We explore the boundaries of scaling up a multilingual vision and language model, both in terms of size of the components and the breadth of its training task mixture. Our model achieves new levels of performance on a wide-range of varied and complex tasks, including multiple image-based captioning and question-answering tasks, image-based document understanding and few-shot (in-context) learning, as well as object detection, video question answering, and video captioning. Our model advances the state-of-the-art on most vision-and-language benchmarks considered (20+ of them). Finally, we observe emerging capabilities, such as complex counting and multilingual object detection, tasks that are not explicitly in the training mix.

The most performant spatio-temporal action localisation models use external person proposals and complex external memory banks. We propose a fully end-to-end, purely-transformer based model that directly ingests an input video, and outputs tubelets - a sequence of bounding boxes and the action classes at each frame. Our flexible model can be trained with either sparse bounding-box supervision on individual frames, or full tubelet annotations. And in both cases, it predicts coherent tubelets as the output. Moreover, our end-to-end model requires no additional pre-processing in the form of proposals, or post-processing in terms of non-maximal suppression. We perform extensive ablation experiments, and significantly advance the state-of-the-art on five different spatio-temporal action localisation benchmarks with both sparse keyframes and full tubelet annotations.

The scaling of Transformers has driven breakthrough capabilities for language models. At present, the largest large language models (LLMs) contain upwards of 100B parameters. Vision Transformers (ViT) have introduced the same architecture to image and video modelling, but these have not yet been successfully scaled to nearly the same degree; the largest dense ViT contains 4B parameters (Chen et al., 2022). We present a recipe for highly efficient and stable training of a 22B-parameter ViT (ViT-22B) and perform a wide variety of experiments on the resulting model. When evaluated on downstream tasks (often with a lightweight linear model on frozen features), ViT-22B demonstrates increasing performance with scale. We further observe other interesting benefits of scale, including an improved tradeoff between fairness and performance, state-of-the-art alignment to human visual perception in terms of shape/texture bias, and improved robustness. ViT-22B demonstrates the potential for "LLM-like" scaling in vision, and provides key steps towards getting there.

The top-$k$ operator returns a $k$-sparse vector, where the non-zero values correspond to the $k$ largest values of the input. Unfortunately, because it is a discontinuous function, it is difficult to incorporate in neural networks trained end-to-end with backpropagation. Recent works have considered differentiable relaxations, based either on regularization or perturbation techniques. However, to date, no approach is fully differentiable and sparse. In this paper, we propose new differentiable and sparse top-$k$ operators. We view the top-$k$ operator as a linear program over the permutahedron, the convex hull of permutations. We then introduce a $p$-norm regularization term to smooth out the operator, and show that its computation can be reduced to isotonic optimization. Our framework is significantly more general than the existing one and allows for example to express top-$k$ operators that select values in magnitude. On the algorithmic side, in addition to pool adjacent violator (PAV) algorithms, we propose a new GPU/TPU-friendly Dykstra algorithm to solve isotonic optimization problems. We successfully use our operators to prune weights in neural networks, to fine-tune vision transformers, and as a router in sparse mixture of experts.

The ubiquitous and demonstrably suboptimal choice of resizing images to a fixed resolution before processing them with computer vision models has not yet been successfully challenged. However, models such as the Vision Transformer (ViT) offer flexible sequence-based modeling, and hence varying input sequence lengths. We take advantage of this with NaViT (Native Resolution ViT) which uses sequence packing during training to process inputs of arbitrary resolutions and aspect ratios. Alongside flexible model usage, we demonstrate improved training efficiency for large-scale supervised and contrastive image-text pretraining. NaViT can be efficiently transferred to standard tasks such as image and video classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation and leads to improved results on robustness and fairness benchmarks. At inference time, the input resolution flexibility can be used to smoothly navigate the test-time cost-performance trade-off. We believe that NaViTmarks a departure from the standard, CNN-designed, input and modelling pipeline used by most computer vision models, and represents a promising direction for ViTs.

Modern deep convolutional networks (CNNs) are often criticized for not generalizing under distributional shifts. However, several recent breakthroughs in transfer learning suggest that these networks can cope with severe distribution shifts and successfully adapt to new tasks from a few training examples. In this work we study the interplay between out-of-distribution and transfer performance of modern image classification CNNs for the first time and investigate the impact of the pre-training data size, the model scale, and the data preprocessing pipeline. We find that increasing both the training set and model sizes significantly improve the distributional shift robustness. Furthermore, we show that, perhaps surprisingly, simple changes in the preprocessing such as modifying the image resolution can significantly mitigate robustness issues in some cases. Finally, we outline the shortcomings of existing robustness evaluation datasets and introduce a synthetic dataset SI-SCORE we use for a systematic analysis across factors of variation common in visual data such as object size and position.

Accurate estimation of predictive uncertainty (model calibration) is essential for the safe application of neural networks. Many instances of miscalibration in modern neural networks have been reported, suggesting a trend that newer, more accurate models produce poorly calibrated predictions. Here, we revisit this question for recent state-of-the-art image classification models. We systematically relate model calibration and accuracy, and find that the most recent models, notably those not using convolutions, are among the best calibrated. Trends observed in prior model generations, such as decay of calibration with distribution shift or model size, are less pronounced in recent architectures. We also show that model size and amount of pretraining do not fully explain these differences, suggesting that architecture is a major determinant of calibration properties.

We propose a method to learn image representations from uncurated videos. We combine a supervised loss from off-the-shelf object detectors and self-supervised losses which naturally arise from the video-shot-frame-object hierarchy present in each video. We report competitive results on 19 transfer learning tasks of the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB), and on 8 out-of-distribution-generalization tasks, and discuss the benefits and shortcomings of the proposed approach. In particular, it improves over the baseline on all 18/19 few-shot learning tasks and 8/8 out-of-distribution generalization tasks. Finally, we perform several ablation studies and analyze the impact of the pretrained object detector on the performance across this suite of tasks.

Despite the tremendous progress in the estimation of generative models, the development of tools for diagnosing their failures and assessing their performance has advanced at a much slower pace. Recent developments have investigated metrics that quantify which parts of the true distribution is modeled well, and, on the contrary, what the model fails to capture, akin to precision and recall in information retrieval. In this paper, we present a general evaluation framework for generative models that measures the trade-off between precision and recall using Renyi divergences. Our framework provides a novel perspective on existing techniques and extends them to more general domains. As a key advantage, this formulation encompasses both continuous and discrete models and allows for the design of efficient algorithms that do not have to quantize the data. We further analyze the biases of the approximations used in practice.

We propose a general framework for self-supervised learning of transferable visual representations based on Video-Induced Visual Invariances (VIVI). We consider the implicit hierarchy present in the videos and make use of (i) frame-level invariances (e.g. stability to color and contrast perturbations), (ii) shot/clip-level invariances (e.g. robustness to changes in object orientation and lighting conditions), and (iii) video-level invariances (semantic relationships of scenes across shots/clips), to define a holistic self-supervised loss. Training models using different variants of the proposed framework on videos from the YouTube-8M (YT8M) data set, we obtain state-of-the-art self-supervised transfer learning results on the 19 diverse downstream tasks of the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB), using only 1000 labels per task. We then show how to co-train our models jointly with labeled images, outperforming an ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 by 0.8 points with 10× fewer labeled images, as well as the previous best supervised model by 3.7 points using the full ImageNet data set.

The sorting operation is one of the most commonly used building blocks in computer programming. In machine learning, it is often used for robust statistics. However, seen as a function, it is piecewise linear and as a result includes many kinks where it is non-differentiable. More problematic is the related ranking operator, often used for order statistics and ranking metrics. It is a piecewise constant function, meaning that its derivatives are null or undefined. While numerous works have proposed differentiable proxies to sorting and ranking, they do not achieve the $O(n \log n)$ time complexity one would expect from sorting and ranking operations. In this paper, we propose the first differentiable sorting and ranking operators with $O(n \log n)$ time and $O(n)$ space complexity. Our proposal in addition enjoys exact computation and differentiation. We achieve this feat by constructing differentiable operators as projections onto the permutahedron, the convex hull of permutations, and using a reduction to isotonic optimization. Empirically, we confirm that our approach is an order of magnitude faster than existing approaches and showcase two novel applications: differentiable Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient and least trimmed squares.

The estimation of an f-divergence between two probability distributions based on samples is a fundamental problem in statistics and machine learning. Most works study this problem under very weak assumptions, in which case it is provably hard. We consider the case of stronger structural assumptions that are commonly satisfied in modern machine learning, including representation learning and generative modelling with autoencoder architectures. Under these assumptions we propose and study an estimator that can be easily implemented, works well in high dimensions, and enjoys faster rates of convergence. We verify the behavior of our estimator empirically in both synthetic and real-data experiments, and discuss its direct implications for total correlation, entropy, and mutual information estimation.

Submodular maximization problems appear in several areas of machine learning and data science, as many useful modelling concepts such as diversity and coverage satisfy this natural diminishing returns property. Because the data defining these functions, as well as the decisions made with the computed solutions, are subject to statistical noise and randomness, it is arguably necessary to go beyond computing a single approximate optimum and quantify its inherent uncertainty. To this end, we define a rich class of probabilistic models associated with constrained submodular maximization problems. These capture log-submodular dependencies of arbitrary order between the variables, but also satisfy hard combinatorial constraints. Namely, the variables are assumed to take on one of — possibly exponentially many — set of states, which form the bases of a matroid. To perform inference in these models we design novel variational inference algorithms, which carefully leverage the combinatorial and probabilistic properties of these objects. In addition to providing completely tractable and well-understood variational approximations, our approach results in the minimization of a convex upper bound on the log-partition function. The bound can be efficiently evaluated using greedy algorithms and optimized using any first-order method. Moreover, for the case of facility location and weighted coverage functions, we prove the first constant factor guarantee in this setting — an efficiently certifiable e/(e-1) approximation of the log-partition function. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several instances.

Modeling diversity of sets of items is important in many applications such as product recommendation and data summarization. Probabilistic submodular models, a family of models including the determinantal point process, form a natural class of distributions, encouraging effects such as diversity, repulsion and coverage. Current models, however, are limited to small and medium number of items due to the high time complexity for learning and inference. In this paper, we propose FLID, a novel log-submodular diversity model that scales to large numbers of items and can be efficiently learned using noise contrastive estimation. We show that our model achieves state of the art performance in terms of model fit, but can be also learned orders of magnitude faster. We demonstrate the wide applicability of our model using several experiments.

We study a rich family of distributions that capture variable interactions significantly more expressive than those representable with low-treewidth or pairwise graphical models, or log-supermodular models. We call these cooperative graphical models. Yet, this family retains structure, which we carefully exploit for efficient inference techniques. Our algorithms combine the polyhedral structure of submodular functions in new ways with variational inference methods to obtain both lower and upper bounds on the partition function. While our fully convex upper bound is minimized as an SDP or via tree-reweighted belief propagation, our lower bound is tightened via belief propagation or mean-field algorithms. The resulting algorithms are easy to implement and, as our experiments show, effectively obtain good bounds and marginals for synthetic and real-world examples.

We consider the problem of variational inference in probabilistic models with both log-submodular and log-supermodular higher-order potentials. These models can represent arbitrary distributions over binary variables, and thus generalize the commonly used pairwise Markov random fields and models with log-supermodular potentials only, for which efficient approximate inference algorithms are known. While inference in the considered models is #P-hard in general, we present efficient approximate algorithms exploiting recent advances in the field of discrete optimization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in a large set of experiments, where our model allows reasoning about preferences over sets of items with complements and substitutes.

Higher-order models have been shown to be very useful for a plethora of computer vision tasks. However, existing techniques have focused mainly on MAP inference. In this paper, we present the first efficient approach towards approximate Bayesian marginal inference in a general class of high-order, multi-label attractive models, where previous techniques slow down exponentially with the order (clique size). We formalize this task as performing inference in log-supermodular models under partition constraints, and present an efficient variational inference technique. The resulting optimization problems are convex and yield bounds on the partition function. We also obtain a fully factorized approximation to the posterior, which can be used in lieu of the true complicated distribution. We empirically demonstrate the performance of our approach by comparing it to traditional inference methods on a challenging high-fidelity multi-label image segmentation dataset. We obtain state-of-the-art classification accuracy for MAP inference, and substantially improved ROC curves using the approximate marginals.

We consider the problem of approximate Bayesian inference in log-supermodular models. These models encompass regular pairwise MRFs with binary variables, but allow to capture high order interactions, which are intractable for existing approximate inference techniques such as belief propagation, mean field and variants. We show that a recently proposed variational approach to inference in log-supermodular models – L-Field – reduces to the widely studied minimum norm problem for submodular minimization. This insight allows to leverage powerful existing tools, and allows solving the variational problem orders of magnitude more efficiently than previously possible. We then provide another natural interpretation of L-Field, demonstrating that it exactly minimizes a specific type of Renyi divergence measure. This insight sheds light on the nature of the variational approximations produced by L-Field. Furthermore, we show how to perform parallel inference as message passing in a suitable factor graph at a linear convergence rate, without having to sum up over all the configurations of the factor. Finally, we apply our approach to a challenging image segmentation task. Our experiments confirm scalability of our approach, high quality of the marginals and the benefit of incorporating higher order potentials.

Many applications in machine learning require optimizing unknown functions defined over a high-dimensional space from noisy samples that are expensive to obtain. We address this notoriously hard challenge, under the assumptions that the function varies only along some low-dimensional subspace and is smooth (i.e., it has a low norm in a Reproducible Kernel Hilbert Space). In particular, we present the SI-BO algorithm, which leverages recent low-rank matrix recovery techniques to learn the underlying subspace of the unknown function and applies Gaussian Process Upper Confidence sampling for optimization of the function. We carefully calibrate the exploration–exploitation tradeoff by allocating sampling budget to subspace estimation and function optimization, and obtain the first subexponential cumulative regret bounds and convergence rates for Bayesian optimization in high-dimensions under noisy observations. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in difficult scenarios.