Massimiliano Mancini

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) learn a shared feature space for text and images, enabling the comparison of inputs of different modalities. While prior works demonstrated that VLMs organize natural language representations into regular structures encoding composite meanings, it remains unclear if compositional patterns also emerge in the visual embedding space. In this work, we investigate compositionality in the image domain, where the analysis of compositional properties is challenged by noise and sparsity of visual data. We address these problems and propose a framework, called Geodesically Decomposable Embeddings (GDE), that approximates image representations with geometry-aware compositional structures in the latent space. We demonstrate that visual embeddings of pre-trained VLMs exhibit a compositional arrangement, and evaluate the effectiveness of this property in the tasks of compositional classification and group robustness. GDE achieves stronger performance in compositional classification compared to its counterpart method that assumes linear geometry of the latent space. Notably, it is particularly effective for group robustness, where we achieve higher results than task-specific solutions. Our results indicate that VLMs can automatically develop a human-like form of compositional reasoning in the visual domain, making their underlying processes more interpretable.

Attribute detection is crucial for many computer vision tasks, as it enables systems to describe properties such as color, texture, and material. Current approaches often rely on labor-intensive annotation processes which are inherently limited: objects can be described at an arbitrary level of detail (eg, color vs. color shades), leading to ambiguities when the annotators are not instructed carefully. Furthermore, they operate within a predefined set of attributes, reducing scalability and adaptability to unforeseen downstream applications. We present Compositional Caching (ComCa), a training-free method for open-vocabulary attribute detection that overcomes these constraints. ComCa requires only the list of target attributes and objects as input, using them to populate an auxiliary cache of images by leveraging web-scale databases and Large Language Models to determine attribute-object compatibility. To account for the compositional nature of attributes, cache images receive soft attribute labels. Those are aggregated at inference time based on the similarity between the input and cache images, refining the predictions of underlying Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Importantly, our approach is model-agnostic, compatible with various VLMs. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that ComCa significantly outperforms zero-shot and cache-based baselines, competing with recent training-based methods, proving that a carefully designed training-free approach can successfully address open-vocabulary attribute detection.

A person downloading a pre-trained model from the web should be aware of its biases. Existing approaches for bias identification rely on datasets containing labels for the task of interest, something that a non-expert may not have access to, or may not have the necessary resources to collect: this greatly limits the number of tasks where model biases can be identified. In this work, we present Classifier-to-Bias (C2B), the first bias discovery framework that works without access to any labeled data: it only relies on a textual description of the classification task to identify biases in the target classification model. This description is fed to a large language model to generate bias proposals and corresponding captions depicting biases together with task-specific target labels. A retrieval model collects images for those captions, which are then used to assess the accuracy of the model wrt the given biases. C2B is training-free, does not require any annotations, has no constraints on the list of biases, and can be applied to any pre-trained model on any classification task. Experiments on two publicly available datasets show that C2B discovers biases beyond those of the original datasets and outperforms a recent state-of-the-art bias detection baseline that relies on task-specific annotations, being a promising first step toward addressing task-agnostic unsupervised bias detection.

An old-school recipe for training a classifier is to (i) learn a good feature extractor and (ii) optimize a linear layer atop. When only a handful of samples are available per category, as in Few-Shot Adaptation (FSA), data are insufficient to fit a large number of parameters, rendering the above impractical. This is especially true with large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which motivated successful research at the intersection of Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) and FSA. In this work, we start by analyzing the learning dynamics of PEFT techniques when trained on few-shot data from only a subset of categories, referred to as the "base" classes. We show that such dynamics naturally splits into two distinct phases: (i) task-level feature extraction and (ii) specialization to the available concepts. To accommodate this dynamic, we then depart from prompt- or adapter-based methods and tackle FSA differently. Specifically, given a fixed computational budget, we split it to (i) learn a task-specific feature extractor via PEFT and (ii) train a linear classifier on top. We call this scheme Two-Stage Few-Shot Adaptation (2SFS). Differently from established methods, our scheme enables a novel form of selective inference at a category level, i.e., at test time, only novel categories are embedded by the adapted text encoder, while embeddings of base categories are available within the classifier. Results with fixed hyperparameters across two settings, three backbones, and eleven datasets, show that 2SFS matches or surpasses the state-of-the-art, while established methods degrade significantly across settings.

Recent video-language alignment models are trained on sets of videos, each with an associated positive caption and a negative caption generated by large language models. A problem with this procedure is that negative captions may introduce linguistic biases, i.e., concepts are seen only as negatives and never associated with a video. While a solution would be to collect videos for the negative captions, existing databases lack the fine-grained variations needed to cover all possible negatives. In this work, we study whether synthetic videos can help to overcome this issue. Our preliminary analysis with multiple generators shows that, while promising on some tasks, synthetic videos harm the performance of the model on others. We hypothesize this issue is linked to noise (semantic and visual) in the generated videos and develop a method, SynViTA, that accounts for those. SynViTA dynamically weights the contribution of each synthetic video based on how similar its target caption is w.r.t. the real counterpart. Moreover, a semantic consistency loss makes the model focus on fine-grained differences across captions, rather than differences in video appearance. Experiments show that, on average, SynViTA improves over existing methods on VideoCon test sets and SSv2-Temporal, SSv2-Events, and ATP-Hard benchmarks, being a first promising step for using synthetic videos when learning video-language models.

Vision-Language Models seamlessly discriminate among arbitrary semantic categories, yet they still suffer from poor generalization when presented with challenging examples. For this reason, Episodic Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) strategies have recently emerged as powerful techniques to adapt VLMs in the presence of a single unlabeled image. The recent literature on TTA is dominated by the paradigm of prompt tuning by Marginal Entropy Minimization, which, relying on online backpropagation, inevitably slows down inference while increasing memory. In this work, we theoretically investigate the properties of this approach and unveil that a surprisingly strong TTA method lies dormant and hidden within it. We term this approach ZERO (TTA with “zero” temperature), whose design is both incredibly effective and frustratingly simple: augment N times, predict, retain the most confident predictions, and marginalize after setting the Softmax temperature to zero. Remarkably, ZERO requires a single batched forward pass through the vision encoder only and no backward passes. We thoroughly evaluate our approach following the experimental protocol established in the literature and show that ZERO largely surpasses or compares favorably w.r.t. the state-of-the-art while being almost 10× faster and 13× more memory friendly than standard Test-Time Prompt Tuning. Thanks to its simplicity and comparatively negligible computation, ZERO can serve as a strong baseline for future work in this field. Code will be available.

Text-to-image generative models are becoming increasingly popular and accessible to the general public. As these models see large-scale deployments it is necessary to deeply investigate their safety and fairness to not disseminate and perpetuate any kind of biases. However existing works focus on detecting closed sets of biases defined a priori limiting the studies to well-known concepts. In this paper we tackle the challenge of open-set bias detection in text-to-image generative models presenting OpenBias a new pipeline that identifies and quantifies the severity of biases agnostically without access to any precompiled set. OpenBias has three stages. In the first phase we leverage a Large Language Model (LLM) to propose biases given a set of captions. Secondly the target generative model produces images using the same set of captions. Lastly a Vision Question Answering model recognizes the presence and extent of the previously proposed biases. We study the behavior of Stable Diffusion 1.5 2 and XL emphasizing new biases never investigated before. Via quantitative experiments we demonstrate that OpenBias agrees with current closed-set bias detection methods and human judgement.

Video anomaly detection (VAD) aims to temporally locate abnormal events in a video. Existing works mostly rely on training deep models to learn the distribution of normality with either video-level supervision one-class supervision or in an unsupervised setting. Training-based methods are prone to be domain-specific thus being costly for practical deployment as any domain change will involve data collection and model training. In this paper we radically depart from previous efforts and propose LAnguage-based VAD (LAVAD) a method tackling VAD in a novel training-free paradigm exploiting the capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) and existing vision-language models (VLMs). We leverage VLM-based captioning models to generate textual descriptions for each frame of any test video. With the textual scene description we then devise a prompting mechanism to unlock the capability of LLMs in terms of temporal aggregation and anomaly score estimation turning LLMs into an effective video anomaly detector. We further leverage modality-aligned VLMs and propose effective techniques based on cross-modal similarity for cleaning noisy captions and refining the LLM-based anomaly scores. We evaluate LAVAD on two large datasets featuring real-world surveillance scenarios (UCF-Crime and XD-Violence) showing that it outperforms both unsupervised and one-class methods without requiring any training or data collection.

Given an image and a target modification (e.g an image of the Eiffel tower and the text “without people and at night-time”), Compositional Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve the relevant target image in a database. While supervised approaches rely on annotating triplets that is costly (i.e. query image, textual modification, and target image), recent research sidesteps this need by using large-scale vision-language models (VLMs), performing Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR). However, state-of-the-art approaches in ZS-CIR still require training task-specific, customized models over large amounts of image-text pairs. In this work, we proposeto tackle CIR in a training-free manner via our Compositional Image Retrieval through Vision-by-Language (CIReVL), a simple, yet human-understandable and scalable pipeline that effectively recombines large-scale VLMs with large language models (LLMs). By captioning the reference image using a pre-trained generative VLM and asking a LLM to recompose the caption based on the textual target modification for subsequent retrieval via e.g. CLIP, we achieve modular language reasoning. In four ZS-CIR benchmarks, we find competitive, in-part state-of-the-art performance - improving over supervised methods Moreover, the modularity of CIReVL offers simple scalability without re-training, allowing us to both investigate scaling laws and bottlenecks for ZS-CIR while easily scaling up to in parts more than double of previously reported results. Finally, we show that CIReVL makes CIR human-understandable by composing image and text in a modular fashion in the language domain, thereby making it intervenable, allowing to post-hoc re-align failure cases. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Recent advances in large vision-language models have revolutionized the image classification paradigm. Despite showing impressive zero-shot capabilities, a pre-defined set of categories, a.k.a. the vocabulary, is assumed at test time for composing the textual prompts. However, such assumption can be impractical when the semantic context is unknown and evolving. We thus formalize a novel task, termed as Vocabulary-free Image Classification (VIC), where we aim to assign to an input image a class that resides in an unconstrained language-induced semantic space, without the prerequisite of a known vocabulary. VIC is a challenging task as the semantic space is extremely large, containing millions of concepts, with hard-to-discriminate fine-grained categories.