tasks suggest that POTATO improves labeling speed through its specially-designed productivity features, especially for long documents and complex tasks. POTATO is available at https://github.com/davidjurgens/potato and will continue to be updated.

We propose Localized Narratives, a new form of multimodal image annotations connecting vision and language. We ask annotators to describe an image with their voice while simultaneously hovering their mouse over the region they are describing. Since the voice and the mouse pointer are synchronized, we can localize every single word in the description. This dense visual grounding takes the form of a mouse trace segment per word and is unique to our data. We annotated 849k images with Localized Narratives: the whole COCO, Flickr30k, and ADE20K datasets, and 671k images of Open Images, all of which we make publicly available. We provide an extensive analysis of these annotations showing they are diverse, accurate, and efficient to produce. We also demonstrate their utility on the application of controlled image captioning.

The availability of large public datasets and the increased amount of computing power have shifted the interest of the medical community to high-performance algorithms. However, little attention is paid to the quality of the data and their annotations. High performance on benchmark datasets may be reported without considering possible shortcuts or artifacts in the data, besides, models are not tested on subpopulation groups. With this work, we aim to raise awareness about shortcuts problems. We validate previous findings, and present a case study on chest X-rays using two publicly available datasets. We share annotations for a subset of pneumothorax images with drains. We conclude with general recommendations for medical image classification.

Formulating effective search queries remains a challenging task, particularly when users lack expertise in a specific domain or are not proficient in the language of the content. Providing example documents of interest might be easier for a user. However, such query-by-example scenarios are prone to concept drift, and the retrieval effectiveness is highly sensitive to the query generation method, without a clear way to incorporate user feedback. To enable exploration and to support Human-In-The-Loop experiments we propose QueryExplorer -- an interactive query generation, reformulation, and retrieval interface with support for HuggingFace generation models and PyTerrier's retrieval pipelines and datasets, and extensive logging of human feedback. To allow users to create and modify effective queries, our demo supports complementary approaches of using LLMs interactively, assisting the user with edits and feedback at multiple stages of the query formulation process. With support for recording fine-grained interactions and user annotations, QueryExplorer can serve as a valuable experimental and research platform for annotation, qualitative evaluation, and conducting Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) experiments for complex search tasks where users struggle to formulate queries.

Vision-language models have made significant strides recently, demonstrating superior performance across a range of tasks, e.g. optical character recognition and complex diagram analysis. Building on this trend, we introduce a new vision-language model, POINTS1.5, designed to excel in various real-world applications. POINTS1.5 is an enhancement of POINTS1.0 and incorporates several key innovations: i) We replace the original CLIP vision encoder, which had a fixed image resolution, with a NaViT-style vision encoder that supports native dynamic high resolution. This allows POINTS1.5 to process images of any resolution without needing to split them into tiles. ii) We add bilingual support to POINTS1.5, significantly enhancing its capability in Chinese. Due to the scarcity of open-source Chinese datasets for vision-language models, we collect numerous images from the Internet and annotate them using a combination of manual and automatic methods. iii) We propose a set of rigorous filtering methods for visual instruction tuning datasets. We comprehensively evaluate all these filtering methods, and choose the most effective ones to obtain the final visual instruction tuning set. Thanks to these innovations, POINTS1.5 significantly outperforms POINTS1.0 and demonstrates strong performance across a range of real-world applications. Notably, POINTS1.5-7B is trained on fewer than 4 billion tokens and ranks first on the OpenCompass leaderboard among models with fewer than 10 billion parameters

Understanding and answering questions based on a user's pointing gesture is essential for next-generation egocentric AI assistants. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with such tasks due to the lack of gesture-rich data and their limited ability to infer fine-grained pointing intent from egocentric video. To address this, we introduce EgoPointVQA, a dataset and benchmark for gesture-grounded egocentric question answering, comprising 4000 synthetic and 400 real-world videos across multiple deictic reasoning tasks. Built upon it, we further propose Hand Intent Tokens (HINT), which encodes tokens derived from 3D hand keypoints using an off-the-shelf reconstruction model and interleaves them with the model input to provide explicit spatial and temporal context for interpreting pointing intent. We show that our model outperforms others in different backbones and model sizes. In particular, HINT-14B achieves 68.1% accuracy, on average over 6 tasks, surpassing the state-of-the-art, InternVL3-14B, by 6.6%. To further facilitate the open research, we will release the code, model, and dataset. Project page: https://yuuraa.github.io/papers/choi2026egovqa

Although the LLM-based in-context learning (ICL) paradigm has demonstrated considerable success across various natural language processing tasks, it encounters challenges in event detection. This is because LLMs lack an accurate understanding of event triggers and tend to make over-interpretation, which cannot be effectively corrected through in-context examples alone. In this paper, we focus on the most challenging one-shot setting and propose KeyCP++, a keyword-centric chain-of-thought prompting approach. KeyCP++ addresses the weaknesses of conventional ICL by automatically annotating the logical gaps between input text and detection results for the demonstrations. Specifically, to generate in-depth and meaningful rationale, KeyCP++ constructs a trigger discrimination prompting template. It incorporates the exemplary triggers (a.k.a keywords) into the prompt as the anchor to simply trigger profiling, let LLM propose candidate triggers, and justify each candidate. These propose-and-judge rationales help LLMs mitigate over-reliance on the keywords and promote detection rule learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing significant advancements in one-shot event detection.

Keeping track of scientific challenges, advances and emerging directions is a fundamental part of research. However, researchers face a flood of papers that hinders discovery of important knowledge. In biomedicine, this directly impacts human lives. To address this problem, we present a novel task of extraction and search of scientific challenges and directions, to facilitate rapid knowledge discovery. We construct and release an expert-annotated corpus of texts sampled from full-length papers, labeled with novel semantic categories that generalize across many types of challenges and directions. We focus on a large corpus of interdisciplinary work relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from biomedicine to areas such as AI and economics. We apply a model trained on our data to identify challenges and directions across the corpus and build a dedicated search engine. In experiments with 19 researchers and clinicians using our system, we outperform a popular scientific search engine in assisting knowledge discovery. Finally, we show that models trained on our resource generalize to the wider biomedical domain and to AI papers, highlighting its broad utility. We make our data, model and search engine publicly available. https://challenges.apps.allenai.org/

Traditional keyphrase prediction methods predict a single set of keyphrases per document, failing to cater to the diverse needs of users and downstream applications. To bridge the gap, we introduce on-demand keyphrase generation, a novel paradigm that requires keyphrases that conform to specific high-level goals or intents. For this task, we present MetaKP, a large-scale benchmark comprising four datasets, 7500 documents, and 3760 goals across news and biomedical domains with human-annotated keyphrases. Leveraging MetaKP, we design both supervised and unsupervised methods, including a multi-task fine-tuning approach and a self-consistency prompting method with large language models. The results highlight the challenges of supervised fine-tuning, whose performance is not robust to distribution shifts. By contrast, the proposed self-consistency prompting approach greatly improves the performance of large language models, enabling GPT-4o to achieve 0.548 SemF1, surpassing the performance of a fully fine-tuned BART-base model. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our method to serve as a general NLP infrastructure, exemplified by its application in epidemic event detection from social media.

As information retrieval systems continue to evolve, accurate evaluation and benchmarking of these systems become pivotal. Web search datasets, such as MS MARCO, primarily provide short keyword queries without accompanying intent or descriptions, posing a challenge in comprehending the underlying information need. This paper proposes an approach to augmenting such datasets to annotate informative query descriptions, with a focus on two prominent benchmark datasets: TREC-DL-21 and TREC-DL-22. Our methodology involves utilizing state-of-the-art LLMs to analyze and comprehend the implicit intent within individual queries from benchmark datasets. By extracting key semantic elements, we construct detailed and contextually rich descriptions for these queries. To validate the generated query descriptions, we employ crowdsourcing as a reliable means of obtaining diverse human perspectives on the accuracy and informativeness of the descriptions. This information can be used as an evaluation set for tasks such as ranking, query rewriting, or others.

Political scientists are rapidly adopting large language models (LLMs) for text annotation, yet the sensitivity of annotation results to implementation choices remains poorly understood. Most evaluations test a single model or configuration; how model choice, model size, learning approach, and prompt style interact, and whether popular "best practices" survive controlled comparison, are largely unexplored. We present a controlled evaluation of these pipeline choices, testing six open-weight models across four political science annotation tasks under identical quantisation, hardware, and prompt-template conditions. Our central finding is methodological: interaction effects dominate main effects, so seemingly reasonable pipeline choices can become consequential researcher degrees of freedom. No single model, prompt style, or learning approach is uniformly superior, and the best-performing model varies across tasks. Two corollaries follow. First, model size is an unreliable guide both to cost and to performance: cross-family efficiency differences are so large that some larger models are less resource-intensive than much smaller alternatives, while within model families mid-range variants often match or exceed larger counterparts. Second, widely recommended prompt engineering techniques yield inconsistent and sometimes negative effects on annotation performance. We use these benchmark results to develop a validation-first framework - with a principled ordering of pipeline decisions, guidance on prompt freezing and held-out evaluation, reporting standards, and open-source tools - to help researchers navigate this decision space transparently.

We present QueryNER, a manually-annotated dataset and accompanying model for e-commerce query segmentation. Prior work in sequence labeling for e-commerce has largely addressed aspect-value extraction which focuses on extracting portions of a product title or query for narrowly defined aspects. Our work instead focuses on the goal of dividing a query into meaningful chunks with broadly applicable types. We report baseline tagging results and conduct experiments comparing token and entity dropping for null and low recall query recovery. Challenging test sets are created using automatic transformations and show how simple data augmentation techniques can make the models more robust to noise. We make the QueryNER dataset publicly available.

User interface understanding with vision-language models has received much attention due to its potential for enabling next-generation software automation. However, existing UI datasets either only provide large-scale context-free element annotations or contextualized functional descriptions for elements at a much smaller scale. In this work, we propose the pipeline for automatically annotating UI elements with detailed functionality descriptions at scale. Specifically, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to infer element functionality by comparing the UI content changes before and after simulated interactions with specific UI elements. To improve annotation quality, we propose LLM-aided rejection and verification, eliminating invalid and incorrect annotations without human labor. We construct an -704k dataset using the proposed pipeline, featuring multi-resolution, multi-device screenshots, diverse data domains, and detailed functionality annotations that have never been provided by previous datasets. Human evaluation shows that the AutoGUI pipeline achieves annotation correctness comparable to trained human annotators. Extensive experimental results show that our -704k dataset remarkably enhances VLM's UI grounding capabilities, exhibits significant scaling effects, and outperforms existing web pre-training data types. We envision AutoGUI as a scalable pipeline for generating massive data to build GUI-oriented VLMs. AutoGUI dataset can be viewed at this anonymous URL: https://autogui-project.github.io/.

Keyphrase extraction is one of the essential tasks for document understanding in NLP. While the majority of the prior works are dedicated to the formal setting, e.g., books, news or web-blogs, informal texts such as video transcripts are less explored. To address this limitation, in this work we present a novel corpus and method for keyphrase extraction from the transcripts of the videos streamed on the Behance platform. More specifically, in this work, a novel data augmentation is proposed to enrich the model with the background knowledge about the keyphrase extraction task from other domains. Extensive experiments on the proposed dataset dataset show the effectiveness of the introduced method.

In recent years, the rise of large language models (LLMs) has made it possible to directly achieve named entity recognition (NER) without any demonstration samples or only using a few samples through in-context learning (ICL). However, standard ICL only helps LLMs understand task instructions, format and input-label mapping, but neglects the particularity of the NER task itself. In this paper, we propose a new prompting framework P-ICL to better achieve NER with LLMs, in which some point entities are leveraged as the auxiliary information to recognize each entity type. With such significant information, the LLM can achieve entity classification more precisely. To obtain optimal point entities for prompting LLMs, we also proposed a point entity selection method based on K-Means clustering. Our extensive experiments on some representative NER benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed strategies in P-ICL and point entity selection.

Visual captioning benchmarks have become outdated with the emergence of modern multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as the brief ground-truth sentences and traditional metrics fail to assess detailed captions effectively. While recent benchmarks attempt to address this by focusing on keyword extraction or object-centric evaluation, they remain limited to vague-view or object-view analyses and incomplete visual element coverage. In this paper, we introduce CAPability, a comprehensive multi-view benchmark for evaluating visual captioning across 12 dimensions spanning six critical views. We curate nearly 11K human-annotated images and videos with visual element annotations to evaluate the generated captions. CAPability stably assesses both the correctness and thoroughness of captions using F1-score. By converting annotations to QA pairs, we further introduce a heuristic metric, know but cannot tell (KT), indicating a significant performance gap between QA and caption capabilities. Our work provides the first holistic analysis of MLLMs' captioning abilities, as we identify their strengths and weaknesses across various dimensions, guiding future research to enhance specific aspects of capabilities.

We introduce a novel approach for keypoint detection task that combines handcrafted and learned CNN filters within a shallow multi-scale architecture. Handcrafted filters provide anchor structures for learned filters, which localize, score and rank repeatable features. Scale-space representation is used within the network to extract keypoints at different levels. We design a loss function to detect robust features that exist across a range of scales and to maximize the repeatability score. Our Key.Net model is trained on data synthetically created from ImageNet and evaluated on HPatches benchmark. Results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art detectors in terms of repeatability, matching performance and complexity.

This paper explores the use of open generative Large Language Models (LLMs) for annotation tasks in the social sciences. The study highlights the challenges associated with proprietary models, such as limited reproducibility and privacy concerns, and advocates for the adoption of open (source) models that can be operated on independent devices. Two examples of annotation tasks, sentiment analysis in tweets and identification of leisure activities in childhood aspirational essays are provided. The study evaluates the performance of different prompting strategies and models (neural-chat-7b-v3-2, Starling-LM-7B-alpha, openchat_3.5, zephyr-7b-alpha and zephyr-7b-beta). The results indicate the need for careful validation and tailored prompt engineering. The study highlights the advantages of open models for data privacy and reproducibility.

Today's most advanced multimodal models remain proprietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good performance, effectively distilling these closed models into open ones. As a result, the community is still missing foundational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs from scratch. We present Molmo, a new family of VLMs that are state-of-the-art in their class of openness. Our key innovation is a novel, highly detailed image caption dataset collected entirely from human annotators using speech-based descriptions. To enable a wide array of user interactions, we also introduce a diverse dataset mixture for fine-tuning that includes in-the-wild Q&A and innovative 2D pointing data. The success of our approach relies on careful choices for the model architecture details, a well-tuned training pipeline, and, most critically, the quality of our newly collected datasets, all of which will be released. The best-in-class 72B model within the Molmo family not only outperforms others in the class of open weight and data models but also compares favorably against proprietary systems like GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and Gemini 1.5 on both academic benchmarks and human evaluation. We will be releasing all of our model weights, captioning and fine-tuning data, and source code in the near future. Select model weights, inference code, and demo are available at https://molmo.allenai.org.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional performance in long-context tasks, while facing significant inference efficiency challenges with limited GPU memory. Existing solutions first proposed the sliding-window approach to accumulate a set of historical key-value (KV) pairs for reuse, then further improvements selectively retain its subsets at each step. However, due to the sparse attention distribution across a long context, it is hard to identify and recall relevant KV pairs, as the attention is distracted by massive candidate pairs. Additionally, we found it promising to select representative tokens as probe-Query in each sliding window to effectively represent the entire context, which is an approach overlooked by existing methods. Thus, we propose ActQKV, a training-free, Activation-aware approach that dynamically determines probe-Query and leverages it to retrieve the relevant KV pairs for inference. Specifically, ActQKV monitors a token-level indicator, Activation Bias, within each context window, enabling the proper construction of probe-Query for retrieval at pre-filling stage. To accurately recall the relevant KV pairs and minimize the irrelevant ones, we design a dynamic KV cut-off mechanism guided by information density across layers at the decoding stage. Experiments on the Long-Bench and infty Benchmarks demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance with competitive inference quality and resource efficiency.

Evaluating the quality of search, ranking and RAG systems traditionally requires a significant number of human relevance annotations. In recent times, several deployed systems have explored the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) as automated judges for this task while their inherent biases prevent direct use for metric estimation. We present a statistical framework extending Prediction-Powered Inference (PPI) that combines minimal human annotations with LLM judgments to produce reliable estimates of metrics which require sub-instance annotations. Our method requires as few as 100 human-annotated queries and 10,000 unlabeled examples, reducing annotation requirements significantly compared to traditional approaches. We formulate our proposed framework (PRECISE) for inference of relevance uplift for an LLM-based query reformulation application, extending PPI to sub-instance annotations at the query-document level. By reformulating the metric-integration space, we reduced the computational complexity from O(2^|C|) to O(2^K), where |C| represents corpus size (in order of millions). Detailed experiments across prominent retrieval datasets demonstrate that our method reduces the variance of estimates for the business-critical Precision@K metric, while effectively correcting for LLM bias in low-resource settings.

With the release of ever more capable large language models (LLMs), researchers in NLP and related disciplines have started to explore the usability of LLMs for a wide variety of different annotation tasks. Very recently, a lot of this attention has shifted to tasks that are subjective in nature. Given that the latest generations of LLMs have digested and encoded extensive knowledge about different human subpopulations and individuals, the hope is that these models can be trained, tuned or prompted to align with a wide range of different human perspectives. While researchers already evaluate the success of this alignment via surveys and tests, there is a lack of resources to evaluate the alignment on what oftentimes matters the most in NLP; the actual downstream tasks. To fill this gap we present SubData, a Python library that offers researchers working on topics related to subjectivity in annotation tasks a convenient way of collecting, combining and using a range of suitable datasets.

Large-scale Vision-Language Models, such as CLIP, learn powerful image-text representations that have found numerous applications, from zero-shot classification to text-to-image generation. Despite that, their capabilities for solving novel discriminative tasks via prompting fall behind those of large language models, such as GPT-3. Here we explore the idea of visual prompt engineering for solving computer vision tasks beyond classification by editing in image space instead of text. In particular, we discover an emergent ability of CLIP, where, by simply drawing a red circle around an object, we can direct the model's attention to that region, while also maintaining global information. We show the power of this simple approach by achieving state-of-the-art in zero-shot referring expressions comprehension and strong performance in keypoint localization tasks. Finally, we draw attention to some potential ethical concerns of large language-vision models.

This paper proposes a new method to infer keypoints from arbitrary object categories in practical scenarios where point cloud data (PCD) are noisy, down-sampled and arbitrarily rotated. Our proposed model adheres to the following principles: i) keypoints inference is fully unsupervised (no annotation given), ii) keypoints position error should be low and resilient to PCD perturbations (robustness), iii) keypoints should not change their indexes for the intra-class objects (semantic coherence), iv) keypoints should be close to or proximal to PCD surface (compactness). We achieve these desiderata by proposing a new self-supervised training strategy for keypoints estimation that does not assume any a priori knowledge of the object class, and a model architecture with coupled auxiliary losses that promotes the desired keypoints properties. We compare the keypoints estimated by the proposed approach with those of the state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches. The experiments show that our approach outperforms by estimating keypoints with improved coverage (+9.41%) while being semantically consistent (+4.66%) that best characterizes the object's 3D shape for downstream tasks. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/IITPAVIS/SC3K

Current state of the art systems in NLP heavily rely on manually annotated datasets, which are expensive to construct. Very little work adequately exploits unannotated data -- such as discourse markers between sentences -- mainly because of data sparseness and ineffective extraction methods. In the present work, we propose a method to automatically discover sentence pairs with relevant discourse markers, and apply it to massive amounts of data. Our resulting dataset contains 174 discourse markers with at least 10k examples each, even for rare markers such as coincidentally or amazingly We use the resulting data as supervision for learning transferable sentence embeddings. In addition, we show that even though sentence representation learning through prediction of discourse markers yields state of the art results across different transfer tasks, it is not clear that our models made use of the semantic relation between sentences, thus leaving room for further improvements. Our datasets are publicly available (https://github.com/synapse-developpement/Discovery)

Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) as a pairwise mention classification task is expensive both for automated systems and manual annotations. The task's quadratic difficulty is exacerbated when using Large Language Models (LLMs), making prompt engineering for ECR prohibitively costly. In this work, we propose a graphical representation of events, X-AMR, anchored around individual mentions using a cross-document version of Abstract Meaning Representation. We then linearize the ECR with a novel multi-hop coreference algorithm over the event graphs. The event graphs simplify ECR, making it a) LLM cost-effective, b) compositional and interpretable, and c) easily annotated. For a fair assessment, we first enrich an existing ECR benchmark dataset with these event graphs using an annotator-friendly tool we introduce. Then, we employ GPT-4, the newest LLM by OpenAI, for these annotations. Finally, using the ECR algorithm, we assess GPT-4 against humans and analyze its limitations. Through this research, we aim to advance the state-of-the-art for efficient ECR and shed light on the potential shortcomings of current LLMs at this task. Code and annotations: https://github.com/ahmeshaf/gpt_coref

There are a few prominent practices for conducting reviews of academic literature, including searching for specific keywords on Google Scholar or checking citations from some initial seed paper(s). These approaches serve a critical purpose for academic literature reviews, yet there remain challenges in identifying relevant literature when similar work may utilize different terminology (e.g., mixed-initiative visual analytics papers may not use the same terminology as papers on model-steering, yet the two topics are relevant to one another). In this paper, we introduce a system, VitaLITy, intended to complement existing practices. In particular, VitaLITy promotes serendipitous discovery of relevant literature using transformer language models, allowing users to find semantically similar papers in a word embedding space given (1) a list of input paper(s) or (2) a working abstract. VitaLITy visualizes this document-level embedding space in an interactive 2-D scatterplot using dimension reduction. VitaLITy also summarizes meta information about the document corpus or search query, including keywords and co-authors, and allows users to save and export papers for use in a literature review. We present qualitative findings from an evaluation of VitaLITy, suggesting it can be a promising complementary technique for conducting academic literature reviews. Furthermore, we contribute data from 38 popular data visualization publication venues in VitaLITy, and we provide scrapers for the open-source community to continue to grow the list of supported venues.

Extracting who says what to whom is a crucial part in analyzing human communication in today's abundance of data such as online news articles. Yet, the lack of annotated data for this task in German news articles severely limits the quality and usability of possible systems. To remedy this, we present a new, freely available, creative-commons-licensed dataset for quotation attribution in German news articles based on WIKINEWS. The dataset provides curated, high-quality annotations across 1000 documents (250,000 tokens) in a fine-grained annotation schema enabling various downstream uses for the dataset. The annotations not only specify who said what but also how, in which context, to whom and define the type of quotation. We specify our annotation schema, describe the creation of the dataset and provide a quantitative analysis. Further, we describe suitable evaluation metrics, apply two existing systems for quotation attribution, discuss their results to evaluate the utility of our dataset and outline use cases of our dataset in downstream tasks.

In this paper we present datasets of Facebook comment threads to mainstream media posts in Slovene and English developed inside the Slovene national project FRENK which cover two topics, migrants and LGBT, and are manually annotated for different types of socially unacceptable discourse (SUD). The main advantages of these datasets compared to the existing ones are identical sampling procedures, producing comparable data across languages and an annotation schema that takes into account six types of SUD and five targets at which SUD is directed. We describe the sampling and annotation procedures, and analyze the annotation distributions and inter-annotator agreements. We consider this dataset to be an important milestone in understanding and combating SUD for both languages.

While existing large vision-language multimodal models focus on whole image understanding, there is a prominent gap in achieving region-specific comprehension. Current approaches that use textual coordinates or spatial encodings often fail to provide a user-friendly interface for visual prompting. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel multimodal model capable of decoding arbitrary visual prompts. This allows users to intuitively mark images and interact with the model using natural cues like a "red bounding box" or "pointed arrow". Our simple design directly overlays visual markers onto the RGB image, eliminating the need for complex region encodings, yet achieves state-of-the-art performance on region-understanding tasks like Visual7W, PointQA, and Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, we present ViP-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark to assess the capability of models in understanding visual prompts across multiple dimensions, enabling future research in this domain. Code, data, and model are publicly available.

Phrase Grounding aims to detect and localize objects in images that are referred to and are queried by natural language phrases. Phrase grounding finds applications in tasks such as Visual Dialog, Visual Search and Image-text co-reference resolution. In this paper, we present a framework that leverages information such as phrase category, relationships among neighboring phrases in a sentence and context to improve the performance of phrase grounding systems. We propose three modules: Proposal Indexing Network(PIN); Inter-phrase Regression Network(IRN) and Proposal Ranking Network(PRN) each of which analyze the region proposals of an image at increasing levels of detail by incorporating the above information. Also, in the absence of ground-truth spatial locations of the phrases(weakly-supervised), we propose knowledge transfer mechanisms that leverages the framework of PIN module. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the Flickr 30k Entities and ReferItGame datasets, for which we achieve improvements over state-of-the-art approaches in both supervised and weakly-supervised variants.

Small object-centric spatial understanding in indoor videos remains a significant challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), despite its practical value for object search and assistive applications. Although existing benchmarks have advanced video spatial intelligence, embodied reasoning, and diagnostic perception, no existing benchmark directly evaluates whether a model can localize a target object in video and express its position with sufficient precision for downstream use. In this work, we introduce PinpointQA, the first dataset and benchmark for small object-centric spatial understanding in indoor videos. Built from ScanNet++ and ScanNet200, PinpointQA comprises 1,024 scenes and 10,094 QA pairs organized into four progressively challenging tasks: Target Presence Verification (TPV), Nearest Reference Identification (NRI), Fine-Grained Spatial Description (FSD), and Structured Spatial Prediction (SSP). The dataset is built from intermediate spatial representations, with QA pairs generated automatically and further refined through quality control. Experiments on representative MLLMs reveal a consistent capability gap along the progressive chain, with SSP remaining particularly difficult. Supervised fine-tuning on PinpointQA yields substantial gains, especially on the harder tasks, demonstrating that PinpointQA serves as both a diagnostic benchmark and an effective training dataset. The dataset and project page are available at https://rainchowz.github.io/PinpointQA.

This paper presents the formal release of MedMentions, a new manually annotated resource for the recognition of biomedical concepts. What distinguishes MedMentions from other annotated biomedical corpora is its size (over 4,000 abstracts and over 350,000 linked mentions), as well as the size of the concept ontology (over 3 million concepts from UMLS 2017) and its broad coverage of biomedical disciplines. In addition to the full corpus, a sub-corpus of MedMentions is also presented, comprising annotations for a subset of UMLS 2017 targeted towards document retrieval. To encourage research in Biomedical Named Entity Recognition and Linking, data splits for training and testing are included in the release, and a baseline model and its metrics for entity linking are also described.

Despite the widespread use of Transformer-based text embedding models in NLP tasks, surprising 'sticky tokens' can undermine the reliability of embeddings. These tokens, when repeatedly inserted into sentences, pull sentence similarity toward a certain value, disrupting the normal distribution of embedding distances and degrading downstream performance. In this paper, we systematically investigate such anomalous tokens, formally defining them and introducing an efficient detection method, Sticky Token Detector (STD), based on sentence and token filtering. Applying STD to 40 checkpoints across 14 model families, we discover a total of 868 sticky tokens. Our analysis reveals that these tokens often originate from special or unused entries in the vocabulary, as well as fragmented subwords from multilingual corpora. Notably, their presence does not strictly correlate with model size or vocabulary size. We further evaluate how sticky tokens affect downstream tasks like clustering and retrieval, observing significant performance drops of up to 50%. Through attention-layer analysis, we show that sticky tokens disproportionately dominate the model's internal representations, raising concerns about tokenization robustness. Our findings show the need for better tokenization strategies and model design to mitigate the impact of sticky tokens in future text embedding applications.

The Open Images Dataset contains approximately 9 million images and is a widely accepted dataset for computer vision research. As is common practice for large datasets, the annotations are not exhaustive, with bounding boxes and attribute labels for only a subset of the classes in each image. In this paper, we present a new set of annotations on a subset of the Open Images dataset called the MIAP (More Inclusive Annotations for People) subset, containing bounding boxes and attributes for all of the people visible in those images. The attributes and labeling methodology for the MIAP subset were designed to enable research into model fairness. In addition, we analyze the original annotation methodology for the person class and its subclasses, discussing the resulting patterns in order to inform future annotation efforts. By considering both the original and exhaustive annotation sets, researchers can also now study how systematic patterns in training annotations affect modeling.

The NLP pipeline has evolved dramatically in the last few years. The first step in the pipeline is to find suitable annotated datasets to evaluate the tasks we are trying to solve. Unfortunately, most of the published datasets lack metadata annotations that describe their attributes. Not to mention, the absence of a public catalogue that indexes all the publicly available datasets related to specific regions or languages. When we consider low-resource dialectical languages, for example, this issue becomes more prominent. In this paper we create Masader, the largest public catalogue for Arabic NLP datasets, which consists of 200 datasets annotated with 25 attributes. Furthermore, We develop a metadata annotation strategy that could be extended to other languages. We also make remarks and highlight some issues about the current status of Arabic NLP datasets and suggest recommendations to address them.

Data annotation is an essential step for constructing new datasets. However, the conventional approach of data annotation through crowdsourcing is both time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the complexity of this process increases when dealing with low-resource languages owing to the difference in the language pool of crowdworkers. To address these issues, this study proposes an autonomous annotation method by utilizing large language models, which have been recently demonstrated to exhibit remarkable performance. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method is not just cost-efficient but also applicable for low-resource language annotation. Additionally, we constructed an image captioning dataset using our approach and are committed to open this dataset for future study. We have opened our source code for further study and reproducibility.

State-of-the-art keyphrase generation methods generally depend on large annotated datasets, limiting their performance in domains with limited annotated data. To overcome this challenge, we design a data-oriented approach that first identifies salient information using retrieval-based corpus-level statistics, and then learns a task-specific intermediate representation based on a pre-trained language model using large-scale unlabeled documents. We introduce salient span recovery and salient span prediction as denoising training objectives that condense the intra-article and inter-article knowledge essential for keyphrase generation. Through experiments on multiple keyphrase generation benchmarks, we show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for facilitating low-resource keyphrase generation and zero-shot domain adaptation. Our method especially benefits the generation of absent keyphrases, approaching the performance of models trained with large training sets.

Existing datasets that contain boolean questions, such as BoolQ and TYDI QA , provide the user with a YES/NO response to the question. However, a one word response is not sufficient for an explainable system. We promote explainability by releasing a new set of annotations marking the evidence in existing TyDi QA and BoolQ datasets. We show that our annotations can be used to train a model that extracts improved evidence spans compared to models that rely on existing resources. We confirm our findings with a user study which shows that our extracted evidence spans enhance the user experience. We also provide further insight into the challenges of answering boolean questions, such as passages containing conflicting YES and NO answers, and varying degrees of relevance of the predicted evidence.

News headline generation is a crucial task in increasing productivity for both the readers and producers of news. This task can easily be aided by automated News headline-generation models. However, the presence of irrelevant headlines in scraped news articles results in sub-optimal performance of generation models. We propose that relevance-based headline classification can greatly aid the task of generating relevant headlines. Relevance-based headline classification involves categorizing news headlines based on their relevance to the corresponding news articles. While this task is well-established in English, it remains under-explored in low-resource languages like Telugu due to a lack of annotated data. To address this gap, we present TeClass, the first-ever human-annotated Telugu news headline classification dataset, containing 78,534 annotations across 26,178 article-headline pairs. We experiment with various baseline models and provide a comprehensive analysis of their results. We further demonstrate the impact of this work by fine-tuning various headline generation models using TeClass dataset. The headlines generated by the models fine-tuned on highly relevant article-headline pairs, showed about a 5 point increment in the ROUGE-L scores. To encourage future research, the annotated dataset as well as the annotation guidelines will be made publicly available.

This paper presents a new challenging information extraction task in the domain of materials science. We develop an annotation scheme for marking information on experiments related to solid oxide fuel cells in scientific publications, such as involved materials and measurement conditions. With this paper, we publish our annotation guidelines, as well as our SOFC-Exp corpus consisting of 45 open-access scholarly articles annotated by domain experts. A corpus and an inter-annotator agreement study demonstrate the complexity of the suggested named entity recognition and slot filling tasks as well as high annotation quality. We also present strong neural-network based models for a variety of tasks that can be addressed on the basis of our new data set. On all tasks, using BERT embeddings leads to large performance gains, but with increasing task complexity, adding a recurrent neural network on top seems beneficial. Our models will serve as competitive baselines in future work, and analysis of their performance highlights difficult cases when modeling the data and suggests promising research directions.

In this paper, we introduce GUIDE, a novel dataset tailored for the advancement of Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) applications, particularly focusing on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) use cases. Our dataset encompasses diverse data from various websites including Apollo(62.67\%), Gmail(3.43\%), Calendar(10.98\%) and Canva(22.92\%). Each data entry includes an image, a task description, the last action taken, CoT and the next action to be performed along with grounding information of where the action needs to be executed. The data is collected using our in-house advanced annotation tool NEXTAG (Next Action Grounding and Annotation Tool). The data is adapted for multiple OS, browsers and display types. It is collected by multiple annotators to capture the variation of design and the way person uses a website. Through this dataset, we aim to facilitate research and development in the realm of LLMs for graphical user interfaces, particularly in tasks related to RPA. The dataset's multi-platform nature and coverage of diverse websites enable the exploration of cross-interface capabilities in automation tasks. We believe that our dataset will serve as a valuable resource for advancing the capabilities of multi-platform LLMs in practical applications, fostering innovation in the field of automation and natural language understanding. Using GUIDE, we build V-Zen, the first RPA model to automate multiple websites using our in-House Automation tool AUTONODE

The next Point of Interest (POI) recommendation task is to predict users' immediate next POI visit given their historical data. Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) data, which is often used for the next POI recommendation task, comes with challenges. One frequently disregarded challenge is how to effectively use the abundant contextual information present in LBSN data. Previous methods are limited by their numerical nature and fail to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle this challenge. Our framework allows us to preserve heterogeneous LBSN data in its original format, hence avoiding the loss of contextual information. Furthermore, our framework is capable of comprehending the inherent meaning of contextual information due to the inclusion of commonsense knowledge. In experiments, we test our framework on three real-world LBSN datasets. Our results show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models in all three datasets. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework in using contextual information as well as alleviating the commonly encountered cold-start and short trajectory problems.

Grounding has become a fundamental capability of vision-language models (VLMs). Most existing VLMs point by generating coordinates as part of their text output, which requires learning a complicated coordinate system and results in a high token count. Instead, we propose a more intuitive pointing mechanism that directly selects the visual tokens that contain the target concept. Our model generates a special pointing token that cross-attends to the input image or video tokens and selects the appropriate one. To make this model more fine-grained, we follow these pointing tokens with an additional special token that selects a fine-grained subpatch within the initially selected region, and then a third token that specifies a location within that subpatch. We further show that performance improves by generating points sequentially in a consistent order, encoding the relative position of the previously selected point, and including a special no-more-points class when selecting visual tokens. Using this method, we set a new state-of-the-art on image pointing (70.7% on PointBench), set a new state-of-the-art among fully open models on GUI pointing (61.1% on ScreenSpotPro), and improve video pointing (59.1% human preference win rate vs. a text coordinate baseline) and tracking (+6.3% gain on Molmo2Track). We additionally show that our method achieves much higher sample efficiency and discuss the qualitative differences that emerge from this design change.

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are central to our interaction with digital devices. Recently, growing efforts have been made to build models for various GUI understanding tasks. However, these efforts largely overlook an important GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points, which we name the Screen Point-and-Read (SPR) task. This task is predominantly handled by rigid accessible screen reading tools, in great need of new models driven by advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In this paper, we propose a Tree-of-Lens (ToL) agent, utilizing a novel ToL grounding mechanism, to address the SPR task. Based on the input point coordinate and the corresponding GUI screenshot, our ToL agent constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree. Based on the tree, our ToL agent not only comprehends the content of the indicated area but also articulates the layout and spatial relationships between elements. Such layout information is crucial for accurately interpreting information on the screen, distinguishing our ToL agent from other screen reading tools. We also thoroughly evaluate the ToL agent against other baselines on a newly proposed SPR benchmark, which includes GUIs from mobile, web, and operating systems. Last but not least, we test the ToL agent on mobile GUI navigation tasks, demonstrating its utility in identifying incorrect actions along the path of agent execution trajectories. Code and data: screen-point-and-read.github.io

Many recent approaches to natural language tasks are built on the remarkable abilities of large language models. Large language models can perform in-context learning, where they learn a new task from a few task demonstrations, without any parameter updates. This work examines the implications of in-context learning for the creation of datasets for new natural language tasks. Departing from recent in-context learning methods, we formulate an annotation-efficient, two-step framework: selective annotation that chooses a pool of examples to annotate from unlabeled data in advance, followed by prompt retrieval that retrieves task examples from the annotated pool at test time. Based on this framework, we propose an unsupervised, graph-based selective annotation method, voke-k, to select diverse, representative examples to annotate. Extensive experiments on 10 datasets (covering classification, commonsense reasoning, dialogue, and text/code generation) demonstrate that our selective annotation method improves the task performance by a large margin. On average, vote-k achieves a 12.9%/11.4% relative gain under an annotation budget of 18/100, as compared to randomly selecting examples to annotate. Compared to state-of-the-art supervised finetuning approaches, it yields similar performance with 10-100x less annotation cost across 10 tasks. We further analyze the effectiveness of our framework in various scenarios: language models with varying sizes, alternative selective annotation methods, and cases where there is a test data domain shift. We hope that our studies will serve as a basis for data annotations as large language models are increasingly applied to new tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUNLP/icl-selective-annotation.

Keyword extraction is the process of identifying the words or phrases that express the main concepts of text to the best of one's ability. Electronic infrastructure creates a considerable amount of text every day and at all times. This massive volume of documents makes it practically impossible for human resources to study and manage them. Nevertheless, the need for these documents to be accessed efficiently and effectively is evident in numerous purposes. A blog, news article, or technical note is considered a relatively long text since the reader aims to learn the subject based on keywords or topics. Our approach consists of a combination of two models: graph centrality features and textural features. The proposed method has been used to extract the best keyword among the candidate keywords with an optimal combination of graph centralities, such as degree, betweenness, eigenvector, closeness centrality and etc, and textural, such as Casing, Term position, Term frequency normalization, Term different sentence, Part Of Speech tagging. There have also been attempts to distinguish keywords from candidate phrases and consider them on separate keywords. For evaluating the proposed method, seven datasets were used: Semeval2010, SemEval2017, Inspec, fao30, Thesis100, pak2018, and Wikinews, with results reported as Precision, Recall, and F- measure. Our proposed method performed much better in terms of evaluation metrics in all reviewed datasets compared with available methods in literature. An approximate 16.9% increase was witnessed in F-score metric and this was much more for the Inspec in English datasets and WikiNews in forgone languages.

Detecting customized moments and highlights from videos given natural language (NL) user queries is an important but under-studied topic. One of the challenges in pursuing this direction is the lack of annotated data. To address this issue, we present the Query-based Video Highlights (QVHIGHLIGHTS) dataset. It consists of over 10,000 YouTube videos, covering a wide range of topics, from everyday activities and travel in lifestyle vlog videos to social and political activities in news videos. Each video in the dataset is annotated with: (1) a human-written free-form NL query, (2) relevant moments in the video w.r.t. the query, and (3) five-point scale saliency scores for all query-relevant clips. This comprehensive annotation enables us to develop and evaluate systems that detect relevant moments as well as salient highlights for diverse, flexible user queries. We also present a strong baseline for this task, Moment-DETR, a transformer encoder-decoder model that views moment retrieval as a direct set prediction problem, taking extracted video and query representations as inputs and predicting moment coordinates and saliency scores end-to-end. While our model does not utilize any human prior, we show that it performs competitively when compared to well-engineered architectures. With weakly supervised pretraining using ASR captions, MomentDETR substantially outperforms previous methods. Lastly, we present several ablations and visualizations of Moment-DETR. Data and code is publicly available at https://github.com/jayleicn/moment_detr

Current summarization systems yield generic summaries that are disconnected from users' preferences and expectations. To address this limitation, we present CTRLsum, a novel framework for controllable summarization. Our approach enables users to control multiple aspects of generated summaries by interacting with the summarization system through textual input in the form of a set of keywords or descriptive prompts. Using a single unified model, CTRLsum is able to achieve a broad scope of summary manipulation at inference time without requiring additional human annotations or pre-defining a set of control aspects during training. We quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three domains of summarization datasets and five control aspects: 1) entity-centric and 2) length-controllable summarization, 3) contribution summarization on scientific papers, 4) invention purpose summarization on patent filings, and 5) question-guided summarization on news articles in a reading comprehension setting. Moreover, when used in a standard, uncontrolled summarization setting, CTRLsum achieves state-of-the-art results on the CNN/DailyMail dataset. Code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/salesforce/ctrl-sum

Despite the significant advancements in keyphrase extraction and keyphrase generation methods, the predominant approach for evaluation only relies on exact matching with human references and disregards reference-free attributes. This scheme fails to recognize systems that generate keyphrases that are semantically equivalent to the references or keyphrases that have practical utility. To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of different keyphrase systems, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework consisting of six critical dimensions: naturalness, faithfulness, saliency, coverage, diversity, and utility. For each dimension, we discuss the desiderata and design semantic-based metrics that align with the evaluation objectives. Rigorous meta-evaluation studies demonstrate that our evaluation strategy correlates better with human preferences compared to a range of previously used metrics. Using this framework, we re-evaluate 18 keyphrase systems and further discover that (1) the best model differs in different dimensions, with pre-trained language models achieving the best in most dimensions; (2) the utility in downstream tasks does not always correlate well with reference-based metrics; and (3) large language models exhibit a strong performance in reference-free evaluation.

Semantic correspondence methods have advanced to obtaining high-quality correspondences employing complicated networks, aiming to maximize the model capacity. However, despite the performance improvements, they may remain constrained by the scarcity of training keypoint pairs, a consequence of the limited training images and the sparsity of keypoints. This paper builds on the hypothesis that there is an inherent data-hungry matter in learning semantic correspondences and uncovers the models can be more trained by employing densified training pairs. We demonstrate a simple machine annotator reliably enriches paired key points via machine supervision, requiring neither extra labeled key points nor trainable modules from unlabeled images. Consequently, our models surpass current state-of-the-art models on semantic correspondence learning benchmarks like SPair-71k, PF-PASCAL, and PF-WILLOW and enjoy further robustness on corruption benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/matchme.

We propose an attentive local feature descriptor suitable for large-scale image retrieval, referred to as DELF (DEep Local Feature). The new feature is based on convolutional neural networks, which are trained only with image-level annotations on a landmark image dataset. To identify semantically useful local features for image retrieval, we also propose an attention mechanism for keypoint selection, which shares most network layers with the descriptor. This framework can be used for image retrieval as a drop-in replacement for other keypoint detectors and descriptors, enabling more accurate feature matching and geometric verification. Our system produces reliable confidence scores to reject false positives---in particular, it is robust against queries that have no correct match in the database. To evaluate the proposed descriptor, we introduce a new large-scale dataset, referred to as Google-Landmarks dataset, which involves challenges in both database and query such as background clutter, partial occlusion, multiple landmarks, objects in variable scales, etc. We show that DELF outperforms the state-of-the-art global and local descriptors in the large-scale setting by significant margins. Code and dataset can be found at the project webpage: https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/research/delf .

End-to-end task-oriented dialogue (EToD) can directly generate responses in an end-to-end fashion without modular training, which attracts escalating popularity. The advancement of deep neural networks, especially the successful use of large pre-trained models, has further led to significant progress in EToD research in recent years. In this paper, we present a thorough review and provide a unified perspective to summarize existing approaches as well as recent trends to advance the development of EToD research. The contributions of this paper can be summarized: (1) \textit{First survey}: to our knowledge, we take the first step to present a thorough survey of this research field; (2) \textit{New taxonomy}: we first introduce a unified perspective for EToD, including (i) Modularly EToD and (ii) Fully EToD; (3) \textit{New Frontiers}: we discuss some potential frontier areas as well as the corresponding challenges, hoping to spur breakthrough research in EToD field; (4) \textit{Abundant resources}: we build a public websiteWe collect the related papers, baseline projects, and leaderboards for the community at \url{https://etods.net/.}, where EToD researchers could directly access the recent progress. We hope this work can serve as a thorough reference for the EToD research community.

Structured representations such as keypoints are widely used in pose transfer, conditional image generation, animation, and 3D reconstruction. However, their supervised learning requires expensive annotation for each target domain. We propose a self-supervised method that learns to disentangle object structure from the appearance with a graph of 2D keypoints linked by straight edges. Both the keypoint location and their pairwise edge weights are learned, given only a collection of images depicting the same object class. The resulting graph is interpretable, for example, AutoLink recovers the human skeleton topology when applied to images showing people. Our key ingredients are i) an encoder that predicts keypoint locations in an input image, ii) a shared graph as a latent variable that links the same pairs of keypoints in every image, iii) an intermediate edge map that combines the latent graph edge weights and keypoint locations in a soft, differentiable manner, and iv) an inpainting objective on randomly masked images. Although simpler, AutoLink outperforms existing self-supervised methods on the established keypoint and pose estimation benchmarks and paves the way for structure-conditioned generative models on more diverse datasets. Project website: https://xingzhehe.github.io/autolink/.