We present InstructDiffusion, a unified and generic framework for aligning computer vision tasks with hu-man instructions. Unlike existing approaches that integrate prior knowledge and pre-define the output space (e.g., categories and coordinates) for each vision task, we cast diverse vision tasks into a human-intuitive image-manipulating pro-cess whose output space is a flexible and interactive pixel space. Concretely, the model is built upon the diffusion process and is trained to predict pixels according to user instructions, such as encircling the man's left shoulder in red or applying a blue mask to the left car. InstructDiffusion could handle a variety of vision tasks, including understanding tasks (such as segmentation and keypoint de-tection) and generative tasks (such as editing and enhance-ment) and outperforms prior methods on novel datasets. This represents a solid step towards a generalist modeling interface for vision tasks, advancing artificial general intelligence in the field of computer vision.

We introduce a highly performant 3D object detector for point clouds using the DETR framework. The prior attempts all end up with suboptimal results because they fail to learn accurate inductive biases from the limited scale of training data. In particular, the queries often attend to points that are far away from the target objects, violating the locality principle in object detection. To address the limitation, we introduce a novel 3D Vertex Relative Position Encoding (3DV-RPE) method which computes position encoding for each point based on its relative position to the 3D boxes predicted by the queries in each decoder layer, thus providing clear information to guide the model to focus on points near the objects, in accordance with the principle of locality. Furthermore, we have systematically refined our pipeline, including data normalization, to better align with the task requirements. Our approach demonstrates remarkable performance on the demanding ScanNetV2 benchmark, showcasing substantial enhancements over the prior state-of-the-art CAGroup3D. Specifically, we achieve an increase in $AP_{25}$ from $75.1\%$ to $77.8\%$ and in ${AP}_{50}$ from $61.3\%$ to $66.0\%$.

Human pose is typically represented by a coordinate vector of body joints or their heatmap embeddings. While easy for data processing, unrealistic pose estimates are admitted due to the lack of dependency modeling between the body joints. In this paper, we present a structured representation, named Pose as Compositional Tokens (PCT), to explore the joint dependency. It represents a pose by M discrete tokens with each characterizing a sub-structure with several interdependent joints (see Figure 1). The compositional design enables it to achieve a small reconstruction error at a low cost. Then we cast pose estimation as a classification task. In particular, we learn a classifier to predict the categories of the M tokens from an image. A pre-learned decoder network is used to recover the pose from the tokens without further post-processing. We show that it achieves better or comparable pose estimation results as the existing methods in general scenarios, yet continues to work well when occlusion occurs, which is ubiquitous in practice. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Gengzigang/PCT.

Masked image modeling (MIM) as pre-training is shown to be effective for numerous vision downstream tasks, but how and where MIM works remain unclear. In this paper, we compare MIM with the long-dominant supervised pretrained models from two perspectives, the visualizations and the experiments, to uncover their key representational differences. From the visualizations, we find that MIM brings locality inductive bias to all layers of the trained models, but supervised models tend to focus locally at lower layers but more globally at higher layers. That may be the reason why MIM helps Vision Transformers that have a very large receptive field to optimize. Using MIM, the model can maintain a large diversity on attention heads in all layers. But for supervised models, the diversity on attention heads almost disappears from the last three layers and less diversity harms the fine-tuning performance. From the experiments, we find that MIM models can perform significantly better on geometric and motion tasks with weak semantics or fine-grained classification tasks, than their supervised counterparts. Without bells and whistles, a standard MIM pre-trained SwinV2-L could achieve state-of-the-art performance on pose estimation (78.9 AP on COCO test-dev and 78.0 AP on CrowdPose), depth estimation (0.287 RMSE on NYUv2 and 1.966 RMSE on KITTI), and video object tracking (70.7 SUC on LaSOT). For the semantic understanding datasets where the categories are sufficiently covered by the supervised pre-training, MIM models can still achieve highly competitive transfer performance. With a deeper understanding of MIM, we hope that our work can inspire new and solid research in this direction. Code will be available at https://github.com/zdaxie/MIM-DarkSecrets.

We introduce AiT, a unified output representation for various vision tasks, which is a crucial step towards general-purpose vision task solvers. Despite the challenges posed by the high-dimensional and task-specific outputs, we showcase the potential of using discrete representation (VQVAE) to model the dense outputs of many computer vision tasks as a sequence of discrete tokens. This is inspired by the established ability of VQ-VAE to conserve the structures spanning multiple pixels using few discrete codes. To that end, we present a modified shallower architecture for VQ-VAE that improves efficiency while keeping prediction accuracy. Our approach also incorporates uncertainty into the decoding process by using a soft fusion of the codebook entries, providing a more stable training process, which notably improved prediction accuracy. Our evaluation of AiT on depth estimation and instance segmentation tasks, with both continuous and discrete labels, demonstrates its superiority compared to other unified models. The code and models are available at https://github.com/SwinTransformer/AiT.

In this paper, we are interested in the bottom-up paradigm of estimating human poses from an image. We study the dense keypoint regression framework that is previously inferior to the keypoint detection and grouping framework. Our motivation is that regressing keypoint positions accurately needs to learn representations that focus on the keypoint regions.We present a simple yet effective approach, named disentangled keypoint regression (DEKR). We adopt adaptive convolutions through pixel-wise spatial transformer to activate the pixels in the keypoint regions and accordingly learn representations from them. We use a multi-branch structure for separate regression: each branch learns a representation with dedicated adaptive convolutions and regresses one keypoint. The resulting disentangled representations are able to attend to the keypoint regions, respectively, and thus the keypoint regression is spatially more accurate. We empirically show that the proposed direct regression method outperforms keypoint detection and grouping methods and achieves superior bottom-up pose estimation results on two benchmark datasets, COCO and CrowdPose. The code and models are available at https://github.com/HRNet/DEKR.