We present a simple approach which can turn a ViT encoder into an efficient video model, which can seamlessly work with both image and video inputs. By sparsely sampling the inputs, the model is able to do training and inference from both inputs. The model is easily scalable and can be adapted to large-scale pre-trained ViTs without requiring full finetuning. The model achieves SOTA results and the code will be open-sourced.

有效的缩放和灵活的任务接口使大型语言模型能够在许多任务中表现出色。帕利（Pali）根据视觉和文本输入生成文本，并使用该界面以许多语言执行许多视觉，语言和多模式任务。为了训练帕利，我们利用了大型的编码器语言模型和视觉变压器（VITS）。这使我们能够利用其现有能力，并利用培训它们的大量成本。我们发现，视觉和语言组成部分的联合缩放很重要。由于现有的语言变压器比其视觉对应物要大得多，因此我们训练迄今为止最大的VIT（VIT-E），以量化甚至大容量视觉模型的好处。为了训练Pali，我们基于一个新的图像文本训练集，其中包含10B图像和文本，以100多种语言来创建大型的多语言组合。帕利（Pali）在多个视觉和语言任务（例如字幕，视觉问题，索方式，场景文本理解）中实现了最新的，同时保留了简单，模块化和可扩展的设计。

我们为视觉和语言变压器模型提供了一种预训练方法，该方法基于各种任务的混合。我们探索了在预训练中使用图像文本字幕数据的使用，这不需要其他监督，以及对象感知的策略来预先培训模型。我们评估了许多文本式视觉+语言任务的方法，例如视觉问题答案，视觉范围和字幕，并证明了对标准预训练方法的巨大收益。

视频问题回答是一项具有挑战性的任务，需要共同理解语言输入，单个视频帧中的视觉信息以及视频中发生的事件的时间信息。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的多流视频编码器，用于视频问题回答，它使用多个视频输入和一种新的视频文本迭代迭代式共同指定方法来回答与视频相关的各种问题。我们在几个数据集上进行了实验评估该模型，例如MSRVTT-QA，MSVD-QA，IVQA，超过了大幅度的先前最新时间。同时，我们的模型将所需的Gflops从150-360减少到只有67，从而产生了高效的视频答案模型。

We present Answer-Me, a task-aware multi-task framework which unifies a variety of question answering tasks, such as, visual question answering, visual entailment, visual reasoning. In contrast to previous works using contrastive or generative captioning training, we propose a novel and simple recipe to pre-train a vision-language joint model, which is multi-task as well. The pre-training uses only noisy image captioning data, and is formulated to use the entire architecture end-to-end with both a strong language encoder and decoder. Our results show state-of-the-art performance, zero-shot generalization, robustness to forgetting, and competitive single-task results across a variety of question answering tasks. Our multi-task mixture training learns from tasks of various question intents and thus generalizes better, including on zero-shot vision-language tasks. We conduct experiments in the challenging multi-task and open-vocabulary settings and across a variety of datasets and tasks, such as VQA2.0, SNLI-VE, NLVR2, GQA. We observe that the proposed approach is able to generalize to unseen tasks and that more diverse mixtures lead to higher accuracy in both known and novel tasks.

我们提出了Findit，这是一个简单而多功能的框架，统一了各种视觉接地和本地化任务，包括引用表达理解，基于文本的本地化和对象检测。我们体系结构的关键是一个有效的多尺度融合模块，该模块统一了整个任务中不同的本地化要求。此外，我们发现标准对象检测器在统一这些任务的无需特定任务设计，损失或预计算检测方面非常有效。我们的端到端可训练框架灵活，准确地响应了零，一个或多个对象的广泛的参考表达，本地化或检测查询。在这些任务上进行了共同培训，发现在引用表达和基于文本的本地化方面，胜过最高的艺术状态，并在对象检测中表现出竞争性的性能。最后，与强大的单任务基准相比，Findit可以更好地推广到分布数据和新型类别。所有这些都是通过一个单一的，统一和有效的模型来完成的。代码将发布。

This paper expounds the design and control of a new Variable Stiffness Series Elastic Actuator (VSSEA). It is established by employing a modular mechanical design approach that allows us to effectively optimise the stiffness modulation characteristics and power density of the actuator. The proposed VSSEA possesses the following features: i) no limitation in the work-range of output link, ii) a wide range of stiffness modulation (~20Nm/rad to ~1KNm/rad), iii) low-energy-cost stiffness modulation at equilibrium and non-equilibrium positions, iv) compact design and high torque density (~36Nm/kg), and v) high-speed stiffness modulation (~3000Nm/rad/s). Such features can help boost the safety and performance of many advanced robotic systems, e.g., a cobot that physically interacts with unstructured environments and an exoskeleton that provides physical assistance to human users. These features can also enable us to utilise variable stiffness property to attain various regulation and trajectory tracking control tasks only by employing conventional controllers, eliminating the need for synthesising complex motion control systems in compliant actuation. To this end, it is experimentally demonstrated that the proposed VSSEA is capable of precisely tracking desired position and force control references through the use of conventional Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers.

Object instance segmentation is a key challenge for indoor robots navigating cluttered environments with many small objects. Limitations in 3D sensing capabilities often make it difficult to detect every possible object. While deep learning approaches may be effective for this problem, manually annotating 3D data for supervised learning is time-consuming. In this work, we explore zero-shot instance segmentation (ZSIS) from RGB-D data to identify unseen objects in a semantic category-agnostic manner. We introduce a zero-shot split for Tabletop Objects Dataset (TOD-Z) to enable this study and present a method that uses annotated objects to learn the ``objectness'' of pixels and generalize to unseen object categories in cluttered indoor environments. Our method, SupeRGB-D, groups pixels into small patches based on geometric cues and learns to merge the patches in a deep agglomerative clustering fashion. SupeRGB-D outperforms existing baselines on unseen objects while achieving similar performance on seen objects. Additionally, it is extremely lightweight (0.4 MB memory requirement) and suitable for mobile and robotic applications. The dataset split and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

A self-supervised adaptive low-light video enhancement (SALVE) method is proposed in this work. SALVE first conducts an effective Retinex-based low-light image enhancement on a few key frames of an input low-light video. Next, it learns mappings from the low- to enhanced-light frames via Ridge regression. Finally, it uses these mappings to enhance the remaining frames in the input video. SALVE is a hybrid method that combines components from a traditional Retinex-based image enhancement method and a learning-based method. The former component leads to a robust solution which is easily adaptive to new real-world environments. The latter component offers a fast, computationally inexpensive and temporally consistent solution. We conduct extensive experiments to show the superior performance of SALVE. Our user study shows that 87% of participants prefer SALVE over prior work.

Hyperparameter tuning is critical to the success of federated learning applications. Unfortunately, appropriately selecting hyperparameters is challenging in federated networks. Issues of scale, privacy, and heterogeneity introduce noise in the tuning process and make it difficult to evaluate the performance of various hyperparameters. In this work, we perform the first systematic study on the effect of noisy evaluation in federated hyperparameter tuning. We first identify and rigorously explore key sources of noise, including client subsampling, data and systems heterogeneity, and data privacy. Surprisingly, our results indicate that even small amounts of noise can significantly impact tuning methods-reducing the performance of state-of-the-art approaches to that of naive baselines. To address noisy evaluation in such scenarios, we propose a simple and effective approach that leverages public proxy data to boost the evaluation signal. Our work establishes general challenges, baselines, and best practices for future work in federated hyperparameter tuning.