All-Seeing (AS) Project: Bridging the Gap Between Vision and Language in AI
The All-Seeing (AS) project aims to bridge the gap between the visual and language worlds in AI. While AI chatbots have shown impressive capabilities in natural language processing, they often lack the ability to understand visual information. The AS project seeks to create a vision system that mimics human cognition, with the goal of achieving open-world panoptic visual recognition and understanding.
The AS Project Components
The AS project consists of two key components:
- The All-Seeing 1B (AS-1B) dataset: This dataset includes a wide range of 3.5 million common and rare concepts in the real world, with 132.2 billion tokens describing the concepts and their attributes.
- The All-Seeing model (ASM): This model is a unified location-aware image-text foundation model. It consists of a location-aware image tokenizer and an LLM-based decoder.
The AS-1B dataset stands out from previous visual recognition datasets due to its rich and diverse instance-level location annotation and detailed object concepts and descriptions. It includes over 1 billion region annotations in various formats.
The Architecture of the AS Model
The AS model has a unified framework that supports contrastive and generative image-text tasks. It leverages pre-trained LLMs and powerful vision foundation models to demonstrate promising performance in tasks like image-text retrieval, visual question answering, image captioning, and more. The model also shows potential in grounding tasks with the assistance of a class-agnostic detector.
The Key Designs of the All-Seeing Model (ASM)
The ASM comprises three key designs:
- A location-aware image tokenizer: This design extracts features from the image and region levels based on the input image and bounding box, respectively.
- A trainable task prompt: A task prompt is incorporated at the beginning of the vision and text tokens to guide the model in distinguishing between discriminative and generative tasks.
- An LLM-based decoder: This design is used to extract vision and text features for discriminative tasks and generate response tokens in generative tasks.
Evaluation and Findings
The ASM was extensively compared to other models through data analysis and experiments. It showcased strong region-level text generation capabilities and the ability to comprehend the entire image. Human evaluation results favored captions generated by the ASM over other models.
The Impact of the AS Project
The AS project has given AI models an “all-seeing eye” by enabling them to understand and process both visual and language information. This breakthrough has revolutionized the intersection of vision and language in AI applications, opening up new possibilities for tasks like region-text retrieval, captioning, question-answering, and more.
For more information on the AS project, you can check out the paper and the code on GitHub.
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