Daily Papers

The essence of a video lies in its dynamic motions, including character actions, object movements, and camera movements. While text-to-video generative diffusion models have recently advanced in creating diverse contents, controlling specific motions through text prompts remains a significant challenge. A primary issue is the coupling of appearance and motion, often leading to overfitting on appearance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce MotionCrafter, a novel one-shot instance-guided motion customization method. MotionCrafter employs a parallel spatial-temporal architecture that injects the reference motion into the temporal component of the base model, while the spatial module is independently adjusted for character or style control. To enhance the disentanglement of motion and appearance, we propose an innovative dual-branch motion disentanglement approach, comprising a motion disentanglement loss and an appearance prior enhancement strategy. During training, a frozen base model provides appearance normalization, effectively separating appearance from motion and thereby preserving diversity. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments, along with user preference tests, demonstrate that MotionCrafter can successfully integrate dynamic motions while preserving the coherence and quality of the base model with a wide range of appearance generation capabilities. Project page: https://zyxelsa.github.io/homepage-motioncrafter. Codes are available at https://github.com/zyxElsa/MotionCrafter.

Autonomous driving in high-speed racing, as opposed to urban environments, presents significant challenges in scene understanding due to rapid changes in the track environment. Traditional sequential network approaches may struggle to meet the real-time knowledge and decision-making demands of an autonomous agent covering large displacements in a short time. This paper proposes a novel baseline architecture for developing sophisticated models capable of true hardware-enabled parallelism, achieving neural processing speeds that mirror the agent's high velocity. The proposed model (Parallel Perception Network (PPN)) consists of two independent neural networks, segmentation and reconstruction networks, running parallelly on separate accelerated hardware. The model takes raw 3D point cloud data from the LiDAR sensor as input and converts it into a 2D Bird's Eye View Map on both devices. Each network independently extracts its input features along space and time dimensions and produces outputs parallelly. The proposed method's model is trained on a system with two NVIDIA T4 GPUs, using a combination of loss functions, including edge preservation, and demonstrates a 2x speedup in model inference time compared to a sequential configuration. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/suwesh/Parallel-Perception-Network. Learned parameters of the trained networks are provided at: https://huggingface.co/suwesh/ParallelPerceptionNetwork.

Classification of time series data is an important task for many application domains. One of the best existing methods for this task, in terms of accuracy and computation time, is MiniROCKET. In this work, we extend this approach to provide better global temporal encodings using hyperdimensional computing (HDC) mechanisms. HDC (also known as Vector Symbolic Architectures, VSA) is a general method to explicitly represent and process information in high-dimensional vectors. It has previously been used successfully in combination with deep neural networks and other signal processing algorithms. We argue that the internal high-dimensional representation of MiniROCKET is well suited to be complemented by the algebra of HDC. This leads to a more general formulation, HDC-MiniROCKET, where the original algorithm is only a special case. We will discuss and demonstrate that HDC-MiniROCKET can systematically overcome catastrophic failures of MiniROCKET on simple synthetic datasets. These results are confirmed by experiments on the 128 datasets from the UCR time series classification benchmark. The extension with HDC can achieve considerably better results on datasets with high temporal dependence without increasing the computational effort for inference.

Temporal networks have been widely used to model real-world complex systems such as financial systems and e-commerce systems. In a temporal network, the joint neighborhood of a set of nodes often provides crucial structural information useful for predicting whether they may interact at a certain time. However, recent representation learning methods for temporal networks often fail to extract such information or depend on online construction of structural features, which is time-consuming. To address the issue, this work proposes Neighborhood-Aware Temporal network model (NAT). For each node in the network, NAT abandons the commonly-used one-single-vector-based representation while adopting a novel dictionary-type neighborhood representation. Such a dictionary representation records a downsampled set of the neighboring nodes as keys, and allows fast construction of structural features for a joint neighborhood of multiple nodes. We also design a dedicated data structure termed N-cache to support parallel access and update of those dictionary representations on GPUs. NAT gets evaluated over seven real-world large-scale temporal networks. NAT not only outperforms all cutting-edge baselines by averaged 1.2% and 4.2% in transductive and inductive link prediction accuracy, respectively, but also keeps scalable by achieving a speed-up of 4.1-76.7x against the baselines that adopt joint structural features and achieves a speed-up of 1.6-4.0x against the baselines that cannot adopt those features. The link to the code: https: //github.com/Graph-COM/Neighborhood-Aware-Temporal-Network.

The abilities to perceive, learn, and use generalities, similarities, classes, i.e., semantic memory (SM), is central to cognition. Machine learning (ML), neural network, and AI research has been primarily driven by tasks requiring such abilities. However, another central facet of cognition, single-trial formation of permanent memories of experiences, i.e., episodic memory (EM), has had relatively little focus. Only recently has EM-like functionality been added to Deep Learning (DL) models, e.g., Neural Turing Machine, Memory Networks. However, in these cases: a) EM is implemented as a separate module, which entails substantial data movement (and so, time and power) between the DL net itself and EM; and b) individual items are stored localistically within the EM, precluding realizing the exponential representational efficiency of distributed over localist coding. We describe Sparsey, an unsupervised, hierarchical, spatial/spatiotemporal associative memory model differing fundamentally from mainstream ML models, most crucially, in its use of sparse distributed representations (SDRs), or, cell assemblies, which admits an extremely efficient, single-trial learning algorithm that maps input similarity into code space similarity (measured as intersection). SDRs of individual inputs are stored in superposition and because similarity is preserved, the patterns of intersections over the assigned codes reflect the similarity, i.e., statistical, structure, of all orders, not simply pairwise, over the inputs. Thus, SM, i.e., a generative model, is built as a computationally free side effect of the act of storing episodic memory traces of individual inputs, either spatial patterns or sequences. We report initial results on MNIST and on the Weizmann video event recognition benchmarks. While we have not yet attained SOTA class accuracy, learning takes only minutes on a single CPU.

We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast

Temporal interpolation often plays a crucial role to learn meaningful representations in dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel method to train spatiotemporal neural radiance fields of dynamic scenes based on temporal interpolation of feature vectors. Two feature interpolation methods are suggested depending on underlying representations, neural networks or grids. In the neural representation, we extract features from space-time inputs via multiple neural network modules and interpolate them based on time frames. The proposed multi-level feature interpolation network effectively captures features of both short-term and long-term time ranges. In the grid representation, space-time features are learned via four-dimensional hash grids, which remarkably reduces training time. The grid representation shows more than 100 times faster training speed than the previous neural-net-based methods while maintaining the rendering quality. Concatenating static and dynamic features and adding a simple smoothness term further improve the performance of our proposed models. Despite the simplicity of the model architectures, our method achieved state-of-the-art performance both in rendering quality for the neural representation and in training speed for the grid representation.

The challenge of mapping AI architectures to GPU hardware is creating a critical bottleneck in AI progress. Despite substantial efforts, hand-written custom kernels fail to meet their theoretical performance thresholds, even on well-established operations like linear attention. The diverse hardware capabilities of GPUs might suggest that we need a wide variety of techniques to achieve high performance. However, our work explores whether a small number of key abstractions can drastically simplify the process. We present ThunderKittens (TK), a framework for writing performant AI kernels while remaining easy to use and maintain. Our abstractions map to the three levels of the GPU hierarchy: (1) at the warp-level, we provide 16x16 matrix tiles as basic data structures and PyTorch-like parallel compute operations over tiles, (2) at the thread-block level, we provide a template for overlapping asynchronous operations across parallel warps, and (3) at the grid-level, we provide support to help hide the block launch and tear-down, and memory costs. We show the value of TK by providing kernels that match or outperform prior kernels for a range of AI operations. We match CuBLAS and FlashAttention-3 on GEMM and attention inference performance and outperform the strongest baselines by 10-40% on attention backwards, 8times on state space models, and 14times on linear attention.

Modelling various spatio-temporal dependencies is the key to recognising human actions in skeleton sequences. Most existing methods excessively relied on the design of traversal rules or graph topologies to draw the dependencies of the dynamic joints, which is inadequate to reflect the relationships of the distant yet important joints. Furthermore, due to the locally adopted operations, the important long-range temporal information is therefore not well explored in existing works. To address this issue, in this work we propose LSTA-Net: a novel Long short-term Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Network, which can effectively capture the long/short-range dependencies in a spatio-temporal manner. We devise our model into a pure factorised architecture which can alternately perform spatial feature aggregation and temporal feature aggregation. To improve the feature aggregation effect, a channel-wise attention mechanism is also designed and employed. Extensive experiments were conducted on three public benchmark datasets, and the results suggest that our approach can capture both long-and-short range dependencies in the space and time domain, yielding higher results than other state-of-the-art methods. Code available at https://github.com/tailin1009/LSTA-Net.

Effectively modeling long spatiotemporal sequences is challenging due to the need to model complex spatial correlations and long-range temporal dependencies simultaneously. ConvLSTMs attempt to address this by updating tensor-valued states with recurrent neural networks, but their sequential computation makes them slow to train. In contrast, Transformers can process an entire spatiotemporal sequence, compressed into tokens, in parallel. However, the cost of attention scales quadratically in length, limiting their scalability to longer sequences. Here, we address the challenges of prior methods and introduce convolutional state space models (ConvSSM) that combine the tensor modeling ideas of ConvLSTM with the long sequence modeling approaches of state space methods such as S4 and S5. First, we demonstrate how parallel scans can be applied to convolutional recurrences to achieve subquadratic parallelization and fast autoregressive generation. We then establish an equivalence between the dynamics of ConvSSMs and SSMs, which motivates parameterization and initialization strategies for modeling long-range dependencies. The result is ConvS5, an efficient ConvSSM variant for long-range spatiotemporal modeling. ConvS5 significantly outperforms Transformers and ConvLSTM on a long horizon Moving-MNIST experiment while training 3X faster than ConvLSTM and generating samples 400X faster than Transformers. In addition, ConvS5 matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art methods on challenging DMLab, Minecraft and Habitat prediction benchmarks and enables new directions for modeling long spatiotemporal sequences.

The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have sparked debate over whether such systems just learn an enormous collection of superficial statistics or a coherent model of the data generating process -- a world model. We find evidence for the latter by analyzing the learned representations of three spatial datasets (world, US, NYC places) and three temporal datasets (historical figures, artworks, news headlines) in the Llama-2 family of models. We discover that LLMs learn linear representations of space and time across multiple scales. These representations are robust to prompting variations and unified across different entity types (e.g. cities and landmarks). In addition, we identify individual ``space neurons'' and ``time neurons'' that reliably encode spatial and temporal coordinates. Our analysis demonstrates that modern LLMs acquire structured knowledge about fundamental dimensions such as space and time, supporting the view that they learn not merely superficial statistics, but literal world models.

Very recently, a variety of vision transformer architectures for dense prediction tasks have been proposed and they show that the design of spatial attention is critical to their success in these tasks. In this work, we revisit the design of the spatial attention and demonstrate that a carefully-devised yet simple spatial attention mechanism performs favourably against the state-of-the-art schemes. As a result, we propose two vision transformer architectures, namely, Twins-PCPVT and Twins-SVT. Our proposed architectures are highly-efficient and easy to implement, only involving matrix multiplications that are highly optimized in modern deep learning frameworks. More importantly, the proposed architectures achieve excellent performance on a wide range of visual tasks, including image level classification as well as dense detection and segmentation. The simplicity and strong performance suggest that our proposed architectures may serve as stronger backbones for many vision tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/Twins .

Sequence parallelism (SP), which divides the sequence dimension of input tensors across multiple computational devices, is becoming key to unlocking the long-context capabilities of generative AI models. This paper investigates the state-of-the-art SP approaches, i.e. DeepSpeed-Ulysses and Ring-Attention, and proposes a unified SP approach, which is more robust to transformer model architectures and network hardware topology. This paper compares the communication and memory cost of SP and existing parallelism, including data/tensor/zero/expert/pipeline parallelism, and discusses the best practices for designing hybrid 4D parallelism involving SP. We achieved 86% MFU on two 8xA800 nodes using SP for sequence length 208K for the LLAMA3-8B model. Our code is publicly available on https://github.com/feifeibear/long-context-attention.

Episodic memory plays a crucial role in various cognitive processes, such as the ability to mentally recall past events. While cognitive science emphasizes the significance of spatial context in the formation and retrieval of episodic memory, the current primary approach to implementing episodic memory in AI systems is through transformers that store temporally ordered experiences, which overlooks the spatial dimension. As a result, it is unclear how the underlying structure could be extended to incorporate the spatial axis beyond temporal order alone and thereby what benefits can be obtained. To address this, this paper explores the use of Spatially-Aware Transformer models that incorporate spatial information. These models enable the creation of place-centric episodic memory that considers both temporal and spatial dimensions. Adopting this approach, we demonstrate that memory utilization efficiency can be improved, leading to enhanced accuracy in various place-centric downstream tasks. Additionally, we propose the Adaptive Memory Allocator, a memory management method based on reinforcement learning that aims to optimize efficiency of memory utilization. Our experiments demonstrate the advantages of our proposed model in various environments and across multiple downstream tasks, including prediction, generation, reasoning, and reinforcement learning. The source code for our models and experiments will be available at https://github.com/junmokane/spatially-aware-transformer.

Not yet. We present SPACE, a benchmark that systematically evaluates spatial cognition in frontier models. Our benchmark builds on decades of research in cognitive science. It evaluates large-scale mapping abilities that are brought to bear when an organism traverses physical environments, smaller-scale reasoning about object shapes and layouts, and cognitive infrastructure such as spatial attention and memory. For many tasks, we instantiate parallel presentations via text and images, allowing us to benchmark both large language models and large multimodal models. Results suggest that contemporary frontier models fall short of the spatial intelligence of animals, performing near chance level on a number of classic tests of animal cognition.

Recently, large-scale pre-trained language-image models like CLIP have shown extraordinary capabilities for understanding spatial contents, but naively transferring such models to video recognition still suffers from unsatisfactory temporal modeling capabilities. Existing methods insert tunable structures into or in parallel with the pre-trained model, which either requires back-propagation through the whole pre-trained model and is thus resource-demanding, or is limited by the temporal reasoning capability of the pre-trained structure. In this work, we present DiST, which disentangles the learning of spatial and temporal aspects of videos. Specifically, DiST uses a dual-encoder structure, where a pre-trained foundation model acts as the spatial encoder, and a lightweight network is introduced as the temporal encoder. An integration branch is inserted between the encoders to fuse spatio-temporal information. The disentangled spatial and temporal learning in DiST is highly efficient because it avoids the back-propagation of massive pre-trained parameters. Meanwhile, we empirically show that disentangled learning with an extra network for integration benefits both spatial and temporal understanding. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks show that DiST delivers better performance than existing state-of-the-art methods by convincing gaps. When pre-training on the large-scale Kinetics-710, we achieve 89.7% on Kinetics-400 with a frozen ViT-L model, which verifies the scalability of DiST. Codes and models can be found in https://github.com/alibaba-mmai-research/DiST.

Transformers have recently been popular for learning and inference in the spatial-temporal domain. However, their performance relies on storing and applying attention to the feature tensor of each frame in video. Hence, their space and time complexity increase linearly as the length of video grows, which could be very costly for long videos. We propose a novel visual memory network architecture for the learning and inference problem in the spatial-temporal domain. We maintain a fixed set of memory slots in our memory network and propose an algorithm based on Gumbel-Softmax to learn an adaptive strategy to update this memory. Finally, this architecture is benchmarked on the video object segmentation (VOS) and video prediction problems. We demonstrate that our memory architecture achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming transformer-based methods on VOS and other recent methods on video prediction while maintaining constant memory capacity independent of the sequence length.

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising results, yet existing approaches struggle to effectively handle both temporal and spatial localization simultaneously. This challenge stems from two key issues: first, incorporating spatial-temporal localization introduces a vast number of coordinate combinations, complicating the alignment of linguistic and visual coordinate representations; second, encoding fine-grained temporal and spatial information during video feature compression is inherently difficult. To address these issues, we propose LLaVA-ST, a MLLM for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. In LLaVA-ST, we propose Language-Aligned Positional Embedding, which embeds the textual coordinate special token into the visual space, simplifying the alignment of fine-grained spatial-temporal correspondences. Additionally, we design the Spatial-Temporal Packer, which decouples the feature compression of temporal and spatial resolutions into two distinct point-to-region attention processing streams. Furthermore, we propose ST-Align dataset with 4.3M training samples for fine-grained spatial-temporal multimodal understanding. With ST-align, we present a progressive training pipeline that aligns the visual and textual feature through sequential coarse-to-fine stages.Additionally, we introduce an ST-Align benchmark to evaluate spatial-temporal interleaved fine-grained understanding tasks, which include Spatial-Temporal Video Grounding (STVG) , Event Localization and Captioning (ELC) and Spatial Video Grounding (SVG). LLaVA-ST achieves outstanding performance on 11 benchmarks requiring fine-grained temporal, spatial, or spatial-temporal interleaving multimodal understanding. Our code, data and benchmark will be released at Our code, data and benchmark will be released at https://github.com/appletea233/LLaVA-ST .

We propose 4Real-Video, a novel framework for generating 4D videos, organized as a grid of video frames with both time and viewpoint axes. In this grid, each row contains frames sharing the same timestep, while each column contains frames from the same viewpoint. We propose a novel two-stream architecture. One stream performs viewpoint updates on columns, and the other stream performs temporal updates on rows. After each diffusion transformer layer, a synchronization layer exchanges information between the two token streams. We propose two implementations of the synchronization layer, using either hard or soft synchronization. This feedforward architecture improves upon previous work in three ways: higher inference speed, enhanced visual quality (measured by FVD, CLIP, and VideoScore), and improved temporal and viewpoint consistency (measured by VideoScore and Dust3R-Confidence).

The multi-modal nature of many vision problems calls for neural network architectures that can perform multiple tasks concurrently. Typically, such architectures have been handcrafted in the literature. However, given the size and complexity of the problem, this manual architecture exploration likely exceeds human design abilities. In this paper, we propose a principled approach, rooted in differentiable neural architecture search, to automatically define branching (tree-like) structures in the encoding stage of a multi-task neural network. To allow flexibility within resource-constrained environments, we introduce a proxyless, resource-aware loss that dynamically controls the model size. Evaluations across a variety of dense prediction tasks show that our approach consistently finds high-performing branching structures within limited resource budgets.

Recent advances in deep learning have mainly relied on Transformers due to their data dependency and ability to learn at scale. The attention module in these architectures, however, exhibits quadratic time and space in input size, limiting their scalability for long-sequence modeling. Despite recent attempts to design efficient and effective architecture backbone for multi-dimensional data, such as images and multivariate time series, existing models are either data independent, or fail to allow inter- and intra-dimension communication. Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), and more specifically Selective State Space Models, with efficient hardware-aware implementation, have shown promising potential for long sequence modeling. Motivated by the success of SSMs, we present MambaMixer, a new architecture with data-dependent weights that uses a dual selection mechanism across tokens and channels, called Selective Token and Channel Mixer. MambaMixer connects selective mixers using a weighted averaging mechanism, allowing layers to have direct access to early features. As a proof of concept, we design Vision MambaMixer (ViM2) and Time Series MambaMixer (TSM2) architectures based on the MambaMixer block and explore their performance in various vision and time series forecasting tasks. Our results underline the importance of selective mixing across both tokens and channels. In ImageNet classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation tasks, ViM2 achieves competitive performance with well-established vision models and outperforms SSM-based vision models. In time series forecasting, TSM2 achieves outstanding performance compared to state-of-the-art methods while demonstrating significantly improved computational cost. These results show that while Transformers, cross-channel attention, and MLPs are sufficient for good performance in time series forecasting, neither is necessary.

Traffic prediction is a typical spatio-temporal data mining task and has great significance to the public transportation system. Considering the demand for its grand application, we recognize key factors for an ideal spatio-temporal prediction method: efficient, lightweight, and effective. However, the current deep model-based spatio-temporal prediction solutions generally own intricate architectures with cumbersome optimization, which can hardly meet these expectations. To accomplish the above goals, we propose an intuitive and novel framework, MLPST, a pure multi-layer perceptron architecture for traffic prediction. Specifically, we first capture spatial relationships from both local and global receptive fields. Then, temporal dependencies in different intervals are comprehensively considered. Through compact and swift MLP processing, MLPST can well capture the spatial and temporal dependencies while requiring only linear computational complexity, as well as model parameters that are more than an order of magnitude lower than baselines. Extensive experiments validated the superior effectiveness and efficiency of MLPST against advanced baselines, and among models with optimal accuracy, MLPST achieves the best time and space efficiency.

This work addresses continuous space-time video super-resolution (C-STVSR) that aims to up-scale an input video both spatially and temporally by any scaling factors. One key challenge of C-STVSR is to propagate information temporally among the input video frames. To this end, we introduce a space-time local implicit neural function. It has the striking feature of learning forward motion for a continuum of pixels. We motivate the use of forward motion from the perspective of learning individual motion trajectories, as opposed to learning a mixture of motion trajectories with backward motion. To ease motion interpolation, we encode sparsely sampled forward motion extracted from the input video as the contextual input. Along with a reliability-aware splatting and decoding scheme, our framework, termed MoTIF, achieves the state-of-the-art performance on C-STVSR. The source code of MoTIF is available at https://github.com/sichun233746/MoTIF.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are well known as a promising energy-efficient alternative to conventional artificial neural networks. Subject to the preconceived impression that SNNs are sparse firing, the analysis and optimization of inherent redundancy in SNNs have been largely overlooked, thus the potential advantages of spike-based neuromorphic computing in accuracy and energy efficiency are interfered. In this work, we pose and focus on three key questions regarding the inherent redundancy in SNNs. We argue that the redundancy is induced by the spatio-temporal invariance of SNNs, which enhances the efficiency of parameter utilization but also invites lots of noise spikes. Further, we analyze the effect of spatio-temporal invariance on the spatio-temporal dynamics and spike firing of SNNs. Then, motivated by these analyses, we propose an Advance Spatial Attention (ASA) module to harness SNNs' redundancy, which can adaptively optimize their membrane potential distribution by a pair of individual spatial attention sub-modules. In this way, noise spike features are accurately regulated. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly drop the spike firing with better performance than state-of-the-art SNN baselines. Our code is available in https://github.com/BICLab/ASA-SNN.

Autoregressive models, despite their commendable performance in a myriad of generative tasks, face challenges stemming from their inherently sequential structure. Inference on these models, by design, harnesses a temporal dependency, where the current token's probability distribution is conditioned on preceding tokens. This inherent characteristic severely impedes computational efficiency during inference as a typical inference request can require more than thousands of tokens, where generating each token requires a load of entire model weights, making the inference more memory-bound. The large overhead becomes profound in real deployment where requests arrive randomly, necessitating various generation lengths. Existing solutions, such as dynamic batching and concurrent instances, introduce significant response delays and bandwidth contention, falling short of achieving optimal latency and throughput. To address these shortcomings, we propose Flover -- a temporal fusion framework for efficiently inferring multiple requests in parallel. We deconstruct the general generation pipeline into pre-processing and token generation, and equip the framework with a dedicated work scheduler for fusing the generation process temporally across all requests. By orchestrating the token-level parallelism, Flover exhibits optimal hardware efficiency and significantly spares the system resources. By further employing a fast buffer reordering algorithm that allows memory eviction of finished tasks, it brings over 11x inference speedup on GPT and 16x on LLAMA compared to the cutting-edge solutions provided by NVIDIA FasterTransformer. Crucially, by leveraging the advanced tensor parallel technique, Flover proves efficacious across diverse computational landscapes, from single-GPU setups to distributed scenarios, thereby offering robust performance optimization that adapts to variable use cases.

The text-to-video (T2V) generation models, offering convenient visual creation, have recently garnered increasing attention. Despite their substantial potential, the generated videos may present artifacts, including structural implausibility, temporal inconsistency, and a lack of motion, often resulting in near-static video. In this work, we have identified a correlation between the disparity of temporal attention maps across different blocks and the occurrence of temporal inconsistencies. Additionally, we have observed that the energy contained within the temporal attention maps is directly related to the magnitude of motion amplitude in the generated videos. Based on these observations, we present BroadWay, a training-free method to improve the quality of text-to-video generation without introducing additional parameters, augmenting memory or sampling time. Specifically, BroadWay is composed of two principal components: 1) Temporal Self-Guidance improves the structural plausibility and temporal consistency of generated videos by reducing the disparity between the temporal attention maps across various decoder blocks. 2) Fourier-based Motion Enhancement enhances the magnitude and richness of motion by amplifying the energy of the map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BroadWay significantly improves the quality of text-to-video generation with negligible additional cost.

Long-term temporal fusion is a crucial but often overlooked technique in camera-based Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) 3D perception. Existing methods are mostly in a parallel manner. While parallel fusion can benefit from long-term information, it suffers from increasing computational and memory overheads as the fusion window size grows. Alternatively, BEVFormer adopts a recurrent fusion pipeline so that history information can be efficiently integrated, yet it fails to benefit from longer temporal frames. In this paper, we explore an embarrassingly simple long-term recurrent fusion strategy built upon the LSS-based methods and find it already able to enjoy the merits from both sides, i.e., rich long-term information and efficient fusion pipeline. A temporal embedding module is further proposed to improve the model's robustness against occasionally missed frames in practical scenarios. We name this simple but effective fusing pipeline VideoBEV. Experimental results on the nuScenes benchmark show that VideoBEV obtains leading performance on various camera-based 3D perception tasks, including object detection (55.4% mAP and 62.9% NDS), segmentation (48.6% vehicle mIoU), tracking (54.8% AMOTA), and motion prediction (0.80m minADE and 0.463 EPA). Code will be available.

Activation sparsity improves compute efficiency and resource utilization in sparsity-aware neural network accelerators. As the predominant operation in DNNs is multiply-accumulate (MAC) of activations with weights to compute inner products, skipping operations where (at least) one of the two operands is zero can make inference more efficient in terms of latency and power. Spatial sparsification of activations is a popular topic in DNN literature and several methods have already been established to bias a DNN for it. On the other hand, temporal sparsity is an inherent feature of bio-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs), which neuromorphic processing exploits for hardware efficiency. Introducing and exploiting spatio-temporal sparsity, is a topic much less explored in DNN literature, but in perfect resonance with the trend in DNN, to shift from static signal processing to more streaming signal processing. Towards this goal, in this paper we introduce a new DNN layer (called Delta Activation Layer), whose sole purpose is to promote temporal sparsity of activations during training. A Delta Activation Layer casts temporal sparsity into spatial activation sparsity to be exploited when performing sparse tensor multiplications in hardware. By employing delta inference and ``the usual'' spatial sparsification heuristics during training, the resulting model learns to exploit not only spatial but also temporal activation sparsity (for a given input data distribution). One may use the Delta Activation Layer either during vanilla training or during a refinement phase. We have implemented Delta Activation Layer as an extension of the standard Tensoflow-Keras library, and applied it to train deep neural networks on the Human Action Recognition (UCF101) dataset. We report an almost 3x improvement of activation sparsity, with recoverable loss of model accuracy after longer training.

This paper tackles the problem of semi-supervised video object segmentation on resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones. We formulate this problem as a distillation task, whereby we demonstrate that small space-time-memory networks with finite memory can achieve competitive results with state of the art, but at a fraction of the computational cost (32 milliseconds per frame on a Samsung Galaxy S22). Specifically, we provide a theoretically grounded framework that unifies knowledge distillation with supervised contrastive representation learning. These models are able to jointly benefit from both pixel-wise contrastive learning and distillation from a pre-trained teacher. We validate this loss by achieving competitive J&F to state of the art on both the standard DAVIS and YouTube benchmarks, despite running up to 5x faster, and with 32x fewer parameters.

Visual autoregressive models typically adhere to a raster-order ``next-token prediction" paradigm, which overlooks the spatial and temporal locality inherent in visual content. Specifically, visual tokens exhibit significantly stronger correlations with their spatially or temporally adjacent tokens compared to those that are distant. In this paper, we propose Neighboring Autoregressive Modeling (NAR), a novel paradigm that formulates autoregressive visual generation as a progressive outpainting procedure, following a near-to-far ``next-neighbor prediction" mechanism. Starting from an initial token, the remaining tokens are decoded in ascending order of their Manhattan distance from the initial token in the spatial-temporal space, progressively expanding the boundary of the decoded region. To enable parallel prediction of multiple adjacent tokens in the spatial-temporal space, we introduce a set of dimension-oriented decoding heads, each predicting the next token along a mutually orthogonal dimension. During inference, all tokens adjacent to the decoded tokens are processed in parallel, substantially reducing the model forward steps for generation. Experiments on ImageNet256times 256 and UCF101 demonstrate that NAR achieves 2.4times and 8.6times higher throughput respectively, while obtaining superior FID/FVD scores for both image and video generation tasks compared to the PAR-4X approach. When evaluating on text-to-image generation benchmark GenEval, NAR with 0.8B parameters outperforms Chameleon-7B while using merely 0.4 of the training data. Code is available at https://github.com/ThisisBillhe/NAR.

Deep autoregressive sequence-to-sequence models have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide variety of tasks in recent years. While common architecture classes such as recurrent, convolutional, and self-attention networks make different trade-offs between the amount of computation needed per layer and the length of the critical path at training time, generation still remains an inherently sequential process. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel blockwise parallel decoding scheme in which we make predictions for multiple time steps in parallel then back off to the longest prefix validated by a scoring model. This allows for substantial theoretical improvements in generation speed when applied to architectures that can process output sequences in parallel. We verify our approach empirically through a series of experiments using state-of-the-art self-attention models for machine translation and image super-resolution, achieving iteration reductions of up to 2x over a baseline greedy decoder with no loss in quality, or up to 7x in exchange for a slight decrease in performance. In terms of wall-clock time, our fastest models exhibit real-time speedups of up to 4x over standard greedy decoding.

Traffic prediction is essential for the progression of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and the vision of smart cities. While Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have shown promise in this domain by leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) integrated with either RNNs or Transformers, they present challenges such as computational complexity, gradient issues, and resource-intensiveness. This paper addresses these challenges, advocating for three main solutions: a node-embedding approach, time series decomposition, and periodicity learning. We introduce STLinear, a minimalist model architecture designed for optimized efficiency and performance. Unlike traditional STGNNs, STlinear operates fully locally, avoiding inter-node data exchanges, and relies exclusively on linear layers, drastically cutting computational demands. Our empirical studies on real-world datasets confirm STLinear's prowess, matching or exceeding the accuracy of leading STGNNs, but with significantly reduced complexity and computation overhead (more than 95% reduction in MACs per epoch compared to state-of-the-art STGNN baseline published in 2023). In summary, STLinear emerges as a potent, efficient alternative to conventional STGNNs, with profound implications for the future of ITS and smart city initiatives.

Diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable results for video generation. Despite the encouraging performances, the generated videos are typically constrained to a small number of frames, resulting in clips lasting merely a few seconds. The primary challenges in producing longer videos include the substantial memory requirements and the extended processing time required on a single GPU. A straightforward solution would be to split the workload across multiple GPUs, which, however, leads to two issues: (1) ensuring all GPUs communicate effectively to share timing and context information, and (2) modifying existing video diffusion models, which are usually trained on short sequences, to create longer videos without additional training. To tackle these, in this paper we introduce Video-Infinity, a distributed inference pipeline that enables parallel processing across multiple GPUs for long-form video generation. Specifically, we propose two coherent mechanisms: Clip parallelism and Dual-scope attention. Clip parallelism optimizes the gathering and sharing of context information across GPUs which minimizes communication overhead, while Dual-scope attention modulates the temporal self-attention to balance local and global contexts efficiently across the devices. Together, the two mechanisms join forces to distribute the workload and enable the fast generation of long videos. Under an 8 x Nvidia 6000 Ada GPU (48G) setup, our method generates videos up to 2,300 frames in approximately 5 minutes, enabling long video generation at a speed 100 times faster than the prior methods.

To mitigate the computational complexity in the self-attention mechanism on long sequences, linear attention utilizes computation tricks to achieve linear complexity, while state space models (SSMs) popularize a favorable practice of using non-data-dependent memory pattern, i.e., emphasize the near and neglect the distant, to processing sequences. Recent studies have shown the priorities by combining them as one. However, the efficiency of linear attention remains only at the theoretical level in a causal setting, and SSMs require various designed constraints to operate effectively on specific data. Therefore, in order to unveil the true power of the hybrid design, the following two issues need to be addressed: (1) hardware-efficient implementation for linear attention and (2) stabilization of SSMs. To achieve this, we leverage the thought of tiling and hierarchy to propose CHELA (short-long Convolutions with Hardware-Efficient Linear Attention), which replaces SSMs with short-long convolutions and implements linear attention in a divide-and-conquer manner. This approach enjoys global abstraction and data-dependent selection from stable SSM and linear attention while maintaining real linear complexity. Our comprehensive experiments on the Long Range Arena benchmark and language modeling tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

How to effectively explore spatial-temporal features is important for video colorization. Instead of stacking multiple frames along the temporal dimension or recurrently propagating estimated features that will accumulate errors or cannot explore information from far-apart frames, we develop a memory-based feature propagation module that can establish reliable connections with features from far-apart frames and alleviate the influence of inaccurately estimated features. To extract better features from each frame for the above-mentioned feature propagation, we explore the features from large-pretrained visual models to guide the feature estimation of each frame so that the estimated features can model complex scenarios. In addition, we note that adjacent frames usually contain similar contents. To explore this property for better spatial and temporal feature utilization, we develop a local attention module to aggregate the features from adjacent frames in a spatial-temporal neighborhood. We formulate our memory-based feature propagation module, large-pretrained visual model guided feature estimation module, and local attention module into an end-to-end trainable network (named ColorMNet) and show that it performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods on both the benchmark datasets and real-world scenarios. The source code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/yyang181/colormnet.

Neural network architecture design requires making many crucial decisions. The common desiderata is that similar decisions, with little modifications, can be reused in a variety of tasks and applications. To satisfy that, architectures must provide promising latency and performance trade-offs, support a variety of tasks, scale efficiently with respect to the amounts of data and compute, leverage available data from other tasks, and efficiently support various hardware. To this end, we introduce AsCAN -- a hybrid architecture, combining both convolutional and transformer blocks. We revisit the key design principles of hybrid architectures and propose a simple and effective asymmetric architecture, where the distribution of convolutional and transformer blocks is asymmetric, containing more convolutional blocks in the earlier stages, followed by more transformer blocks in later stages. AsCAN supports a variety of tasks: recognition, segmentation, class-conditional image generation, and features a superior trade-off between performance and latency. We then scale the same architecture to solve a large-scale text-to-image task and show state-of-the-art performance compared to the most recent public and commercial models. Notably, even without any computation optimization for transformer blocks, our models still yield faster inference speed than existing works featuring efficient attention mechanisms, highlighting the advantages and the value of our approach.

Contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated remarkable success in various image tasks. However, how to extend CLIP with effective temporal modeling is still an open and crucial problem. Existing factorized or joint spatial-temporal modeling trades off between the efficiency and performance. While modeling temporal information within straight through tube is widely adopted in literature, we find that simple frame alignment already provides enough essence without temporal attention. To this end, in this paper, we proposed a novel Implicit Learnable Alignment (ILA) method, which minimizes the temporal modeling effort while achieving incredibly high performance. Specifically, for a frame pair, an interactive point is predicted in each frame, serving as a mutual information rich region. By enhancing the features around the interactive point, two frames are implicitly aligned. The aligned features are then pooled into a single token, which is leveraged in the subsequent spatial self-attention. Our method allows eliminating the costly or insufficient temporal self-attention in video. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and generality of our module. Particularly, the proposed ILA achieves a top-1 accuracy of 88.7% on Kinetics-400 with much fewer FLOPs compared with Swin-L and ViViT-H. Code is released at https://github.com/Francis-Rings/ILA .

Human processes video reasoning in a sequential spatio-temporal reasoning logic, we first identify the relevant frames ("when") and then analyse the spatial relationships ("where") between key objects, and finally leverage these relationships to draw inferences ("what"). However, can Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) also "reason through a sequential spatio-temporal logic" in videos? Existing Video-LLM benchmarks primarily focus on assessing object presence, neglecting relational reasoning. Consequently, it is difficult to measure whether a model truly comprehends object interactions (actions/events) in videos or merely relies on pre-trained "memory" of co-occurrences as biases in generating answers. In this work, we introduce a Video Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (V-STaR) benchmark to address these shortcomings. The key idea is to decompose video understanding into a Reverse Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (RSTR) task that simultaneously evaluates what objects are present, when events occur, and where they are located while capturing the underlying Chain-of-thought (CoT) logic. To support this evaluation, we construct a dataset to elicit the spatial-temporal reasoning process of Video-LLMs. It contains coarse-to-fine CoT questions generated by a semi-automated GPT-4-powered pipeline, embedding explicit reasoning chains to mimic human cognition. Experiments from 14 Video-LLMs on our V-STaR reveal significant gaps between current Video-LLMs and the needs for robust and consistent spatio-temporal reasoning.

We propose WaveMix -- a novel neural architecture for computer vision that is resource-efficient yet generalizable and scalable. WaveMix networks achieve comparable or better accuracy than the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks, vision transformers, and token mixers for several tasks, establishing new benchmarks for segmentation on Cityscapes; and for classification on Places-365, five EMNIST datasets, and iNAT-mini. Remarkably, WaveMix architectures require fewer parameters to achieve these benchmarks compared to the previous state-of-the-art. Moreover, when controlled for the number of parameters, WaveMix requires lesser GPU RAM, which translates to savings in time, cost, and energy. To achieve these gains we used multi-level two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (2D-DWT) in WaveMix blocks, which has the following advantages: (1) It reorganizes spatial information based on three strong image priors -- scale-invariance, shift-invariance, and sparseness of edges, (2) in a lossless manner without adding parameters, (3) while also reducing the spatial sizes of feature maps, which reduces the memory and time required for forward and backward passes, and (4) expanding the receptive field faster than convolutions do. The whole architecture is a stack of self-similar and resolution-preserving WaveMix blocks, which allows architectural flexibility for various tasks and levels of resource availability. Our code and trained models are publicly available.

Expert parallelism has been introduced as a strategy to distribute the computational workload of sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) models across multiple computing devices, facilitating the execution of these increasingly large-scale models. However, the All-to-All communication intrinsic to expert parallelism constitutes a significant overhead, diminishing the MoE models' efficiency. Current optimization approaches offer some relief, yet they are constrained by the sequential interdependence of communication and computation operations. To address this limitation, we present a novel shortcut-connected MoE architecture with overlapping parallel strategy, designated as ScMoE, which effectively decouples communication from its conventional sequence, allowing for a substantial overlap of 70% to 100% with computation. When compared with the prevalent top-2 MoE architecture, ScMoE demonstrates training speed improvements of 30% and 11%, and inference improvements of 40% and 15%, in our PCIe and NVLink hardware environments, respectively, where communication constitutes 60% and 15% of the total MoE time consumption. On the other hand, extensive experiments and theoretical analyses indicate that ScMoE not only achieves comparable but in some instances surpasses the model quality of existing approaches in vision and language tasks.

Integrating CNNs and RNNs to capture spatiotemporal dependencies is a prevalent strategy for spatiotemporal prediction tasks. However, the property of CNNs to learn local spatial information decreases their efficiency in capturing spatiotemporal dependencies, thereby limiting their prediction accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new recurrent cell, SwinLSTM, which integrates Swin Transformer blocks and the simplified LSTM, an extension that replaces the convolutional structure in ConvLSTM with the self-attention mechanism. Furthermore, we construct a network with SwinLSTM cell as the core for spatiotemporal prediction. Without using unique tricks, SwinLSTM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on Moving MNIST, Human3.6m, TaxiBJ, and KTH datasets. In particular, it exhibits a significant improvement in prediction accuracy compared to ConvLSTM. Our competitive experimental results demonstrate that learning global spatial dependencies is more advantageous for models to capture spatiotemporal dependencies. We hope that SwinLSTM can serve as a solid baseline to promote the advancement of spatiotemporal prediction accuracy. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SongTang-x/SwinLSTM.

Human motion generation stands as a significant pursuit in generative computer vision, while achieving long-sequence and efficient motion generation remains challenging. Recent advancements in state space models (SSMs), notably Mamba, have showcased considerable promise in long sequence modeling with an efficient hardware-aware design, which appears to be a promising direction to build motion generation model upon it. Nevertheless, adapting SSMs to motion generation faces hurdles since the lack of a specialized design architecture to model motion sequence. To address these challenges, we propose Motion Mamba, a simple and efficient approach that presents the pioneering motion generation model utilized SSMs. Specifically, we design a Hierarchical Temporal Mamba (HTM) block to process temporal data by ensemble varying numbers of isolated SSM modules across a symmetric U-Net architecture aimed at preserving motion consistency between frames. We also design a Bidirectional Spatial Mamba (BSM) block to bidirectionally process latent poses, to enhance accurate motion generation within a temporal frame. Our proposed method achieves up to 50% FID improvement and up to 4 times faster on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets compared to the previous best diffusion-based method, which demonstrates strong capabilities of high-quality long sequence motion modeling and real-time human motion generation. See project website https://steve-zeyu-zhang.github.io/MotionMamba/

We present an efficient encoder-free approach for video-language understanding that achieves competitive performance while significantly reducing computational overhead. Current video-language models typically rely on heavyweight image encoders (300M-1.1B parameters) or video encoders (1B-1.4B parameters), creating a substantial computational burden when processing multi-frame videos. Our method introduces a novel Spatio-Temporal Alignment Block (STAB) that directly processes video inputs without requiring pre-trained encoders while using only 45M parameters for visual processing - at least a 6.5times reduction compared to traditional approaches. The STAB architecture combines Local Spatio-Temporal Encoding for fine-grained feature extraction, efficient spatial downsampling through learned attention and separate mechanisms for modeling frame-level and video-level relationships. Our model achieves comparable or superior performance to encoder-based approaches for open-ended video question answering on standard benchmarks. The fine-grained video question-answering evaluation demonstrates our model's effectiveness, outperforming the encoder-based approaches Video-ChatGPT and Video-LLaVA in key aspects like correctness and temporal understanding. Extensive ablation studies validate our architectural choices and demonstrate the effectiveness of our spatio-temporal modeling approach while achieving 3-4times faster processing speeds than previous methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jh-yi/Video-Panda.

Temporal modeling plays a crucial role in understanding video content. To tackle this problem, previous studies built complicated temporal relations through time sequence thanks to the development of computationally powerful devices. In this work, we explore the potential of four simple arithmetic operations for temporal modeling. Specifically, we first capture auxiliary temporal cues by computing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division between pairs of extracted frame features. Then, we extract corresponding features from these cues to benefit the original temporal-irrespective domain. We term such a simple pipeline as an Arithmetic Temporal Module (ATM), which operates on the stem of a visual backbone with a plug-and-play style. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies on the instantiation of ATMs and demonstrate that this module provides powerful temporal modeling capability at a low computational cost. Moreover, the ATM is compatible with both CNNs- and ViTs-based architectures. Our results show that ATM achieves superior performance over several popular video benchmarks. Specifically, on Something-Something V1, V2 and Kinetics-400, we reach top-1 accuracy of 65.6%, 74.6%, and 89.4% respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/whwu95/ATM.

Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have been extended for text-guided video editing, yielding impressive zero-shot video editing performance. Nonetheless, the generated videos usually show spatial irregularities and temporal inconsistencies as the temporal characteristics of videos have not been faithfully modeled. In this paper, we propose an elegant yet effective Temporal-Consistent Video Editing (TCVE) method, to mitigate the temporal inconsistency challenge for robust text-guided video editing. In addition to the utilization of a pretrained 2D Unet for spatial content manipulation, we establish a dedicated temporal Unet architecture to faithfully capture the temporal coherence of the input video sequences. Furthermore, to establish coherence and interrelation between the spatial-focused and temporal-focused components, a cohesive joint spatial-temporal modeling unit is formulated. This unit effectively interconnects the temporal Unet with the pretrained 2D Unet, thereby enhancing the temporal consistency of the generated video output while simultaneously preserving the capacity for video content manipulation. Quantitative experimental results and visualization results demonstrate that TCVE achieves state-of-the-art performance in both video temporal consistency and video editing capability, surpassing existing benchmarks in the field.

Foundation models, now powering most of the exciting applications in deep learning, are almost universally based on the Transformer architecture and its core attention module. Many subquadratic-time architectures such as linear attention, gated convolution and recurrent models, and structured state space models (SSMs) have been developed to address Transformers' computational inefficiency on long sequences, but they have not performed as well as attention on important modalities such as language. We identify that a key weakness of such models is their inability to perform content-based reasoning, and make several improvements. First, simply letting the SSM parameters be functions of the input addresses their weakness with discrete modalities, allowing the model to selectively propagate or forget information along the sequence length dimension depending on the current token. Second, even though this change prevents the use of efficient convolutions, we design a hardware-aware parallel algorithm in recurrent mode. We integrate these selective SSMs into a simplified end-to-end neural network architecture without attention or even MLP blocks (Mamba). Mamba enjoys fast inference (5times higher throughput than Transformers) and linear scaling in sequence length, and its performance improves on real data up to million-length sequences. As a general sequence model backbone, Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance across several modalities such as language, audio, and genomics. On language modeling, our Mamba-3B model outperforms Transformers of the same size and matches Transformers twice its size, both in pretraining and downstream evaluation.

Recent two-stream deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) have made significant progress in recognizing human actions in videos. Despite their success, methods extending the basic two-stream ConvNet have not systematically explored possible network architectures to further exploit spatiotemporal dynamics within video sequences. Further, such networks often use different baseline two-stream networks. Therefore, the differences and the distinguishing factors between various methods using Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) or convolutional networks on temporally-constructed feature vectors (Temporal-ConvNet) are unclear. In this work, we first demonstrate a strong baseline two-stream ConvNet using ResNet-101. We use this baseline to thoroughly examine the use of both RNNs and Temporal-ConvNets for extracting spatiotemporal information. Building upon our experimental results, we then propose and investigate two different networks to further integrate spatiotemporal information: 1) temporal segment RNN and 2) Inception-style Temporal-ConvNet. We demonstrate that using both RNNs (using LSTMs) and Temporal-ConvNets on spatiotemporal feature matrices are able to exploit spatiotemporal dynamics to improve the overall performance. However, each of these methods require proper care to achieve state-of-the-art performance; for example, LSTMs require pre-segmented data or else they cannot fully exploit temporal information. Our analysis identifies specific limitations for each method that could form the basis of future work. Our experimental results on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets achieve state-of-the-art performances, 94.1% and 69.0%, respectively, without requiring extensive temporal augmentation.

Traffic forecasting has emerged as a core component of intelligent transportation systems. However, timely accurate traffic forecasting, especially long-term forecasting, still remains an open challenge due to the highly nonlinear and dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies of traffic flows. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm of Spatial-Temporal Transformer Networks (STTNs) that leverages dynamical directed spatial dependencies and long-range temporal dependencies to improve the accuracy of long-term traffic forecasting. Specifically, we present a new variant of graph neural networks, named spatial transformer, by dynamically modeling directed spatial dependencies with self-attention mechanism to capture realtime traffic conditions as well as the directionality of traffic flows. Furthermore, different spatial dependency patterns can be jointly modeled with multi-heads attention mechanism to consider diverse relationships related to different factors (e.g. similarity, connectivity and covariance). On the other hand, the temporal transformer is utilized to model long-range bidirectional temporal dependencies across multiple time steps. Finally, they are composed as a block to jointly model the spatial-temporal dependencies for accurate traffic prediction. Compared to existing works, the proposed model enables fast and scalable training over a long range spatial-temporal dependencies. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive results compared with the state-of-the-arts, especially forecasting long-term traffic flows on real-world PeMS-Bay and PeMSD7(M) datasets.

Recent works have successfully extended large-scale text-to-image models to the video domain, producing promising results but at a high computational cost and requiring a large amount of video data. In this work, we introduce ConditionVideo, a training-free approach to text-to-video generation based on the provided condition, video, and input text, by leveraging the power of off-the-shelf text-to-image generation methods (e.g., Stable Diffusion). ConditionVideo generates realistic dynamic videos from random noise or given scene videos. Our method explicitly disentangles the motion representation into condition-guided and scenery motion components. To this end, the ConditionVideo model is designed with a UNet branch and a control branch. To improve temporal coherence, we introduce sparse bi-directional spatial-temporal attention (sBiST-Attn). The 3D control network extends the conventional 2D controlnet model, aiming to strengthen conditional generation accuracy by additionally leveraging the bi-directional frames in the temporal domain. Our method exhibits superior performance in terms of frame consistency, clip score, and conditional accuracy, outperforming other compared methods.

The predictive learning of spatiotemporal sequences aims to generate future images by learning from the historical context, where the visual dynamics are believed to have modular structures that can be learned with compositional subsystems. This paper models these structures by presenting PredRNN, a new recurrent network, in which a pair of memory cells are explicitly decoupled, operate in nearly independent transition manners, and finally form unified representations of the complex environment. Concretely, besides the original memory cell of LSTM, this network is featured by a zigzag memory flow that propagates in both bottom-up and top-down directions across all layers, enabling the learned visual dynamics at different levels of RNNs to communicate. It also leverages a memory decoupling loss to keep the memory cells from learning redundant features. We further propose a new curriculum learning strategy to force PredRNN to learn long-term dynamics from context frames, which can be generalized to most sequence-to-sequence models. We provide detailed ablation studies to verify the effectiveness of each component. Our approach is shown to obtain highly competitive results on five datasets for both action-free and action-conditioned predictive learning scenarios.

Spatiotemporal predictive learning methods generally fall into two categories: recurrent-based approaches, which face challenges in parallelization and performance, and recurrent-free methods, which employ convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as encoder-decoder architectures. These methods benefit from strong inductive biases but often at the expense of scalability and generalization. This paper proposes PredFormer, a pure transformer-based framework for spatiotemporal predictive learning. Motivated by the Vision Transformers (ViT) design, PredFormer leverages carefully designed Gated Transformer blocks, following a comprehensive analysis of 3D attention mechanisms, including full-, factorized-, and interleaved-spatial-temporal attention. With its recurrent-free, transformer-based design, PredFormer is both simple and efficient, significantly outperforming previous methods by large margins. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that PredFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance. On Moving MNIST, PredFormer achieves a 51.3% reduction in MSE relative to SimVP. For TaxiBJ, the model decreases MSE by 33.1% and boosts FPS from 533 to 2364. Additionally, on WeatherBench, it reduces MSE by 11.1% while enhancing FPS from 196 to 404. These performance gains in both accuracy and efficiency demonstrate PredFormer's potential for real-world applications. The source code will be released at https://github.com/yyyujintang/PredFormer .

Despite advances in Large Multi-modal Models, applying them to long and untrimmed video content remains challenging due to limitations in context length and substantial memory overhead. These constraints often lead to significant information loss and reduced relevance in the model responses. With the exponential growth of video data across web platforms, understanding long-form video is crucial for advancing generalized intelligence. In this paper, we introduce SALOVA: Segment-Augmented LOng Video Assistant, a novel video-LLM framework designed to enhance the comprehension of lengthy video content through targeted retrieval process. We address two main challenges to achieve it: (i) We present the SceneWalk dataset, a high-quality collection of 87.8K long videos, each densely captioned at the segment level to enable models to capture scene continuity and maintain rich descriptive context. (ii) We develop robust architectural designs integrating dynamic routing mechanism and spatio-temporal projector to efficiently retrieve and process relevant video segments based on user queries. Our framework mitigates the limitations of current video-LMMs by allowing for precise identification and retrieval of relevant video segments in response to queries, thereby improving the contextual relevance of the generated responses. Through extensive experiments, SALOVA demonstrates enhanced capability in processing complex long-form videos, showing significant capability to maintain contextual integrity across extended sequences.

The mainstream of the existing approaches for video prediction builds up their models based on a Single-In-Single-Out (SISO) architecture, which takes the current frame as input to predict the next frame in a recursive manner. This way often leads to severe performance degradation when they try to extrapolate a longer period of future, thus limiting the practical use of the prediction model. Alternatively, a Multi-In-Multi-Out (MIMO) architecture that outputs all the future frames at one shot naturally breaks the recursive manner and therefore prevents error accumulation. However, only a few MIMO models for video prediction are proposed and they only achieve inferior performance due to the date. The real strength of the MIMO model in this area is not well noticed and is largely under-explored. Motivated by that, we conduct a comprehensive investigation in this paper to thoroughly exploit how far a simple MIMO architecture can go. Surprisingly, our empirical studies reveal that a simple MIMO model can outperform the state-of-the-art work with a large margin much more than expected, especially in dealing with longterm error accumulation. After exploring a number of ways and designs, we propose a new MIMO architecture based on extending the pure Transformer with local spatio-temporal blocks and a new multi-output decoder, namely MIMO-VP, to establish a new standard in video prediction. We evaluate our model in four highly competitive benchmarks (Moving MNIST, Human3.6M, Weather, KITTI). Extensive experiments show that our model wins 1st place on all the benchmarks with remarkable performance gains and surpasses the best SISO model in all aspects including efficiency, quantity, and quality. We believe our model can serve as a new baseline to facilitate the future research of video prediction tasks. The code will be released.

Natural data is redundant yet predominant architectures tile computation uniformly across their input and output space. We propose the Recurrent Interface Networks (RINs), an attention-based architecture that decouples its core computation from the dimensionality of the data, enabling adaptive computation for more scalable generation of high-dimensional data. RINs focus the bulk of computation (i.e. global self-attention) on a set of latent tokens, using cross-attention to read and write (i.e. route) information between latent and data tokens. Stacking RIN blocks allows bottom-up (data to latent) and top-down (latent to data) feedback, leading to deeper and more expressive routing. While this routing introduces challenges, this is less problematic in recurrent computation settings where the task (and routing problem) changes gradually, such as iterative generation with diffusion models. We show how to leverage recurrence by conditioning the latent tokens at each forward pass of the reverse diffusion process with those from prior computation, i.e. latent self-conditioning. RINs yield state-of-the-art pixel diffusion models for image and video generation, scaling to 1024X1024 images without cascades or guidance, while being domain-agnostic and up to 10X more efficient than 2D and 3D U-Nets.

We present a new data-driven video inpainting method for recovering missing regions of video frames. A novel deep learning architecture is proposed which contains two sub-networks: a temporal structure inference network and a spatial detail recovering network. The temporal structure inference network is built upon a 3D fully convolutional architecture: it only learns to complete a low-resolution video volume given the expensive computational cost of 3D convolution. The low resolution result provides temporal guidance to the spatial detail recovering network, which performs image-based inpainting with a 2D fully convolutional network to produce recovered video frames in their original resolution. Such two-step network design ensures both the spatial quality of each frame and the temporal coherence across frames. Our method jointly trains both sub-networks in an end-to-end manner. We provide qualitative and quantitative evaluation on three datasets, demonstrating that our method outperforms previous learning-based video inpainting methods.

Many real-world systems exhibit temporal, dynamic behaviors, which are captured as time series of complex agent interactions. To perform temporal reasoning, current methods primarily encode temporal dynamics through simple sequence-based models. However, in general these models fail to efficiently capture the full spectrum of rich dynamics in the input, since the dynamics is not uniformly distributed. In particular, relevant information might be harder to extract and computing power is wasted for processing all individual timesteps, even if they contain no significant changes or no new information. Here we propose TimeGraphs, a novel approach that characterizes dynamic interactions as a hierarchical temporal graph, diverging from traditional sequential representations. Our approach models the interactions using a compact graph-based representation, enabling adaptive reasoning across diverse time scales. Adopting a self-supervised method, TimeGraphs constructs a multi-level event hierarchy from a temporal input, which is then used to efficiently reason about the unevenly distributed dynamics. This construction process is scalable and incremental to accommodate streaming data. We evaluate TimeGraphs on multiple datasets with complex, dynamic agent interactions, including a football simulator, the Resistance game, and the MOMA human activity dataset. The results demonstrate both robustness and efficiency of TimeGraphs on a range of temporal reasoning tasks. Our approach obtains state-of-the-art performance and leads to a performance increase of up to 12.2% on event prediction and recognition tasks over current approaches. Our experiments further demonstrate a wide array of capabilities including zero-shot generalization, robustness in case of data sparsity, and adaptability to streaming data flow.

Prior works on event-based optical flow estimation have investigated several gradient-based learning methods to train neural networks for predicting optical flow. However, they do not utilize the fast data rate of event data streams and rely on a spatio-temporal representation constructed from a collection of events over a fixed period of time (often between two grayscale frames). As a result, optical flow is only evaluated at a frequency much lower than the rate data is produced by an event-based camera, leading to a temporally sparse optical flow estimation. To predict temporally dense optical flow, we cast the problem as a sequential learning task and propose a training methodology to train sequential networks for continuous prediction on an event stream. We propose two types of networks: one focused on performance and another focused on compute efficiency. We first train long-short term memory networks (LSTMs) on the DSEC dataset and demonstrated 10x temporally dense optical flow estimation over existing flow estimation approaches. The additional benefit of having a memory to draw long temporal correlations back in time results in a 19.7% improvement in flow prediction accuracy of LSTMs over similar networks with no memory elements. We subsequently show that the inherent recurrence of spiking neural networks (SNNs) enables them to learn and estimate temporally dense optical flow with 31.8% lesser parameters than LSTM, but with a slightly increased error. This demonstrates potential for energy-efficient implementation of fast optical flow prediction using SNNs.

Forecasting future events based on evidence of current conditions is an innate skill of human beings, and key for predicting the outcome of any decision making. In artificial vision for example, we would like to predict the next human action before it happens, without observing the future video frames associated to it. Computer vision models for action anticipation are expected to collect the subtle evidence in the preamble of the target actions. In prior studies recurrence modeling often leads to better performance, the strong temporal inference is assumed to be a key element for reasonable prediction. To this end, we propose a unified recurrence modeling for video action anticipation via message passing framework. The information flow in space-time can be described by the interaction between vertices and edges, and the changes of vertices for each incoming frame reflects the underlying dynamics. Our model leverages self-attention as the building blocks for each of the message passing functions. In addition, we introduce different edge learning strategies that can be end-to-end optimized to gain better flexibility for the connectivity between vertices. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous works on the large-scale EPIC-Kitchen dataset.

The pursuit of controllability as a higher standard of visual content creation has yielded remarkable progress in customizable image synthesis. However, achieving controllable video synthesis remains challenging due to the large variation of temporal dynamics and the requirement of cross-frame temporal consistency. Based on the paradigm of compositional generation, this work presents VideoComposer that allows users to flexibly compose a video with textual conditions, spatial conditions, and more importantly temporal conditions. Specifically, considering the characteristic of video data, we introduce the motion vector from compressed videos as an explicit control signal to provide guidance regarding temporal dynamics. In addition, we develop a Spatio-Temporal Condition encoder (STC-encoder) that serves as a unified interface to effectively incorporate the spatial and temporal relations of sequential inputs, with which the model could make better use of temporal conditions and hence achieve higher inter-frame consistency. Extensive experimental results suggest that VideoComposer is able to control the spatial and temporal patterns simultaneously within a synthesized video in various forms, such as text description, sketch sequence, reference video, or even simply hand-crafted motions. The code and models will be publicly available at https://videocomposer.github.io.

Attention for transformers is a critical workload that has recently received significant "attention" as a target for custom acceleration. Yet, while prior work succeeds in reducing attention's memory-bandwidth requirements, it creates load imbalance between attention operators (resulting in severe compute under-utilization) and requires on-chip memory that scales with sequence length (which is expected to grow over time). This paper ameliorates these issues, enabling attention with nearly 100% compute utilization, no off-chip memory traffic bottlenecks, and on-chip buffer size requirements that are independent of sequence length. The main conceptual contribution is to use a recently proposed abstraction -- the cascade of Einsums -- to describe, formalize and taxonomize the space of attention algorithms that appear in the literature. In particular, we show how Einsum cascades can be used to infer non-trivial lower bounds on the number of passes a kernel must take through its input data, which has implications for either required on-chip buffer capacity or memory traffic. We show how this notion can be used to meaningfully divide the space of attention algorithms into several categories and use these categories to inform our design process. Based on the above characterization, we propose FuseMax -- a novel mapping of attention onto a spatial array-style architecture. On attention, in an iso-area comparison, FuseMax achieves an average 6.7times speedup over the prior state-of-the-art FLAT while using 79% of the energy. Similarly, on the full end-to-end transformer inference, FuseMax achieves an average 5.3times speedup over FLAT using 83% of the energy.

We introduce VideoMamba, a novel adaptation of the pure Mamba architecture, specifically designed for video recognition. Unlike transformers that rely on self-attention mechanisms leading to high computational costs by quadratic complexity, VideoMamba leverages Mamba's linear complexity and selective SSM mechanism for more efficient processing. The proposed Spatio-Temporal Forward and Backward SSM allows the model to effectively capture the complex relationship between non-sequential spatial and sequential temporal information in video. Consequently, VideoMamba is not only resource-efficient but also effective in capturing long-range dependency in videos, demonstrated by competitive performance and outstanding efficiency on a variety of video understanding benchmarks. Our work highlights the potential of VideoMamba as a powerful tool for video understanding, offering a simple yet effective baseline for future research in video analysis.

Window-based transformers excel in large-scale point cloud understanding by capturing context-aware representations with affordable attention computation in a more localized manner. However, the sparse nature of point clouds leads to a significant variance in the number of voxels per window. Existing methods group the voxels in each window into fixed-length sequences through extensive sorting and padding operations, resulting in a non-negligible computational and memory overhead. In this paper, we introduce ScatterFormer, which to the best of our knowledge, is the first to directly apply attention to voxels across different windows as a single sequence. The key of ScatterFormer is a Scattered Linear Attention (SLA) module, which leverages the pre-computation of key-value pairs in linear attention to enable parallel computation on the variable-length voxel sequences divided by windows. Leveraging the hierarchical structure of GPUs and shared memory, we propose a chunk-wise algorithm that reduces the SLA module's latency to less than 1 millisecond on moderate GPUs. Furthermore, we develop a cross-window interaction module that improves the locality and connectivity of voxel features across different windows, eliminating the need for extensive window shifting. Our proposed ScatterFormer demonstrates 73.8 mAP (L2) on the Waymo Open Dataset and 72.4 NDS on the NuScenes dataset, running at an outstanding detection rate of 23 FPS.The code is available at https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer{https://github.com/skyhehe123/ScatterFormer}.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising energy-efficient models for neuromorphic computing. For training the non-differentiable SNN models, the backpropagation through time (BPTT) with surrogate gradients (SG) method has achieved high performance. However, this method suffers from considerable memory cost and training time during training. In this paper, we propose the Spatial Learning Through Time (SLTT) method that can achieve high performance while greatly improving training efficiency compared with BPTT. First, we show that the backpropagation of SNNs through the temporal domain contributes just a little to the final calculated gradients. Thus, we propose to ignore the unimportant routes in the computational graph during backpropagation. The proposed method reduces the number of scalar multiplications and achieves a small memory occupation that is independent of the total time steps. Furthermore, we propose a variant of SLTT, called SLTT-K, that allows backpropagation only at K time steps, then the required number of scalar multiplications is further reduced and is independent of the total time steps. Experiments on both static and neuromorphic datasets demonstrate superior training efficiency and performance of our SLTT. In particular, our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ImageNet, while the memory cost and training time are reduced by more than 70% and 50%, respectively, compared with BPTT.

Motion modeling is critical in flow-based Video Frame Interpolation (VFI). Existing paradigms either consider linear combinations of bidirectional flows or directly predict bilateral flows for given timestamps without exploring favorable motion priors, thus lacking the capability of effectively modeling spatiotemporal dynamics in real-world videos. To address this limitation, in this study, we introduce Generalizable Implicit Motion Modeling (GIMM), a novel and effective approach to motion modeling for VFI. Specifically, to enable GIMM as an effective motion modeling paradigm, we design a motion encoding pipeline to model spatiotemporal motion latent from bidirectional flows extracted from pre-trained flow estimators, effectively representing input-specific motion priors. Then, we implicitly predict arbitrary-timestep optical flows within two adjacent input frames via an adaptive coordinate-based neural network, with spatiotemporal coordinates and motion latent as inputs. Our GIMM can be smoothly integrated with existing flow-based VFI works without further modifications. We show that GIMM performs better than the current state of the art on the VFI benchmarks.

Scaling multi-dimensional transformers to long sequences is indispensable across various domains. However, the challenges of large memory requirements and slow speeds of such sequences necessitate sequence parallelism. All existing approaches fall under the category of embedded sequence parallelism, which are limited to shard along a single sequence dimension, thereby introducing significant communication overhead. However, the nature of multi-dimensional transformers involves independent calculations across multiple sequence dimensions. To this end, we propose Dynamic Sequence Parallelism (DSP) as a novel abstraction of sequence parallelism. DSP dynamically switches the parallel dimension among all sequences according to the computation stage with efficient resharding strategy. DSP offers significant reductions in communication costs, adaptability across modules, and ease of implementation with minimal constraints. Experimental evaluations demonstrate DSP's superiority over state-of-the-art embedded sequence parallelism methods by remarkable throughput improvements ranging from 32.2% to 10x, with less than 25% communication volume.

The recent wave of AI-generated content has witnessed the great development and success of Text-to-Image (T2I) technologies. By contrast, Text-to-Video (T2V) still falls short of expectations though attracting increasing interests. Existing works either train from scratch or adapt large T2I model to videos, both of which are computation and resource expensive. In this work, we propose a Simple Diffusion Adapter (SimDA) that fine-tunes only 24M out of 1.1B parameters of a strong T2I model, adapting it to video generation in a parameter-efficient way. In particular, we turn the T2I model for T2V by designing light-weight spatial and temporal adapters for transfer learning. Besides, we change the original spatial attention to the proposed Latent-Shift Attention (LSA) for temporal consistency. With similar model architecture, we further train a video super-resolution model to generate high-definition (1024x1024) videos. In addition to T2V generation in the wild, SimDA could also be utilized in one-shot video editing with only 2 minutes tuning. Doing so, our method could minimize the training effort with extremely few tunable parameters for model adaptation.

Recent successes in autoregressive (AR) generation models, such as the GPT series in natural language processing, have motivated efforts to replicate this success in visual tasks. Some works attempt to extend this approach to autonomous driving by building video-based world models capable of generating realistic future video sequences and predicting ego states. However, prior works tend to produce unsatisfactory results, as the classic GPT framework is designed to handle 1D contextual information, such as text, and lacks the inherent ability to model the spatial and temporal dynamics essential for video generation. In this paper, we present DrivingWorld, a GPT-style world model for autonomous driving, featuring several spatial-temporal fusion mechanisms. This design enables effective modeling of both spatial and temporal dynamics, facilitating high-fidelity, long-duration video generation. Specifically, we propose a next-state prediction strategy to model temporal coherence between consecutive frames and apply a next-token prediction strategy to capture spatial information within each frame. To further enhance generalization ability, we propose a novel masking strategy and reweighting strategy for token prediction to mitigate long-term drifting issues and enable precise control. Our work demonstrates the ability to produce high-fidelity and consistent video clips of over 40 seconds in duration, which is over 2 times longer than state-of-the-art driving world models. Experiments show that, in contrast to prior works, our method achieves superior visual quality and significantly more accurate controllable future video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/YvanYin/DrivingWorld.

This paper addresses the task of space-time video super-resolution (ST-VSR). Existing methods generally suffer from inaccurate motion estimation and motion compensation (MEMC) problems for large motions. Inspired by recent progress in physics-informed neural networks, we model the challenges of MEMC in ST-VSR as a mapping between two continuous function spaces. Specifically, our approach transforms independent low-resolution representations in the coarse-grained continuous function space into refined representations with enriched spatiotemporal details in the fine-grained continuous function space. To achieve efficient and accurate MEMC, we design a Galerkin-type attention function to perform frame alignment and temporal interpolation. Due to the linear complexity of the Galerkin-type attention mechanism, our model avoids patch partitioning and offers global receptive fields, enabling precise estimation of large motions. The experimental results show that the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art techniques in both fixed-size and continuous space-time video super-resolution tasks.

Knowledge about the hidden factors that determine particular system dynamics is crucial for both explaining them and pursuing goal-directed interventions. Inferring these factors from time series data without supervision remains an open challenge. Here, we focus on spatiotemporal processes, including wave propagation and weather dynamics, for which we assume that universal causes (e.g. physics) apply throughout space and time. A recently introduced DIstributed SpatioTemporal graph Artificial Neural network Architecture (DISTANA) is used and enhanced to learn such processes, requiring fewer parameters and achieving significantly more accurate predictions compared to temporal convolutional neural networks and other related approaches. We show that DISTANA, when combined with a retrospective latent state inference principle called active tuning, can reliably derive location-respective hidden causal factors. In a current weather prediction benchmark, DISTANA infers our planet's land-sea mask solely by observing temperature dynamics and, meanwhile, uses the self inferred information to improve its own future temperature predictions.

Recent advances in video-based multimodal large language models (Video-LLMs) have significantly improved video understanding by processing videos as sequences of image frames. However, many existing methods treat frames independently in the vision backbone, lacking explicit temporal modeling, which limits their ability to capture dynamic patterns and efficiently handle long videos. To address these limitations, we introduce STORM (Spatiotemporal TOken Reduction for Multimodal LLMs), a novel architecture incorporating a dedicated temporal encoder between the image encoder and the LLM. Our temporal encoder leverages the Mamba State Space Model to integrate temporal information into image tokens, generating enriched representations that preserve inter-frame dynamics across the entire video sequence. This enriched encoding not only enhances video reasoning capabilities but also enables effective token reduction strategies, including test-time sampling and training-based temporal and spatial pooling, substantially reducing computational demands on the LLM without sacrificing key temporal information. By integrating these techniques, our approach simultaneously reduces training and inference latency while improving performance, enabling efficient and robust video understanding over extended temporal contexts. Extensive evaluations show that STORM achieves state-of-the-art results across various long video understanding benchmarks (more than 5\% improvement on MLVU and LongVideoBench) while reducing the computation costs by up to 8times and the decoding latency by 2.4-2.9times for the fixed numbers of input frames. Project page is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/storm

The success of deep learning models has led to their adaptation and adoption by prominent video understanding methods. The majority of these approaches encode features in a joint space-time modality for which the inner workings and learned representations are difficult to visually interpret. We propose LEArned Preconscious Synthesis (LEAPS), an architecture-independent method for synthesizing videos from the internal spatiotemporal representations of models. Using a stimulus video and a target class, we prime a fixed space-time model and iteratively optimize a video initialized with random noise. Additional regularizers are used to improve the feature diversity of the synthesized videos alongside the cross-frame temporal coherence of motions. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the applicability of LEAPS by inverting a range of spatiotemporal convolutional and attention-based architectures trained on Kinetics-400, which to the best of our knowledge has not been previously accomplished.

We present W.A.L.T, a transformer-based approach for photorealistic video generation via diffusion modeling. Our approach has two key design decisions. First, we use a causal encoder to jointly compress images and videos within a unified latent space, enabling training and generation across modalities. Second, for memory and training efficiency, we use a window attention architecture tailored for joint spatial and spatiotemporal generative modeling. Taken together these design decisions enable us to achieve state-of-the-art performance on established video (UCF-101 and Kinetics-600) and image (ImageNet) generation benchmarks without using classifier free guidance. Finally, we also train a cascade of three models for the task of text-to-video generation consisting of a base latent video diffusion model, and two video super-resolution diffusion models to generate videos of 512 times 896 resolution at 8 frames per second.

We present a self-supervised Contrastive Video Representation Learning (CVRL) method to learn spatiotemporal visual representations from unlabeled videos. Our representations are learned using a contrastive loss, where two augmented clips from the same short video are pulled together in the embedding space, while clips from different videos are pushed away. We study what makes for good data augmentations for video self-supervised learning and find that both spatial and temporal information are crucial. We carefully design data augmentations involving spatial and temporal cues. Concretely, we propose a temporally consistent spatial augmentation method to impose strong spatial augmentations on each frame of the video while maintaining the temporal consistency across frames. We also propose a sampling-based temporal augmentation method to avoid overly enforcing invariance on clips that are distant in time. On Kinetics-600, a linear classifier trained on the representations learned by CVRL achieves 70.4% top-1 accuracy with a 3D-ResNet-50 (R3D-50) backbone, outperforming ImageNet supervised pre-training by 15.7% and SimCLR unsupervised pre-training by 18.8% using the same inflated R3D-50. The performance of CVRL can be further improved to 72.9% with a larger R3D-152 (2x filters) backbone, significantly closing the gap between unsupervised and supervised video representation learning. Our code and models will be available at https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/official/.

Modern neural recording techniques allow neuroscientists to obtain spiking activity of multiple neurons from different brain regions over long time periods, which requires new statistical methods to be developed for understanding structure of the large-scale data. In this paper, we develop a bi-clustering method to cluster the neural spiking activity spatially and temporally, according to their low-dimensional latent structures. The spatial (neuron) clusters are defined by the latent trajectories within each neural population, while the temporal (state) clusters are defined by (populationally) synchronous local linear dynamics shared with different periods. To flexibly extract the bi-clustering structure, we build the model non-parametrically, and develop an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to sample the posterior distributions of model parameters. Validating our proposed MCMC algorithm through simulations, we find the method can recover unknown parameters and true bi-clustering structures successfully. We then apply the proposed bi-clustering method to multi-regional neural recordings under different experiment settings, where we find that simultaneously considering latent trajectories and spatial-temporal clustering structures can provide us with a more accurate and interpretable result. Overall, the proposed method provides scientific insights for large-scale (counting) time series with elongated recording periods, and it can potentially have application beyond neuroscience.

Traditional convolutional neural networks have a limited receptive field while transformer-based networks are mediocre in constructing long-term dependency from the perspective of computational complexity. Such the bottleneck poses a significant challenge when processing long video sequences in video analysis tasks. Very recently, the state space models (SSMs) with efficient hardware-aware designs, famous by Mamba, have exhibited impressive achievements in long sequence modeling, which facilitates the development of deep neural networks on many vision tasks. To better capture available cues in video frames, this paper presents a generic Video Vision Mamba-based framework for medical video object segmentation tasks, named Vivim. Our Vivim can effectively compress the long-term spatiotemporal representation into sequences at varying scales by our designed Temporal Mamba Block. Compared to existing video-level Transformer-based methods, our model maintains excellent segmentation results with better speed performance. Extensive experiments on the breast US dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our Vivim. The code for Vivim is available at: https://github.com/scott-yjyang/Vivim.

Transformer achieves promising results on various tasks. However, self-attention suffers from quadratic memory requirements with respect to the sequence length. Existing work focuses on reducing time and space complexity from an algorithm perspective. In this work, we propose sequence parallelism, a memory-efficient parallelism method to help us break input sequence length limitation and train with longer sequences on GPUs efficiently. Our approach is compatible with most existing parallelisms (e.g. data parallelism, pipeline parallelism and tensor parallelism), which means our sequence parallelism makes 4D parallelism possible. More importantly, we no longer require a single device to hold the whole sequence. That is, with sparse attention, our sequence parallelism enables us to train transformer with infinite long sequence. Specifically, we split the input sequence into multiple chunks and feed each chunk into its corresponding device (i.e. GPU). To compute the attention output, we integrated ring-style communication with self-attention calculation and proposed Ring Self-Attention (RSA). Experiments show that sequence parallelism performs well when scaling with batch size and sequence length. Compared with tensor parallelism, our approach achieved 13.7times and 3.0times maximum batch size and sequence length respectively when scaling up to 64 NVIDIA P100 GPUs. With sparse attention, sequence can handle sequence with over 114K tokens, which is over 27times longer than existing sparse attention works holding the whole sequence on a single device.

It has long been known in both neuroscience and AI that ``binding'' between neurons leads to a form of competitive learning where representations are compressed in order to represent more abstract concepts in deeper layers of the network. More recently, it was also hypothesized that dynamic (spatiotemporal) representations play an important role in both neuroscience and AI. Building on these ideas, we introduce Artificial Kuramoto Oscillatory Neurons (AKOrN) as a dynamical alternative to threshold units, which can be combined with arbitrary connectivity designs such as fully connected, convolutional, or attentive mechanisms. Our generalized Kuramoto updates bind neurons together through their synchronization dynamics. We show that this idea provides performance improvements across a wide spectrum of tasks such as unsupervised object discovery, adversarial robustness, calibrated uncertainty quantification, and reasoning. We believe that these empirical results show the importance of rethinking our assumptions at the most basic neuronal level of neural representation, and in particular show the importance of dynamical representations.

Graph Neural Networks have gained huge interest in the past few years. These powerful algorithms expanded deep learning models to non-Euclidean space and were able to achieve state of art performance in various applications including recommender systems and social networks. However, this performance is based on static graph structures assumption which limits the Graph Neural Networks performance when the data varies with time. Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks are extension of Graph Neural Networks that takes the time factor into account. Recently, various Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Network algorithms were proposed and achieved superior performance compared to other deep learning algorithms in several time dependent applications. This survey discusses interesting topics related to Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks, including algorithms, applications, and open challenges.

To generate accurate videos, algorithms have to understand the spatial and temporal dependencies in the world. Current algorithms enable accurate predictions over short horizons but tend to suffer from temporal inconsistencies. When generated content goes out of view and is later revisited, the model invents different content instead. Despite this severe limitation, no established benchmarks on complex data exist for rigorously evaluating video generation with long temporal dependencies. In this paper, we curate 3 challenging video datasets with long-range dependencies by rendering walks through 3D scenes of procedural mazes, Minecraft worlds, and indoor scans. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of current models and observe their limitations in temporal consistency. Moreover, we introduce the Temporally Consistent Transformer (TECO), a generative model that substantially improves long-term consistency while also reducing sampling time. By compressing its input sequence into fewer embeddings, applying a temporal transformer, and expanding back using a spatial MaskGit, TECO outperforms existing models across many metrics. Videos are available on the website: https://wilson1yan.github.io/teco

Neural graphics primitives are faster and achieve higher quality when their neural networks are augmented by spatial data structures that hold trainable features arranged in a grid. However, existing feature grids either come with a large memory footprint (dense or factorized grids, trees, and hash tables) or slow performance (index learning and vector quantization). In this paper, we show that a hash table with learned probes has neither disadvantage, resulting in a favorable combination of size and speed. Inference is faster than unprobed hash tables at equal quality while training is only 1.2-2.6x slower, significantly outperforming prior index learning approaches. We arrive at this formulation by casting all feature grids into a common framework: they each correspond to a lookup function that indexes into a table of feature vectors. In this framework, the lookup functions of existing data structures can be combined by simple arithmetic combinations of their indices, resulting in Pareto optimal compression and speed.

We present VideoFactory, an innovative framework for generating high-quality open-domain videos. VideoFactory excels in producing high-definition (1376x768), widescreen (16:9) videos without watermarks, creating an engaging user experience. Generating videos guided by text instructions poses significant challenges, such as modeling the complex relationship between space and time, and the lack of large-scale text-video paired data. Previous approaches extend pretrained text-to-image generation models by adding temporal 1D convolution/attention modules for video generation. However, these approaches overlook the importance of jointly modeling space and time, inevitably leading to temporal distortions and misalignment between texts and videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that strengthens the interaction between spatial and temporal perceptions. In particular, we utilize a swapped cross-attention mechanism in 3D windows that alternates the "query" role between spatial and temporal blocks, enabling mutual reinforcement for each other. To fully unlock model capabilities for high-quality video generation, we curate a large-scale video dataset called HD-VG-130M. This dataset comprises 130 million text-video pairs from the open-domain, ensuring high-definition, widescreen and watermark-free characters. Objective metrics and user studies demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of per-frame quality, temporal correlation, and text-video alignment, with clear margins.

As the development of large-scale Generative AI models evolve beyond text (1D) generation to include image (2D) and video (3D) generation, processing spatial and temporal information presents unique challenges to quality, performance, and efficiency. We present the first work towards understanding this new system design space for multi-modal text-to-image (TTI) and text-to-video (TTV) generation models. Current model architecture designs are bifurcated into 2 categories: Diffusion- and Transformer-based models. Our systematic performance characterization on a suite of eight representative TTI/TTV models shows that after state-of-the-art optimization techniques such as Flash Attention are applied, Convolution accounts for up to 44% of execution time for Diffusion-based TTI models, while Linear layers consume up to 49% of execution time for Transformer-based models. We additionally observe that Diffusion-based TTI models resemble the Prefill stage of LLM inference, and benefit from 1.1-2.5x greater speedup from Flash Attention than Transformer-based TTI models that resemble the Decode phase. Since optimizations designed for LLMs do not map directly onto TTI/TTV models, we must conduct a thorough characterization of these workloads to gain insights for new optimization opportunities. In doing so, we define sequence length in the context of TTI/TTV models and observe sequence length can vary up to 4x in Diffusion model inference. We additionally observe temporal aspects of TTV workloads pose unique system bottlenecks, with Temporal Attention accounting for over 60% of total Attention time. Overall, our in-depth system performance characterization is a critical first step towards designing efficient and deployable systems for emerging TTI/TTV workloads.

Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generation using diffusion models have enabled cost-effective video-editing applications by leveraging pre-trained models, eliminating the need for resource-intensive training. However, the frame-independence of T2I generation often results in poor temporal consistency. Existing methods address this issue through temporal layer fine-tuning or inference-based temporal propagation, but these approaches suffer from high training costs or limited temporal coherence. To address these challenges, we propose a General and Efficient Adapter (GE-Adapter) that integrates temporal-spatial and semantic consistency with Baliteral DDIM inversion. This framework introduces three key components: (1) Frame-based Temporal Consistency Blocks (FTC Blocks) to capture frame-specific features and enforce smooth inter-frame transitions via temporally-aware loss functions; (2) Channel-dependent Spatial Consistency Blocks (SCD Blocks) employing bilateral filters to enhance spatial coherence by reducing noise and artifacts; and (3) Token-based Semantic Consistency Module (TSC Module) to maintain semantic alignment using shared prompt tokens and frame-specific tokens. Our method significantly improves perceptual quality, text-image alignment, and temporal coherence, as demonstrated on the MSR-VTT dataset. Additionally, it achieves enhanced fidelity and frame-to-frame coherence, offering a practical solution for T2V editing.

We introduce Lumiere -- a text-to-video diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion -- a pivotal challenge in video synthesis. To this end, we introduce a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution -- an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve. By deploying both spatial and (importantly) temporal down- and up-sampling and leveraging a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, our model learns to directly generate a full-frame-rate, low-resolution video by processing it in multiple space-time scales. We demonstrate state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results, and show that our design easily facilitates a wide range of content creation tasks and video editing applications, including image-to-video, video inpainting, and stylized generation.

Models that can simulate how environments change in response to actions can be used by agents to plan and act efficiently. We improve on previous environment simulators from high-dimensional pixel observations by introducing recurrent neural networks that are able to make temporally and spatially coherent predictions for hundreds of time-steps into the future. We present an in-depth analysis of the factors affecting performance, providing the most extensive attempt to advance the understanding of the properties of these models. We address the issue of computationally inefficiency with a model that does not need to generate a high-dimensional image at each time-step. We show that our approach can be used to improve exploration and is adaptable to many diverse environments, namely 10 Atari games, a 3D car racing environment, and complex 3D mazes.

With the growing scale and complexity of video data, efficiently processing long video sequences poses significant challenges due to the quadratic increase in memory and computational demands associated with existing transformer-based Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs). To address these issues, we introduce Video-Ma^2mba, a novel architecture that incorporates State Space Models (SSMs) within the Mamba-2 framework, replacing the attention mechanisms. This allows the LMMs to scale linearly in terms of time and memory requirements, making it feasible to handle long-duration video content. Furthermore, we enhance the memory efficiency introducing the Multi-Axis Gradient Checkpointing (MA-GC) method, which strategically manages memory by retaining only essential activations across multiple computational axes. Our approach significantly reduces the memory footprint compared to standard gradient checkpointing. Empirical analyses show that Video-Ma^2mba can process extensive video sequences-equivalent to millions of tokens or over two hours of continuous sequences at 1 FPS-on a single GPU. By maintaining a detailed capture of temporal dynamics, our model improves the accuracy and relevance of responses in long video understanding tasks, demonstrating substantial advantages over existing frameworks.

Efficient neural representations for dynamic video scenes are critical for applications ranging from video compression to interactive simulations. Yet, existing methods often face challenges related to high memory usage, lengthy training times, and temporal consistency. To address these issues, we introduce a novel neural video representation that combines 3D Gaussian splatting with continuous camera motion modeling. By leveraging Neural ODEs, our approach learns smooth camera trajectories while maintaining an explicit 3D scene representation through Gaussians. Additionally, we introduce a spatiotemporal hierarchical learning strategy, progressively refining spatial and temporal features to enhance reconstruction quality and accelerate convergence. This memory-efficient approach achieves high-quality rendering at impressive speeds. Experimental results show that our hierarchical learning, combined with robust camera motion modeling, captures complex dynamic scenes with strong temporal consistency, achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse video datasets in both high- and low-motion scenarios.

Occlusions between consecutive frames have long posed a significant challenge in optical flow estimation. The inherent ambiguity introduced by occlusions directly violates the brightness constancy constraint and considerably hinders pixel-to-pixel matching. To address this issue, multi-frame optical flow methods leverage adjacent frames to mitigate the local ambiguity. Nevertheless, prior multi-frame methods predominantly adopt recursive flow estimation, resulting in a considerable computational overlap. In contrast, we propose a streamlined in-batch framework that eliminates the need for extensive redundant recursive computations while concurrently developing effective spatio-temporal modeling approaches under in-batch estimation constraints. Specifically, we present a Streamlined In-batch Multi-frame (SIM) pipeline tailored to video input, attaining a similar level of time efficiency to two-frame networks. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient Integrative Spatio-temporal Coherence (ISC) modeling method for effective spatio-temporal modeling during the encoding phase, which introduces no additional parameter overhead. Additionally, we devise a Global Temporal Regressor (GTR) that effectively explores temporal relations during decoding. Benefiting from the efficient SIM pipeline and effective modules, StreamFlow not only excels in terms of performance on the challenging KITTI and Sintel datasets, with particular improvement in occluded areas but also attains a remarkable 63.82% enhancement in speed compared with previous multi-frame methods. The code will be available soon at https://github.com/littlespray/StreamFlow.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities in text comprehension and generation, prompting research efforts towards video LLMs to facilitate human-AI interaction at the video level. However, how to effectively encode and understand videos in video-based dialogue systems remains to be solved. In this paper, we investigate a straightforward yet unexplored question: Can we feed all spatial-temporal tokens into the LLM, thus delegating the task of video sequence modeling to the LLMs? Surprisingly, this simple approach yields significant improvements in video understanding. Based upon this, we propose ST-LLM, an effective video-LLM baseline with Spatial-Temporal sequence modeling inside LLM. Furthermore, to address the overhead and stability issues introduced by uncompressed video tokens within LLMs, we develop a dynamic masking strategy with tailor-made training objectives. For particularly long videos, we have also designed a global-local input module to balance efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently, we harness LLM for proficient spatial-temporal modeling, while upholding efficiency and stability. Extensive experimental results attest to the effectiveness of our method. Through a more concise model and training pipeline, ST-LLM establishes a new state-of-the-art result on VideoChatGPT-Bench and MVBench. Codes have been available at https://github.com/TencentARC/ST-LLM.

Recently, with the tremendous success of diffusion models in the field of text-to-image (T2I) generation, increasing attention has been directed toward their potential in text-to-video (T2V) applications. However, the computational demands of diffusion models pose significant challenges, particularly in generating high-resolution videos with high frame rates. In this paper, we propose CascadeV, a cascaded latent diffusion model (LDM), that is capable of producing state-of-the-art 2K resolution videos. Experiments demonstrate that our cascaded model achieves a higher compression ratio, substantially reducing the computational challenges associated with high-quality video generation. We also implement a spatiotemporal alternating grid 3D attention mechanism, which effectively integrates spatial and temporal information, ensuring superior consistency across the generated video frames. Furthermore, our model can be cascaded with existing T2V models, theoretically enabling a 4times increase in resolution or frames per second without any fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/CascadeV.

We present XMem, a video object segmentation architecture for long videos with unified feature memory stores inspired by the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model. Prior work on video object segmentation typically only uses one type of feature memory. For videos longer than a minute, a single feature memory model tightly links memory consumption and accuracy. In contrast, following the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, we develop an architecture that incorporates multiple independent yet deeply-connected feature memory stores: a rapidly updated sensory memory, a high-resolution working memory, and a compact thus sustained long-term memory. Crucially, we develop a memory potentiation algorithm that routinely consolidates actively used working memory elements into the long-term memory, which avoids memory explosion and minimizes performance decay for long-term prediction. Combined with a new memory reading mechanism, XMem greatly exceeds state-of-the-art performance on long-video datasets while being on par with state-of-the-art methods (that do not work on long videos) on short-video datasets. Code is available at https://hkchengrex.github.io/XMem

Vision and language are the two foundational senses for humans, and they build up our cognitive ability and intelligence. While significant breakthroughs have been made in AI language ability, artificial visual intelligence, especially the ability to generate and simulate the world we see, is far lagging behind. To facilitate the development and accessibility of artificial visual intelligence, we created Open-Sora, an open-source video generation model designed to produce high-fidelity video content. Open-Sora supports a wide spectrum of visual generation tasks, including text-to-image generation, text-to-video generation, and image-to-video generation. The model leverages advanced deep learning architectures and training/inference techniques to enable flexible video synthesis, which could generate video content of up to 15 seconds, up to 720p resolution, and arbitrary aspect ratios. Specifically, we introduce Spatial-Temporal Diffusion Transformer (STDiT), an efficient diffusion framework for videos that decouples spatial and temporal attention. We also introduce a highly compressive 3D autoencoder to make representations compact and further accelerate training with an ad hoc training strategy. Through this initiative, we aim to foster innovation, creativity, and inclusivity within the community of AI content creation. By embracing the open-source principle, Open-Sora democratizes full access to all the training/inference/data preparation codes as well as model weights. All resources are publicly available at: https://github.com/hpcaitech/Open-Sora.

Understanding long, real-world videos requires modeling of long-range visual dependencies. To this end, we explore video-first architectures, building on the common paradigm of transferring large-scale, image--text models to video via shallow temporal fusion. However, we expose two limitations to the approach: (1) decreased spatial capabilities, likely due to poor video--language alignment in standard video datasets, and (2) higher memory consumption, bottlenecking the number of frames that can be processed. To mitigate the memory bottleneck, we systematically analyze the memory/accuracy trade-off of various efficient methods: factorized attention, parameter-efficient image-to-video adaptation, input masking, and multi-resolution patchification. Surprisingly, simply masking large portions of the video (up to 75%) during contrastive pre-training proves to be one of the most robust ways to scale encoders to videos up to 4.3 minutes at 1 FPS. Our simple approach for training long video-to-text models, which scales to 1B parameters, does not add new architectural complexity and is able to outperform the popular paradigm of using much larger LLMs as an information aggregator over segment-based information on benchmarks with long-range temporal dependencies (YouCook2, EgoSchema).

Finding multiple temporal relationships among locations can benefit a bunch of urban applications, such as dynamic offline advertising and smart public transport planning. While some efforts have been made on finding static relationships among locations, little attention is focused on studying time-aware location relationships. Indeed, abundant location-based human activities are time-varying and the availability of these data enables a new paradigm for understanding the dynamic relationships in a period among connective locations. To this end, we propose to study a new problem, namely multi-Temporal relationship inference among locations (Trial for short), where the major challenge is how to integrate dynamic and geographical influence under the relationship sparsity constraint. Specifically, we propose a solution to Trial with a graph learning scheme, which includes a spatially evolving graph neural network (SEENet) with two collaborative components: spatially evolving graph convolution module (SEConv) and spatially evolving self-supervised learning strategy (SE-SSL). SEConv performs the intra-time aggregation and inter-time propagation to capture the multifaceted spatially evolving contexts from the view of location message passing. In addition, SE-SSL designs time-aware self-supervised learning tasks in a global-local manner with additional evolving constraint to enhance the location representation learning and further handle the relationship sparsity. Finally, experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over several state-of-the-art approaches.

Recent diffusion-based human image animation techniques have demonstrated impressive success in synthesizing videos that faithfully follow a given reference identity and a sequence of desired movement poses. Despite this, there are still two limitations: i) an extra reference model is required to align the identity image with the main video branch, which significantly increases the optimization burden and model parameters; ii) the generated video is usually short in time (e.g., 24 frames), hampering practical applications. To address these shortcomings, we present a UniAnimate framework to enable efficient and long-term human video generation. First, to reduce the optimization difficulty and ensure temporal coherence, we map the reference image along with the posture guidance and noise video into a common feature space by incorporating a unified video diffusion model. Second, we propose a unified noise input that supports random noised input as well as first frame conditioned input, which enhances the ability to generate long-term video. Finally, to further efficiently handle long sequences, we explore an alternative temporal modeling architecture based on state space model to replace the original computation-consuming temporal Transformer. Extensive experimental results indicate that UniAnimate achieves superior synthesis results over existing state-of-the-art counterparts in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Notably, UniAnimate can even generate highly consistent one-minute videos by iteratively employing the first frame conditioning strategy. Code and models will be publicly available. Project page: https://unianimate.github.io/.

Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) have emerged as a novel framework for enabling interpretable machine learning algorithms equipped with the ability to reason and explain their decision processes. The basic idea is to represent discrete information through high dimensional random vectors. Complex data structures can be built up with operations over vectors such as the "binding" operation involving element-wise vector multiplication, which associates data together. The reverse task of decomposing the associated elements is a combinatorially hard task, with an exponentially large search space. The main algorithm for performing this search is the resonator network, inspired by Hopfield network-based memory search operations. In this work, we introduce a new variant of the resonator network, based on self-attention based update rules in the iterative search problem. This update rule, based on the Hopfield network with log-sum-exp energy function and norm-bounded states, is shown to substantially improve the performance and rate of convergence. As a result, our algorithm enables a larger capacity for associative memory, enabling applications in many tasks like perception based pattern recognition, scene decomposition, and object reasoning. We substantiate our algorithm with a thorough evaluation and comparisons to baselines.

Vision transformers have gained popularity recently, leading to the development of new vision backbones with improved features and consistent performance gains. However, these advancements are not solely attributable to novel feature transformation designs; certain benefits also arise from advanced network-level and block-level architectures. This paper aims to identify the real gains of popular convolution and attention operators through a detailed study. We find that the key difference among these feature transformation modules, such as attention or convolution, lies in their spatial feature aggregation approach, known as the "spatial token mixer" (STM). To facilitate an impartial comparison, we introduce a unified architecture to neutralize the impact of divergent network-level and block-level designs. Subsequently, various STMs are integrated into this unified framework for comprehensive comparative analysis. Our experiments on various tasks and an analysis of inductive bias show a significant performance boost due to advanced network-level and block-level designs, but performance differences persist among different STMs. Our detailed analysis also reveals various findings about different STMs, such as effective receptive fields and invariance tests. All models and codes used in this study are publicly available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/STM-Evaluation.

In the pursuit of superior video-processing MLLMs, we have encountered a perplexing paradox: the "anti-scaling law", where more data and larger models lead to worse performance. This study unmasks the culprit: "temporal hacking", a phenomenon where models shortcut by fixating on select frames, missing the full video narrative. In this work, we systematically establish a comprehensive theory of temporal hacking, defining it from a reinforcement learning perspective, introducing the Temporal Perplexity (TPL) score to assess this misalignment, and proposing the Unhackable Temporal Rewarding (UTR) framework to mitigate the temporal hacking. Both theoretically and empirically, TPL proves to be a reliable indicator of temporal modeling quality, correlating strongly with frame activation patterns. Extensive experiments reveal that UTR not only counters temporal hacking but significantly elevates video comprehension capabilities. This work not only advances video-AI systems but also illuminates the critical importance of aligning proxy rewards with true objectives in MLLM development.

Models based on deep convolutional networks have dominated recent image interpretation tasks; we investigate whether models which are also recurrent, or "temporally deep", are effective for tasks involving sequences, visual and otherwise. We develop a novel recurrent convolutional architecture suitable for large-scale visual learning which is end-to-end trainable, and demonstrate the value of these models on benchmark video recognition tasks, image description and retrieval problems, and video narration challenges. In contrast to current models which assume a fixed spatio-temporal receptive field or simple temporal averaging for sequential processing, recurrent convolutional models are "doubly deep"' in that they can be compositional in spatial and temporal "layers". Such models may have advantages when target concepts are complex and/or training data are limited. Learning long-term dependencies is possible when nonlinearities are incorporated into the network state updates. Long-term RNN models are appealing in that they directly can map variable-length inputs (e.g., video frames) to variable length outputs (e.g., natural language text) and can model complex temporal dynamics; yet they can be optimized with backpropagation. Our recurrent long-term models are directly connected to modern visual convnet models and can be jointly trained to simultaneously learn temporal dynamics and convolutional perceptual representations. Our results show such models have distinct advantages over state-of-the-art models for recognition or generation which are separately defined and/or optimized.

Sequential models, such as Recurrent Neural Networks and Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, have long suffered from slow training due to their inherent sequential nature. For many years this bottleneck has persisted, as many thought sequential models could not be parallelized. We challenge this long-held belief with our parallel algorithm that accelerates GPU evaluation of sequential models by up to 3 orders of magnitude faster without compromising output accuracy. The algorithm does not need any special structure in the sequential models' architecture, making it applicable to a wide range of architectures. Using our method, training sequential models can be more than 10 times faster than the common sequential method without any meaningful difference in the training results. Leveraging this accelerated training, we discovered the efficacy of the Gated Recurrent Unit in a long time series classification problem with 17k time samples. By overcoming the training bottleneck, our work serves as the first step to unlock the potential of non-linear sequential models for long sequence problems.

This paper presents a simple yet effective approach to modeling space-time correspondences in the context of video object segmentation. Unlike most existing approaches, we establish correspondences directly between frames without re-encoding the mask features for every object, leading to a highly efficient and robust framework. With the correspondences, every node in the current query frame is inferred by aggregating features from the past in an associative fashion. We cast the aggregation process as a voting problem and find that the existing inner-product affinity leads to poor use of memory with a small (fixed) subset of memory nodes dominating the votes, regardless of the query. In light of this phenomenon, we propose using the negative squared Euclidean distance instead to compute the affinities. We validated that every memory node now has a chance to contribute, and experimentally showed that such diversified voting is beneficial to both memory efficiency and inference accuracy. The synergy of correspondence networks and diversified voting works exceedingly well, achieves new state-of-the-art results on both DAVIS and YouTubeVOS datasets while running significantly faster at 20+ FPS for multiple objects without bells and whistles.

Reinforcement learning agents often forget details of the past, especially after delays or distractor tasks. Agents with common memory architectures struggle to recall and integrate across multiple timesteps of a past event, or even to recall the details of a single timestep that is followed by distractor tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical Chunk Attention Memory (HCAM), which helps agents to remember the past in detail. HCAM stores memories by dividing the past into chunks, and recalls by first performing high-level attention over coarse summaries of the chunks, and then performing detailed attention within only the most relevant chunks. An agent with HCAM can therefore "mentally time-travel" -- remember past events in detail without attending to all intervening events. We show that agents with HCAM substantially outperform agents with other memory architectures at tasks requiring long-term recall, retention, or reasoning over memory. These include recalling where an object is hidden in a 3D environment, rapidly learning to navigate efficiently in a new neighborhood, and rapidly learning and retaining new object names. Agents with HCAM can extrapolate to task sequences much longer than they were trained on, and can even generalize zero-shot from a meta-learning setting to maintaining knowledge across episodes. HCAM improves agent sample efficiency, generalization, and generality (by solving tasks that previously required specialized architectures). Our work is a step towards agents that can learn, interact, and adapt in complex and temporally-extended environments.

We present Pyramid Attention Broadcast (PAB), a real-time, high quality and training-free approach for DiT-based video generation. Our method is founded on the observation that attention difference in the diffusion process exhibits a U-shaped pattern, indicating significant redundancy. We mitigate this by broadcasting attention outputs to subsequent steps in a pyramid style. It applies different broadcast strategies to each attention based on their variance for best efficiency. We further introduce broadcast sequence parallel for more efficient distributed inference. PAB demonstrates superior results across three models compared to baselines, achieving real-time generation for up to 720p videos. We anticipate that our simple yet effective method will serve as a robust baseline and facilitate future research and application for video generation.

Spatio-temporal consistency is a critical research topic in video generation. A qualified generated video segment must ensure plot plausibility and coherence while maintaining visual consistency of objects and scenes across varying viewpoints. Prior research, especially in open-source projects, primarily focuses on either temporal or spatial consistency, or their basic combination, such as appending a description of a camera movement after a prompt without constraining the outcomes of this movement. However, camera movement may introduce new objects to the scene or eliminate existing ones, thereby overlaying and affecting the preceding narrative. Especially in videos with numerous camera movements, the interplay between multiple plots becomes increasingly complex. This paper introduces and examines integral spatio-temporal consistency, considering the synergy between plot progression and camera techniques, and the long-term impact of prior content on subsequent generation. Our research encompasses dataset construction through to the development of the model. Initially, we constructed a DropletVideo-10M dataset, which comprises 10 million videos featuring dynamic camera motion and object actions. Each video is annotated with an average caption of 206 words, detailing various camera movements and plot developments. Following this, we developed and trained the DropletVideo model, which excels in preserving spatio-temporal coherence during video generation. The DropletVideo dataset and model are accessible at https://dropletx.github.io.

Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) is a biologically-inspired framework which represents symbols with high-dimensional vectors, and uses vector operations to manipulate them. The ensemble of a particular vector space and a prescribed set of vector operations (including one addition-like for "bundling" and one outer-product-like for "binding") form a *vector symbolic architecture* (VSA). While VSAs have been employed in numerous applications and have been studied empirically, many theoretical questions about VSAs remain open. We analyze the *representation capacities* of four common VSAs: MAP-I, MAP-B, and two VSAs based on sparse binary vectors. "Representation capacity' here refers to bounds on the dimensions of the VSA vectors required to perform certain symbolic tasks, such as testing for set membership i in S and estimating set intersection sizes |X cap Y| for two sets of symbols X and Y, to a given degree of accuracy. We also analyze the ability of a novel variant of a Hopfield network (a simple model of associative memory) to perform some of the same tasks that are typically asked of VSAs. In addition to providing new bounds on VSA capacities, our analyses establish and leverage connections between VSAs, "sketching" (dimensionality reduction) algorithms, and Bloom filters.

Designing an efficient yet deployment-friendly 3D backbone to handle sparse point clouds is a fundamental problem in 3D perception. Compared with the customized sparse convolution, the attention mechanism in Transformers is more appropriate for flexibly modeling long-range relationships and is easier to be deployed in real-world applications. However, due to the sparse characteristics of point clouds, it is non-trivial to apply a standard transformer on sparse points. In this paper, we present Dynamic Sparse Voxel Transformer (DSVT), a single-stride window-based voxel Transformer backbone for outdoor 3D perception. In order to efficiently process sparse points in parallel, we propose Dynamic Sparse Window Attention, which partitions a series of local regions in each window according to its sparsity and then computes the features of all regions in a fully parallel manner. To allow the cross-set connection, we design a rotated set partitioning strategy that alternates between two partitioning configurations in consecutive self-attention layers. To support effective downsampling and better encode geometric information, we also propose an attention-style 3D pooling module on sparse points, which is powerful and deployment-friendly without utilizing any customized CUDA operations. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance with a broad range of 3D perception tasks. More importantly, DSVT can be easily deployed by TensorRT with real-time inference speed (27Hz). Code will be available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/DSVT.

Analyzing both temporal and spatial patterns for an accurate forecasting model for financial time series forecasting is a challenge due to the complex nature of temporal-spatial dynamics: time series from different locations often have distinct patterns; and for the same time series, patterns may vary as time goes by. Inspired by the successful applications of deep learning, we propose a new model to resolve the issues of forecasting household leverage in China. Our solution consists of multiple RNN-based layers and an attention layer: each RNN-based layer automatically learns the temporal pattern of a specific series with multivariate exogenous series, and then the attention layer learns the spatial correlative weight and obtains the global representations simultaneously. The results show that the new approach can capture the temporal-spatial dynamics of household leverage well and get more accurate and solid predictive results. More, the simulation also studies show that clustering and choosing correlative series are necessary to obtain accurate forecasting results.

Pre-training on large-scale video data has become a common recipe for learning transferable spatiotemporal representations in recent years. Despite some progress, existing methods are mostly limited to highly curated datasets (e.g., K400) and exhibit unsatisfactory out-of-the-box representations. We argue that it is due to the fact that they only capture pixel-level knowledge rather than spatiotemporal semantics, which hinders further progress in video understanding. Inspired by the great success of image-text pre-training (e.g., CLIP), we take the first step to exploit language semantics to boost transferable spatiotemporal representation learning. We introduce a new pretext task, Turning to Video for Transcript Sorting (TVTS), which sorts shuffled ASR scripts by attending to learned video representations. We do not rely on descriptive captions and learn purely from video, i.e., leveraging the natural transcribed speech knowledge to provide noisy but useful semantics over time. Our method enforces the vision model to contextualize what is happening over time so that it can re-organize the narrative transcripts, and can seamlessly apply to large-scale uncurated video data in the real world. Our method demonstrates strong out-of-the-box spatiotemporal representations on diverse benchmarks, e.g., +13.6% gains over VideoMAE on SSV2 via linear probing. The code is available at https://github.com/TencentARC/TVTS.

Alternatives to recurrent neural networks, in particular, architectures based on attention or convolutions, have been gaining momentum for processing input sequences. In spite of their relevance, the computational properties of these alternatives have not yet been fully explored. We study the computational power of two of the most paradigmatic architectures exemplifying these mechanisms: the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) and the Neural GPU (Kaiser & Sutskever, 2016). We show both models to be Turing complete exclusively based on their capacity to compute and access internal dense representations of the data. In particular, neither the Transformer nor the Neural GPU requires access to an external memory to become Turing complete. Our study also reveals some minimal sets of elements needed to obtain these completeness results.

Graph-based deep learning methods have become popular tools to process collections of correlated time series. Differently from traditional multivariate forecasting methods, neural graph-based predictors take advantage of pairwise relationships by conditioning forecasts on a (possibly dynamic) graph spanning the time series collection. The conditioning can take the form of an architectural inductive bias on the neural forecasting architecture, resulting in a family of deep learning models called spatiotemporal graph neural networks. Such relational inductive biases enable the training of global forecasting models on large time-series collections, while at the same time localizing predictions w.r.t. each element in the set (i.e., graph nodes) by accounting for local correlations among them (i.e., graph edges). Indeed, recent theoretical and practical advances in graph neural networks and deep learning for time series forecasting make the adoption of such processing frameworks appealing and timely. However, most of the studies in the literature focus on proposing variations of existing neural architectures by taking advantage of modern deep learning practices, while foundational and methodological aspects have not been subject to systematic investigation. To fill the gap, this paper aims to introduce a comprehensive methodological framework that formalizes the forecasting problem and provides design principles for graph-based predictive models and methods to assess their performance. At the same time, together with an overview of the field, we provide design guidelines, recommendations, and best practices, as well as an in-depth discussion of open challenges and future research directions.

Biological cortical neurons are remarkably sophisticated computational devices, temporally integrating their vast synaptic input over an intricate dendritic tree, subject to complex, nonlinearly interacting internal biological processes. A recent study proposed to characterize this complexity by fitting accurate surrogate models to replicate the input-output relationship of a detailed biophysical cortical pyramidal neuron model and discovered it needed temporal convolutional networks (TCN) with millions of parameters. Requiring these many parameters, however, could stem from a misalignment between the inductive biases of the TCN and cortical neuron's computations. In light of this, and to explore the computational implications of leaky memory units and nonlinear dendritic processing, we introduce the Expressive Leaky Memory (ELM) neuron model, a biologically inspired phenomenological model of a cortical neuron. Remarkably, by exploiting such slowly decaying memory-like hidden states and two-layered nonlinear integration of synaptic input, our ELM neuron can accurately match the aforementioned input-output relationship with under ten thousand trainable parameters. To further assess the computational ramifications of our neuron design, we evaluate it on various tasks with demanding temporal structures, including the Long Range Arena (LRA) datasets, as well as a novel neuromorphic dataset based on the Spiking Heidelberg Digits dataset (SHD-Adding). Leveraging a larger number of memory units with sufficiently long timescales, and correspondingly sophisticated synaptic integration, the ELM neuron displays substantial long-range processing capabilities, reliably outperforming the classic Transformer or Chrono-LSTM architectures on LRA, and even solving the Pathfinder-X task with over 70% accuracy (16k context length).

In recent developments, the Mamba architecture, known for its selective state space approach, has shown potential in the efficient modeling of long sequences. However, its application in image generation remains underexplored. Traditional diffusion transformers (DiT), which utilize self-attention blocks, are effective but their computational complexity scales quadratically with the input length, limiting their use for high-resolution images. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel diffusion architecture, Diffusion Mamba (DiM), which foregoes traditional attention mechanisms in favor of a scalable alternative. By harnessing the inherent efficiency of the Mamba architecture, DiM achieves rapid inference times and reduced computational load, maintaining linear complexity with respect to sequence length. Our architecture not only scales effectively but also outperforms existing diffusion transformers in both image and video generation tasks. The results affirm the scalability and efficiency of DiM, establishing a new benchmark for image and video generation techniques. This work advances the field of generative models and paves the way for further applications of scalable architectures.

Applying Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to video understanding presents significant challenges due to the need to model temporal relations across frames. Existing approaches adopt either implicit temporal modeling, relying solely on the LLM decoder, or explicit temporal modeling, employing auxiliary temporal encoders. To investigate this debate between the two paradigms, we propose the Stackable Temporal Encoder (STE). STE enables flexible explicit temporal modeling with adjustable temporal receptive fields and token compression ratios. Using STE, we systematically compare implicit and explicit temporal modeling across dimensions such as overall performance, token compression effectiveness, and temporal-specific understanding. We also explore STE's design considerations and broader impacts as a plug-in module and in image modalities. Our findings emphasize the critical role of explicit temporal modeling, providing actionable insights to advance video MLLMs.

In this paper, we address the challenges posed by the substantial training time and memory consumption associated with video transformers, focusing on the ViViT (Video Vision Transformer) model, in particular the Factorised Encoder version, as our baseline for action recognition tasks. The factorised encoder variant follows the late-fusion approach that is adopted by many state of the art approaches. Despite standing out for its favorable speed/accuracy tradeoffs among the different variants of ViViT, its considerable training time and memory requirements still pose a significant barrier to entry. Our method is designed to lower this barrier and is based on the idea of freezing the spatial transformer during training. This leads to a low accuracy model if naively done. But we show that by (1) appropriately initializing the temporal transformer (a module responsible for processing temporal information) (2) introducing a compact adapter model connecting frozen spatial representations ((a module that selectively focuses on regions of the input image) to the temporal transformer, we can enjoy the benefits of freezing the spatial transformer without sacrificing accuracy. Through extensive experimentation over 6 benchmarks, we demonstrate that our proposed training strategy significantly reduces training costs (by sim 50%) and memory consumption while maintaining or slightly improving performance by up to 1.79\% compared to the baseline model. Our approach additionally unlocks the capability to utilize larger image transformer models as our spatial transformer and access more frames with the same memory consumption.

Visual motion processing is essential for humans to perceive and interact with dynamic environments. Despite extensive research in cognitive neuroscience, image-computable models that can extract informative motion flow from natural scenes in a manner consistent with human visual processing have yet to be established. Meanwhile, recent advancements in computer vision (CV), propelled by deep learning, have led to significant progress in optical flow estimation, a task closely related to motion perception. Here we propose an image-computable model of human motion perception by bridging the gap between biological and CV models. Specifically, we introduce a novel two-stages approach that combines trainable motion energy sensing with a recurrent self-attention network for adaptive motion integration and segregation. This model architecture aims to capture the computations in V1-MT, the core structure for motion perception in the biological visual system, while providing the ability to derive informative motion flow for a wide range of stimuli, including complex natural scenes. In silico neurophysiology reveals that our model's unit responses are similar to mammalian neural recordings regarding motion pooling and speed tuning. The proposed model can also replicate human responses to a range of stimuli examined in past psychophysical studies. The experimental results on the Sintel benchmark demonstrate that our model predicts human responses better than the ground truth, whereas the state-of-the-art CV models show the opposite. Our study provides a computational architecture consistent with human visual motion processing, although the physiological correspondence may not be exact.

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching billions of parameters. These huge models are memory hungry and incur significant inference latency even on cutting edge AI-accelerators, such as GPUs. Specifically, the time and memory complexity of the attention operation is quadratic in terms of the total context length, i.e., prompt and output tokens. Thus, several optimizations such as key-value tensor caching and FlashAttention computation have been proposed to deliver the low latency demands of applications relying on such large models. However, these techniques do not cater to the computationally distinct nature of different phases during inference. To that end, we propose LeanAttention, a scalable technique of computing self-attention for the token-generation phase (decode-phase) of decoder-only transformer models. LeanAttention enables scaling the attention mechanism implementation for the challenging case of long context lengths by re-designing the execution flow for the decode-phase. We identify that the associative property of online softmax can be treated as a reduction operation thus allowing us to parallelize the attention computation over these large context lengths. We extend the "stream-K" style reduction of tiled calculation to self-attention to enable parallel computation resulting in an average of 2.6x attention execution speedup over FlashAttention-2 and up to 8.33x speedup for 512k context lengths.

We consider the problem of reconstructing a dynamic scene observed from a stereo camera. Most existing methods for depth from stereo treat different stereo frames independently, leading to temporally inconsistent depth predictions. Temporal consistency is especially important for immersive AR or VR scenarios, where flickering greatly diminishes the user experience. We propose DynamicStereo, a novel transformer-based architecture to estimate disparity for stereo videos. The network learns to pool information from neighboring frames to improve the temporal consistency of its predictions. Our architecture is designed to process stereo videos efficiently through divided attention layers. We also introduce Dynamic Replica, a new benchmark dataset containing synthetic videos of people and animals in scanned environments, which provides complementary training and evaluation data for dynamic stereo closer to real applications than existing datasets. Training with this dataset further improves the quality of predictions of our proposed DynamicStereo as well as prior methods. Finally, it acts as a benchmark for consistent stereo methods.

Visual data comes in various forms, ranging from small icons of just a few pixels to long videos spanning hours. Existing multi-modal LLMs usually standardize these diverse visual inputs to a fixed resolution for visual encoders and yield similar numbers of tokens for LLMs. This approach is non-optimal for multimodal understanding and inefficient for processing inputs with long and short visual contents. To solve the problem, we propose Oryx, a unified multimodal architecture for the spatial-temporal understanding of images, videos, and multi-view 3D scenes. Oryx offers an on-demand solution to seamlessly and efficiently process visual inputs with arbitrary spatial sizes and temporal lengths through two core innovations: 1) a pre-trained OryxViT model that can encode images at any resolution into LLM-friendly visual representations; 2) a dynamic compressor module that supports 1x to 16x compression on visual tokens by request. These design features enable Oryx to accommodate extremely long visual contexts, such as videos, with lower resolution and high compression while maintaining high recognition precision for tasks like document understanding with native resolution and no compression. Beyond the architectural improvements, enhanced data curation and specialized training on long-context retrieval and spatial-aware data help Oryx achieve strong capabilities in image, video, and 3D multimodal understanding simultaneously. Our work is open-sourced at https://github.com/Oryx-mllm/Oryx.

Recently, there has been a growing trend toward feature-based approaches for Online Action Detection (OAD). However, these approaches have limitations due to their fixed backbone design, which ignores the potential capability of a trainable backbone. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end OAD model, termed E2E-LOAD, designed to address the major challenge of OAD, namely, long-term understanding and efficient online reasoning. Specifically, our proposed approach adopts an initial spatial model that is shared by all frames and maintains a long sequence cache for inference at a low computational cost. We also advocate an asymmetric spatial-temporal model for long-form and short-form modeling effectively. Furthermore, we propose a novel and efficient inference mechanism that accelerates heavy spatial-temporal exploration. Extensive ablation studies and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. Notably, we achieve 17.3 (+12.6) FPS for end-to-end OAD with 72.4%~(+1.2%), 90.3%~(+0.7%), and 48.1%~(+26.0%) mAP on THMOUS14, TVSeries, and HDD, respectively, which is 3x faster than previous approaches. The source code will be made publicly available.

Continuous space-time video super-resolution (C-STVSR) aims to simultaneously enhance video resolution and frame rate at an arbitrary scale. Recently, implicit neural representation (INR) has been applied to video restoration, representing videos as implicit fields that can be decoded at an arbitrary scale. However, the highly ill-posed nature of C-STVSR limits the effectiveness of current INR-based methods: they assume linear motion between frames and use interpolation or feature warping to generate features at arbitrary spatiotemporal positions with two consecutive frames. This restrains C-STVSR from capturing rapid and nonlinear motion and long-term dependencies (involving more than two frames) in complex dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel C-STVSR framework, called HR-INR, which captures both holistic dependencies and regional motions based on INR. It is assisted by an event camera, a novel sensor renowned for its high temporal resolution and low latency. To fully utilize the rich temporal information from events, we design a feature extraction consisting of (1) a regional event feature extractor - taking events as inputs via the proposed event temporal pyramid representation to capture the regional nonlinear motion and (2) a holistic event-frame feature extractor for long-term dependence and continuity motion. We then propose a novel INR-based decoder with spatiotemporal embeddings to capture long-term dependencies with a larger temporal perception field. We validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method on four datasets (both simulated and real data), showing the superiority of our method.

Transformers have achieved the state-of-the-art performance on solving the inverse problem of Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI) for video, whose ill-posedness is rooted in the mixed degradation of spatial masking and temporal aliasing. However, previous Transformers lack an insight into the degradation and thus have limited performance and efficiency. In this work, we tailor an efficient reconstruction architecture without temporal aggregation in early layers and Hierarchical Separable Video Transformer (HiSViT) as building block. HiSViT is built by multiple groups of Cross-Scale Separable Multi-head Self-Attention (CSS-MSA) and Gated Self-Modulated Feed-Forward Network (GSM-FFN) with dense connections, each of which is conducted within a separate channel portions at a different scale, for multi-scale interactions and long-range modeling. By separating spatial operations from temporal ones, CSS-MSA introduces an inductive bias of paying more attention within frames instead of between frames while saving computational overheads. GSM-FFN further enhances the locality via gated mechanism and factorized spatial-temporal convolutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods by !>!0.5 dB with comparable or fewer parameters and complexity. The source codes and pretrained models are released at https://github.com/pwangcs/HiSViT.

In this work, we aim to reconstruct a time-varying 3D model, capable of rendering photo-realistic renderings with independent control of viewpoint, illumination, and time, from Internet photos of large-scale landmarks. The core challenges are twofold. First, different types of temporal changes, such as illumination and changes to the underlying scene itself (such as replacing one graffiti artwork with another) are entangled together in the imagery. Second, scene-level temporal changes are often discrete and sporadic over time, rather than continuous. To tackle these problems, we propose a new scene representation equipped with a novel temporal step function encoding method that can model discrete scene-level content changes as piece-wise constant functions over time. Specifically, we represent the scene as a space-time radiance field with a per-image illumination embedding, where temporally-varying scene changes are encoded using a set of learned step functions. To facilitate our task of chronology reconstruction from Internet imagery, we also collect a new dataset of four scenes that exhibit various changes over time. We demonstrate that our method exhibits state-of-the-art view synthesis results on this dataset, while achieving independent control of viewpoint, time, and illumination.

A recent frontier in computer vision has been the task of 3D video generation, which consists of generating a time-varying 3D representation of a scene. To generate dynamic 3D scenes, current methods explicitly model 3D temporal dynamics by jointly optimizing for consistency across both time and views of the scene. In this paper, we instead investigate whether it is necessary to explicitly enforce multiview consistency over time, as current approaches do, or if it is sufficient for a model to generate 3D representations of each timestep independently. We hence propose a model, Vid3D, that leverages 2D video diffusion to generate 3D videos by first generating a 2D "seed" of the video's temporal dynamics and then independently generating a 3D representation for each timestep in the seed video. We evaluate Vid3D against two state-of-the-art 3D video generation methods and find that Vid3D is achieves comparable results despite not explicitly modeling 3D temporal dynamics. We further ablate how the quality of Vid3D depends on the number of views generated per frame. While we observe some degradation with fewer views, performance degradation remains minor. Our results thus suggest that 3D temporal knowledge may not be necessary to generate high-quality dynamic 3D scenes, potentially enabling simpler generative algorithms for this task.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) with 3D full attention power state-of-the-art video generation, but suffer from prohibitive compute cost -- when generating just a 5-second 720P video, attention alone takes 800 out of 945 seconds of total inference time. This paper introduces sliding tile attention (STA) to address this challenge. STA leverages the observation that attention scores in pretrained video diffusion models predominantly concentrate within localized 3D windows. By sliding and attending over the local spatial-temporal region, STA eliminates redundancy from full attention. Unlike traditional token-wise sliding window attention (SWA), STA operates tile-by-tile with a novel hardware-aware sliding window design, preserving expressiveness while being hardware-efficient. With careful kernel-level optimizations, STA offers the first efficient 2D/3D sliding-window-like attention implementation, achieving 58.79% MFU. Precisely, STA accelerates attention by 2.8-17x over FlashAttention-2 (FA2) and 1.6-10x over FlashAttention-3 (FA3). On the leading video DiT, HunyuanVideo, STA reduces end-to-end latency from 945s (FA3) to 685s without quality degradation, requiring no training. Enabling finetuning further lowers latency to 268s with only a 0.09% drop on VBench.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) dominate video generation but their high computational cost severely limits real-world applicability, usually requiring tens of minutes to generate a few seconds of video even on high-performance GPUs. This inefficiency primarily arises from the quadratic computational complexity of 3D Full Attention with respect to the context length. In this paper, we propose a training-free framework termed Sparse VideoGen (SVG) that leverages the inherent sparsity in 3D Full Attention to boost inference efficiency. We reveal that the attention heads can be dynamically classified into two groups depending on distinct sparse patterns: (1) Spatial Head, where only spatially-related tokens within each frame dominate the attention output, and (2) Temporal Head, where only temporally-related tokens across different frames dominate. Based on this insight, SVG proposes an online profiling strategy to capture the dynamic sparse patterns and predicts the type of attention head. Combined with a novel hardware-efficient tensor layout transformation and customized kernel implementations, SVG achieves up to 2.28x and 2.33x end-to-end speedup on CogVideoX-v1.5 and HunyuanVideo, respectively, while preserving generation quality.

Video generation requires modeling a vast spatiotemporal space, which demands significant computational resources and data usage. To reduce the complexity, the prevailing approaches employ a cascaded architecture to avoid direct training with full resolution. Despite reducing computational demands, the separate optimization of each sub-stage hinders knowledge sharing and sacrifices flexibility. This work introduces a unified pyramidal flow matching algorithm. It reinterprets the original denoising trajectory as a series of pyramid stages, where only the final stage operates at the full resolution, thereby enabling more efficient video generative modeling. Through our sophisticated design, the flows of different pyramid stages can be interlinked to maintain continuity. Moreover, we craft autoregressive video generation with a temporal pyramid to compress the full-resolution history. The entire framework can be optimized in an end-to-end manner and with a single unified Diffusion Transformer (DiT). Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method supports generating high-quality 5-second (up to 10-second) videos at 768p resolution and 24 FPS within 20.7k A100 GPU training hours. All code and models will be open-sourced at https://pyramid-flow.github.io.

There has been tremendous progress in multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent works have extended these models to video input with promising instruction following capabilities. However, an important missing piece is temporal localization. These models cannot accurately answer the "When?" questions. We identify three key aspects that limit their temporal localization capabilities: (i) time representation, (ii) architecture, and (iii) data. We address these shortcomings by proposing Language Instructed Temporal-Localization Assistant (LITA) with the following features: (1) We introduce time tokens that encode timestamps relative to the video length to better represent time in videos. (2) We introduce SlowFast tokens in the architecture to capture temporal information at fine temporal resolution. (3) We emphasize temporal localization data for LITA. In addition to leveraging existing video datasets with timestamps, we propose a new task, Reasoning Temporal Localization (RTL), along with the dataset, ActivityNet-RTL, for learning and evaluating this task. Reasoning temporal localization requires both the reasoning and temporal localization of Video LLMs. LITA demonstrates strong performance on this challenging task, nearly doubling the temporal mean intersection-over-union (mIoU) of baselines. In addition, we show that our emphasis on temporal localization also substantially improves video-based text generation compared to existing Video LLMs, including a 36% relative improvement of Temporal Understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/NVlabs/LITA

In numerous artificial intelligence applications, the collaborative efforts of multiple intelligent agents are imperative for the successful attainment of target objectives. To enhance coordination among these agents, a distributed communication framework is often employed. However, indiscriminate information sharing among all agents can be resource-intensive, and the adoption of manually pre-defined communication architectures imposes constraints on inter-agent communication, thus limiting the potential for effective collaboration. Moreover, the communication framework often remains static during inference, which may result in sustained high resource consumption, as in most cases, only key decisions necessitate information sharing among agents. In this study, we introduce a novel approach wherein we conceptualize the communication architecture among agents as a learnable graph. We formulate this problem as the task of determining the communication graph while enabling the architecture parameters to update normally, thus necessitating a bi-level optimization process. Utilizing continuous relaxation of the graph representation and incorporating attention units, our proposed approach, CommFormer, efficiently optimizes the communication graph and concurrently refines architectural parameters through gradient descent in an end-to-end manner. Additionally, we introduce a temporal gating mechanism for each agent, enabling dynamic decisions on whether to receive shared information at a given time, based on current observations, thus improving decision-making efficiency. Extensive experiments on a variety of cooperative tasks substantiate the robustness of our model across diverse cooperative scenarios, where agents are able to develop more coordinated and sophisticated strategies regardless of changes in the number of agents.

This paper proposes a novel pretext task to address the self-supervised video representation learning problem. Specifically, given an unlabeled video clip, we compute a series of spatio-temporal statistical summaries, such as the spatial location and dominant direction of the largest motion, the spatial location and dominant color of the largest color diversity along the temporal axis, etc. Then a neural network is built and trained to yield the statistical summaries given the video frames as inputs. In order to alleviate the learning difficulty, we employ several spatial partitioning patterns to encode rough spatial locations instead of exact spatial Cartesian coordinates. Our approach is inspired by the observation that human visual system is sensitive to rapidly changing contents in the visual field, and only needs impressions about rough spatial locations to understand the visual contents. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we conduct extensive experiments with four 3D backbone networks, i.e., C3D, 3D-ResNet, R(2+1)D and S3D-G. The results show that our approach outperforms the existing approaches across these backbone networks on four downstream video analysis tasks including action recognition, video retrieval, dynamic scene recognition, and action similarity labeling. The source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/laura-wang/video_repres_sts.

We present a convolution-free approach to video classification built exclusively on self-attention over space and time. Our method, named "TimeSformer," adapts the standard Transformer architecture to video by enabling spatiotemporal feature learning directly from a sequence of frame-level patches. Our experimental study compares different self-attention schemes and suggests that "divided attention," where temporal attention and spatial attention are separately applied within each block, leads to the best video classification accuracy among the design choices considered. Despite the radically new design, TimeSformer achieves state-of-the-art results on several action recognition benchmarks, including the best reported accuracy on Kinetics-400 and Kinetics-600. Finally, compared to 3D convolutional networks, our model is faster to train, it can achieve dramatically higher test efficiency (at a small drop in accuracy), and it can also be applied to much longer video clips (over one minute long). Code and models are available at: https://github.com/facebookresearch/TimeSformer.

Recurrent neural network (RNN) and self-attention mechanism (SAM) are the de facto methods to extract spatial-temporal information for temporal graph learning. Interestingly, we found that although both RNN and SAM could lead to a good performance, in practice neither of them is always necessary. In this paper, we propose GraphMixer, a conceptually and technically simple architecture that consists of three components: (1) a link-encoder that is only based on multi-layer perceptrons (MLP) to summarize the information from temporal links, (2) a node-encoder that is only based on neighbor mean-pooling to summarize node information, and (3) an MLP-based link classifier that performs link prediction based on the outputs of the encoders. Despite its simplicity, GraphMixer attains an outstanding performance on temporal link prediction benchmarks with faster convergence and better generalization performance. These results motivate us to rethink the importance of simpler model architecture.

Transformer models serve as the backbone of many state-ofthe-art language models, and most use the scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) mechanism to capture relationships between tokens. However, the straightforward implementation of SDPA has quadratic compute and memory complexity with respect to the sequence length. On processor architectures such as GPUs and TPUs, there is a robust body of prior work. However, little work has been performed on non-processor architectures.In this work, we show how the architecture and execution model of Streaming Dataflow Accelerators can help tackle this challenge. We first define abstract hardware that adopts a streaming execution model, and we implement a cycle-accurate simulator of the abstract hardware using the Dataflow Abstract Machine simulation framework. Second, we implement the naive SDPA algorithm on this abstract hardware and show it requires linear (O(N)) intermediate memory. Third, we then modify the naive algorithm, taking inspiration from prior processor-oriented works, by reordering the multiplication and division operations. Finally, we map the modified algorithm to abstract hardware, and confirm that the implementation computes SDPA at full throughput while only using a constant amount (O(1)) of intermediate memory.

In this paper, we proposed a effective but extensible residual one-dimensional convolution neural network as base network, based on the this network, we proposed four subnets to explore the features of skeleton sequences from each aspect. Given a skeleton sequences, the spatial information are encoded into the skeleton joints coordinate in a frame and the temporal information are present by multiple frames. Limited by the skeleton sequence representations, two-dimensional convolution neural network cannot be used directly, we chose one-dimensional convolution layer as the basic layer. Each sub network could extract discriminative features from different aspects. Our first subnet is a two-stream network which could explore both temporal and spatial information. The second is a body-parted network, which could gain micro spatial features and macro temporal features. The third one is an attention network, the main contribution of which is to focus the key frames and feature channels which high related with the action classes in a skeleton sequence. One frame-difference network, as the last subnet, mainly processes the joints changes between the consecutive frames. Four subnets ensemble together by late fusion, the key problem of ensemble method is each subnet should have a certain performance and between the subnets, there are diversity existing. Each subnet shares a wellperformance basenet and differences between subnets guaranteed the diversity. Experimental results show that the ensemble network gets a state-of-the-art performance on three widely used datasets.

We present a unified representation for actionable spatial perception: 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs. Scene graphs are directed graphs where nodes represent entities in the scene (e.g. objects, walls, rooms), and edges represent relations (e.g. inclusion, adjacency) among nodes. Dynamic scene graphs (DSGs) extend this notion to represent dynamic scenes with moving agents (e.g. humans, robots), and to include actionable information that supports planning and decision-making (e.g. spatio-temporal relations, topology at different levels of abstraction). Our second contribution is to provide the first fully automatic Spatial PerceptIon eNgine(SPIN) to build a DSG from visual-inertial data. We integrate state-of-the-art techniques for object and human detection and pose estimation, and we describe how to robustly infer object, robot, and human nodes in crowded scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that reconciles visual-inertial SLAM and dense human mesh tracking. Moreover, we provide algorithms to obtain hierarchical representations of indoor environments (e.g. places, structures, rooms) and their relations. Our third contribution is to demonstrate the proposed spatial perception engine in a photo-realistic Unity-based simulator, where we assess its robustness and expressiveness. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposal on modern robotics applications. 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs can have a profound impact on planning and decision-making, human-robot interaction, long-term autonomy, and scene prediction. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/SWbofjhyPzI

We present VideoGPT: a conceptually simple architecture for scaling likelihood based generative modeling to natural videos. VideoGPT uses VQ-VAE that learns downsampled discrete latent representations of a raw video by employing 3D convolutions and axial self-attention. A simple GPT-like architecture is then used to autoregressively model the discrete latents using spatio-temporal position encodings. Despite the simplicity in formulation and ease of training, our architecture is able to generate samples competitive with state-of-the-art GAN models for video generation on the BAIR Robot dataset, and generate high fidelity natural videos from UCF-101 and Tumbler GIF Dataset (TGIF). We hope our proposed architecture serves as a reproducible reference for a minimalistic implementation of transformer based video generation models. Samples and code are available at https://wilson1yan.github.io/videogpt/index.html

Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear (with respect to output length) inference complexity. Recent works such as RetNet (Sun et al., 2023) and TransNormerLLM (Qin et al., 2023a) observe that adding a global decay term to the additive RNN update rule greatly improves performance, sometimes outperforming standard Transformers with softmax attention when trained at scale. In this work we show that adding a data-dependent gating mechanism further improves performance. We derive a parallel form of this gated linear attention layer that enables efficient training. However, a straightforward, numerically stable implementation of this parallel form requires generalized matrix multiplications in log-space for numerical stability, and thus cannot take advantage of tensor cores on modern GPUs which are optimized for standard matrix multiplications. We develop a hardware-efficient version of the parallel form that can still make use of tensor cores through block-parallel computations over sequence chunks. Experiments on moderate-scale language modeling (340M-parameter models trained on 15B tokens, 1.3B-parameter models trained on 100B tokens) show that gated linear attention (GLA) Transformers perform competitively against a strong LLaMA-architecture Transformer baseline (Touvron et al., 2023) as well as Mamba (Gu & Dao, 2023), a recently introduced state-space model with a data-dependent state transition mechanism. For training speed, our Triton-based implementation performs comparably to CUDA-optimized FlashAttention-2 (Dao, 2023) under the regular 2048 training length setting, while outperforming FlashAttention-2 when training on longer sequences beyond 4096.

We present ScatterMoE, an implementation of Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) on GPUs. ScatterMoE builds upon existing implementations, and overcoming some of the limitations to improve inference and training speed, and memory footprint. This implementation achieves this by avoiding padding and making excessive copies of the input. We introduce ParallelLinear, the main component we use to build our implementation and the various kernels used to speed up the operation. We benchmark our implementation against Megablocks, and show that it enables a higher throughput and lower memory footprint. We also show how ParallelLinear enables extension of the Mixture-of-Experts concept by demonstrating with an implementation of Mixture of Attention.

Recent LLM-driven visual agents mainly focus on solving image-based tasks, which limits their ability to understand dynamic scenes, making it far from real-life applications like guiding students in laboratory experiments and identifying their mistakes. Considering the video modality better reflects the ever-changing nature of real-world scenarios, we devise DoraemonGPT, a comprehensive and conceptually elegant system driven by LLMs to handle dynamic video tasks. Given a video with a question/task, DoraemonGPT begins by converting the input video into a symbolic memory that stores task-related attributes. This structured representation allows for spatial-temporal querying and reasoning by well-designed sub-task tools, resulting in concise intermediate results. Recognizing that LLMs have limited internal knowledge when it comes to specialized domains (e.g., analyzing the scientific principles underlying experiments), we incorporate plug-and-play tools to assess external knowledge and address tasks across different domains. Moreover, a novel LLM-driven planner based on Monte Carlo Tree Search is introduced to explore the large planning space for scheduling various tools. The planner iteratively finds feasible solutions by backpropagating the result's reward, and multiple solutions can be summarized into an improved final answer. We extensively evaluate DoraemonGPT's effectiveness on three benchmarks and challenging in-the-wild scenarios. Code will be released at: https://github.com/z-x-yang/DoraemonGPT.

Effective attention modules have played a crucial role in the success of Transformer-based large language models (LLMs), but the quadratic time and memory complexities of these attention modules also pose a challenge when processing long sequences. One potential solution for the long sequence problem is to utilize distributed clusters to parallelize the computation of attention modules across multiple devices (e.g., GPUs). However, adopting a distributed approach inevitably introduces extra memory overheads to store local attention results and incurs additional communication costs to aggregate local results into global ones. In this paper, we propose a distributed attention framework named ``BurstAttention'' to optimize memory access and communication operations at both the global cluster and local device levels. In our experiments, we compare BurstAttention with other competitive distributed attention solutions for long sequence processing. The experimental results under different length settings demonstrate that BurstAttention offers significant advantages for processing long sequences compared with these competitive baselines, reducing 40% communication overheads and achieving 2 X speedup during training 32K sequence length on 8 X A100.

In robotics, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are increasingly recognized for their largely-unrealized potential energy efficiency and low latency particularly when implemented on neuromorphic hardware. Our paper highlights three advancements for SNNs in Visual Place Recognition (VPR). First, we propose Modular SNNs, where each SNN represents a set of non-overlapping geographically distinct places, enabling scalable networks for large environments. Secondly, we present Ensembles of Modular SNNs, where multiple networks represent the same place, significantly enhancing accuracy compared to single-network models. Our SNNs are compact and small, comprising only 1500 neurons and 474k synapses, which makes them ideally suited for ensembling due to this small size. Lastly, we investigate the role of sequence matching in SNN-based VPR, a technique where consecutive images are used to refine place recognition. We analyze the responsiveness of SNNs to ensembling and sequence matching compared to other VPR techniques. Our contributions highlight the viability of SNNs for VPR, offering scalable and robust solutions, paving the way for their application in various energy-sensitive robotic tasks.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) enables the agent to navigate to a remote location following the natural language instruction in 3D environments. To represent the previously visited environment, most approaches for VLN implement memory using recurrent states, topological maps, or top-down semantic maps. In contrast to these approaches, we build the top-down egocentric and dynamically growing Grid Memory Map (i.e., GridMM) to structure the visited environment. From a global perspective, historical observations are projected into a unified grid map in a top-down view, which can better represent the spatial relations of the environment. From a local perspective, we further propose an instruction relevance aggregation method to capture fine-grained visual clues in each grid region. Extensive experiments are conducted on both the REVERIE, R2R, SOON datasets in the discrete environments, and the R2R-CE dataset in the continuous environments, showing the superiority of our proposed method.

In this paper, we propose ZipAR, a training-free, plug-and-play parallel decoding framework for accelerating auto-regressive (AR) visual generation. The motivation stems from the observation that images exhibit local structures, and spatially distant regions tend to have minimal interdependence. Given a partially decoded set of visual tokens, in addition to the original next-token prediction scheme in the row dimension, the tokens corresponding to spatially adjacent regions in the column dimension can be decoded in parallel, enabling the ``next-set prediction'' paradigm. By decoding multiple tokens simultaneously in a single forward pass, the number of forward passes required to generate an image is significantly reduced, resulting in a substantial improvement in generation efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that ZipAR can reduce the number of model forward passes by up to 91% on the Emu3-Gen model without requiring any additional retraining.

Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have recently exhibited remarkable capabilities in general video understanding. However, they mainly focus on holistic comprehension and struggle with capturing fine-grained spatial and temporal details. Besides, the lack of high-quality object-level video instruction data and a comprehensive benchmark further hinders their advancements. To tackle these challenges, we introduce the VideoRefer Suite to empower Video LLM for finer-level spatial-temporal video understanding, i.e., enabling perception and reasoning on any objects throughout the video. Specially, we thoroughly develop VideoRefer Suite across three essential aspects: dataset, model, and benchmark. Firstly, we introduce a multi-agent data engine to meticulously curate a large-scale, high-quality object-level video instruction dataset, termed VideoRefer-700K. Next, we present the VideoRefer model, which equips a versatile spatial-temporal object encoder to capture precise regional and sequential representations. Finally, we meticulously create a VideoRefer-Bench to comprehensively assess the spatial-temporal understanding capability of a Video LLM, evaluating it across various aspects. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate that our VideoRefer model not only achieves promising performance on video referring benchmarks but also facilitates general video understanding capabilities.

We introduce ARPG, a novel visual autoregressive model that enables randomized parallel generation, addressing the inherent limitations of conventional raster-order approaches, which hinder inference efficiency and zero-shot generalization due to their sequential, predefined token generation order. Our key insight is that effective random-order modeling necessitates explicit guidance for determining the position of the next predicted token. To this end, we propose a novel guided decoding framework that decouples positional guidance from content representation, encoding them separately as queries and key-value pairs. By directly incorporating this guidance into the causal attention mechanism, our approach enables fully random-order training and generation, eliminating the need for bidirectional attention. Consequently, ARPG readily generalizes to zero-shot tasks such as image inpainting, outpainting, and resolution expansion. Furthermore, it supports parallel inference by concurrently processing multiple queries using a shared KV cache. On the ImageNet-1K 256 benchmark, our approach attains an FID of 1.94 with only 64 sampling steps, achieving over a 20-fold increase in throughput while reducing memory consumption by over 75% compared to representative recent autoregressive models at a similar scale.

3D vision and spatial reasoning have long been recognized as preferable for accurately perceiving our three-dimensional world, especially when compared with traditional visual reasoning based on 2D images. Due to the difficulties in collecting high-quality 3D data, research in this area has only recently gained momentum. With the advent of powerful large language models (LLMs), multi-modal LLMs for 3D vision have been developed over the past few years. However, most of these models focus primarily on the vision encoder for 3D data. In this paper, we propose converting existing densely activated LLMs into mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, which have proven effective for multi-modal data processing. In addition to leveraging these models' instruction-following capabilities, we further enable embodied task planning by attaching a diffusion head, Pose-DiT, that employs a novel rectified flow diffusion scheduler. Experimental results on 3D question answering and task-planning tasks demonstrate that our 3D-MoE framework achieves improved performance with fewer activated parameters.

We present a novel technique for self-supervised video representation learning by: (a) decoupling the learning objective into two contrastive subtasks respectively emphasizing spatial and temporal features, and (b) performing it hierarchically to encourage multi-scale understanding. Motivated by their effectiveness in supervised learning, we first introduce spatial-temporal feature learning decoupling and hierarchical learning to the context of unsupervised video learning. We show by experiments that augmentations can be manipulated as regularization to guide the network to learn desired semantics in contrastive learning, and we propose a way for the model to separately capture spatial and temporal features at multiple scales. We also introduce an approach to overcome the problem of divergent levels of instance invariance at different hierarchies by modeling the invariance as loss weights for objective re-weighting. Experiments on downstream action recognition benchmarks on UCF101 and HMDB51 show that our proposed Hierarchically Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Contrast (HDC) makes substantial improvements over directly learning spatial-temporal features as a whole and achieves competitive performance when compared with other state-of-the-art unsupervised methods. Code will be made available.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performance in 2D image understanding, however they are still struggling with spatial understanding which is the foundation of Embodied AI. In this paper, we propose SpatialBot for better spatial understanding by feeding both RGB and depth images. Additionally, we have constructed the SpatialQA dataset, which involves multi-level depth-related questions to train VLMs for depth understanding. Finally, we present SpatialBench to comprehensively evaluate VLMs' capabilities in spatial understanding at different levels. Extensive experiments on our spatial-understanding benchmark, general VLM benchmarks and Embodied AI tasks, demonstrate the remarkable improvements of SpatialBot trained on SpatialQA. The model, code and data are available at https://github.com/BAAI-DCAI/SpatialBot.

With the impressive progress in diffusion-based text-to-image generation, extending such powerful generative ability to text-to-video raises enormous attention. Existing methods either require large-scale text-video pairs and a large number of training resources or learn motions that are precisely aligned with template videos. It is non-trivial to balance a trade-off between the degree of generation freedom and the resource costs for video generation. In our study, we present a few-shot-based tuning framework, LAMP, which enables text-to-image diffusion model Learn A specific Motion Pattern with 8~16 videos on a single GPU. Specifically, we design a first-frame-conditioned pipeline that uses an off-the-shelf text-to-image model for content generation so that our tuned video diffusion model mainly focuses on motion learning. The well-developed text-to-image techniques can provide visually pleasing and diverse content as generation conditions, which highly improves video quality and generation freedom. To capture the features of temporal dimension, we expand the pretrained 2D convolution layers of the T2I model to our novel temporal-spatial motion learning layers and modify the attention blocks to the temporal level. Additionally, we develop an effective inference trick, shared-noise sampling, which can improve the stability of videos with computational costs. Our method can also be flexibly applied to other tasks, e.g. real-world image animation and video editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LAMP can effectively learn the motion pattern on limited data and generate high-quality videos. The code and models are available at https://rq-wu.github.io/projects/LAMP.

This study introduces a parameter-efficient Hierarchical Spatial Temporal Network (HiSTN) specifically designed for the task of emotion classification using multi-channel electroencephalogram data. The network incorporates a graph hierarchy constructed from bottom-up at various abstraction levels, offering the dual advantages of enhanced task-relevant deep feature extraction and a lightweight design. The model's effectiveness is further amplified when used in conjunction with a proposed unique label smoothing method. Comprehensive benchmark experiments reveal that this combined approach yields high, balanced performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative predictions. HiSTN, which has approximately 1,000 parameters, achieves mean F1 scores of 96.82% (valence) and 95.62% (arousal) in subject-dependent tests on the rarely-utilized 5-classification task problem from the DREAMER dataset. In the subject-independent settings, the same model yields mean F1 scores of 78.34% for valence and 81.59% for arousal. The adoption of the Sequential Top-2 Hit Rate (Seq2HR) metric highlights the significant enhancements in terms of the balance between model's quantitative and qualitative for predictions achieved through our approach when compared to training with regular one-hot labels. These improvements surpass 50% in subject-dependent tasks and 30% in subject-independent tasks. The study also includes relevant ablation studies and case explorations to further elucidate the workings of the proposed model and enhance its interpretability.

This paper studies a conceptually simple extension of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) to spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. We randomly mask out spacetime patches in videos and learn an autoencoder to reconstruct them in pixels. Interestingly, we show that our MAE method can learn strong representations with almost no inductive bias on spacetime (only except for patch and positional embeddings), and spacetime-agnostic random masking performs the best. We observe that the optimal masking ratio is as high as 90% (vs. 75% on images), supporting the hypothesis that this ratio is related to information redundancy of the data. A high masking ratio leads to a large speedup, e.g., > 4x in wall-clock time or even more. We report competitive results on several challenging video datasets using vanilla Vision Transformers. We observe that MAE can outperform supervised pre-training by large margins. We further report encouraging results of training on real-world, uncurated Instagram data. Our study suggests that the general framework of masked autoencoding (BERT, MAE, etc.) can be a unified methodology for representation learning with minimal domain knowledge.

Video inpainting aims to fill spatio-temporal "corrupted" regions with plausible content. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to find correspondences from neighbouring frames to faithfully hallucinate the unknown content. Current methods achieve this goal through attention, flow-based warping, or 3D temporal convolution. However, flow-based warping can create artifacts when optical flow is not accurate, while temporal convolution may suffer from spatial misalignment. We propose 'Progressive Temporal Feature Alignment Network', which progressively enriches features extracted from the current frame with the feature warped from neighbouring frames using optical flow. Our approach corrects the spatial misalignment in the temporal feature propagation stage, greatly improving visual quality and temporal consistency of the inpainted videos. Using the proposed architecture, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the DAVIS and FVI datasets compared to existing deep learning approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/MaureenZOU/TSAM.

State-of-the-art systems neuroscience experiments yield large-scale multimodal data, and these data sets require new tools for analysis. Inspired by the success of large pretrained models in vision and language domains, we reframe the analysis of large-scale, cellular-resolution neuronal spiking data into an autoregressive spatiotemporal generation problem. Neuroformer is a multimodal, multitask generative pretrained transformer (GPT) model that is specifically designed to handle the intricacies of data in systems neuroscience. It scales linearly with feature size, can process an arbitrary number of modalities, and is adaptable to downstream tasks, such as predicting behavior. We first trained Neuroformer on simulated datasets, and found that it both accurately predicted simulated neuronal circuit activity, and also intrinsically inferred the underlying neural circuit connectivity, including direction. When pretrained to decode neural responses, the model predicted the behavior of a mouse with only few-shot fine-tuning, suggesting that the model begins learning how to do so directly from the neural representations themselves, without any explicit supervision. We used an ablation study to show that joint training on neuronal responses and behavior boosted performance, highlighting the model's ability to associate behavioral and neural representations in an unsupervised manner. These findings show that Neuroformer can analyze neural datasets and their emergent properties, informing the development of models and hypotheses associated with the brain.

Pipeline parallelism has been widely explored, but most existing schedules lack a systematic methodology. In this paper, we propose a framework to decompose pipeline schedules as repeating a building block and we show that the lifespan of the building block decides the peak activation memory of the pipeline schedule. Guided by the observations, we find that almost all existing pipeline schedules, to the best of our knowledge, are memory inefficient. To address this, we introduce a family of memory efficient building blocks with controllable activation memory, which can reduce the peak activation memory to 1/2 of 1F1B without sacrificing efficiency, and even to 1/3 with comparable throughput. We can also achieve almost zero pipeline bubbles while maintaining the same activation memory as 1F1B. Our evaluations demonstrate that in pure pipeline parallelism settings, our methods outperform 1F1B by from 7% to 55% in terms of throughput. When employing a grid search over hybrid parallelism hyperparameters in practical scenarios, our proposed methods demonstrate a 16% throughput improvement over the 1F1B baseline for large language models.

We propose Lodge, a network capable of generating extremely long dance sequences conditioned on given music. We design Lodge as a two-stage coarse to fine diffusion architecture, and propose the characteristic dance primitives that possess significant expressiveness as intermediate representations between two diffusion models. The first stage is global diffusion, which focuses on comprehending the coarse-level music-dance correlation and production characteristic dance primitives. In contrast, the second-stage is the local diffusion, which parallelly generates detailed motion sequences under the guidance of the dance primitives and choreographic rules. In addition, we propose a Foot Refine Block to optimize the contact between the feet and the ground, enhancing the physical realism of the motion. Our approach can parallelly generate dance sequences of extremely long length, striking a balance between global choreographic patterns and local motion quality and expressiveness. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our method.

We propose a novel block for video modelling. It relies on a time-space-channel factorisation with dedicated blocks for each dimension: gated linear recurrent units (LRUs) perform information mixing over time, self-attention layers perform mixing over space, and MLPs over channels. The resulting architecture TRecViT performs well on sparse and dense tasks, trained in supervised or self-supervised regimes. Notably, our model is causal and outperforms or is on par with a pure attention model ViViT-L on large scale video datasets (SSv2, Kinetics400), while having 3times less parameters, 12times smaller memory footprint, and 5times lower FLOPs count. Code and checkpoints will be made available online at https://github.com/google-deepmind/trecvit.

Multi-subject fMRI studies are challenging due to the high variability of both brain anatomy and functional brain topographies across participants. An effective way of aggregating multi-subject fMRI data is to extract a shared representation that filters out unwanted variability among subjects. Some recent work has implemented probabilistic models to extract a shared representation in task fMRI. In the present work, we improve upon these models by incorporating temporal information in the common latent structures. We introduce a new model, Shared Gaussian Process Factor Analysis (S-GPFA), that discovers shared latent trajectories and subject-specific functional topographies, while modelling temporal correlation in fMRI data. We demonstrate the efficacy of our model in revealing ground truth latent structures using simulated data, and replicate experimental performance of time-segment matching and inter-subject similarity on the publicly available Raider and Sherlock datasets. We further test the utility of our model by analyzing its learned model parameters in the large multi-site SPINS dataset, on a social cognition task from participants with and without schizophrenia.

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from 2D images and generating diverse views over time is challenging due to scene complexity and temporal dynamics. Despite advancements in neural implicit models, limitations persist: (i) Inadequate Scene Structure: Existing methods struggle to reveal the spatial and temporal structure of dynamic scenes from directly learning the complex 6D plenoptic function. (ii) Scaling Deformation Modeling: Explicitly modeling scene element deformation becomes impractical for complex dynamics. To address these issues, we consider the spacetime as an entirety and propose to approximate the underlying spatio-temporal 4D volume of a dynamic scene by optimizing a collection of 4D primitives, with explicit geometry and appearance modeling. Learning to optimize the 4D primitives enables us to synthesize novel views at any desired time with our tailored rendering routine. Our model is conceptually simple, consisting of a 4D Gaussian parameterized by anisotropic ellipses that can rotate arbitrarily in space and time, as well as view-dependent and time-evolved appearance represented by the coefficient of 4D spherindrical harmonics. This approach offers simplicity, flexibility for variable-length video and end-to-end training, and efficient real-time rendering, making it suitable for capturing complex dynamic scene motions. Experiments across various benchmarks, including monocular and multi-view scenarios, demonstrate our 4DGS model's superior visual quality and efficiency.

Recently, there is a surge in interest surrounding video large language models (Video LLMs). However, existing benchmarks fail to provide a comprehensive feedback on the temporal perception ability of Video LLMs. On the one hand, most of them are unable to distinguish between different temporal aspects (e.g., speed, direction) and thus cannot reflect the nuanced performance on these specific aspects. On the other hand, they are limited in the diversity of task formats (e.g., only multi-choice QA), which hinders the understanding of how temporal perception performance may vary across different types of tasks. Motivated by these two problems, we propose the TempCompass benchmark, which introduces a diversity of temporal aspects and task formats. To collect high-quality test data, we devise two novel strategies: (1) In video collection, we construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect, which prevents Video LLMs from leveraging single-frame bias or language priors. (2) To collect the task instructions, we propose a paradigm where humans first annotate meta-information for a video and then an LLM generates the instruction. We also design an LLM-based approach to automatically and accurately evaluate the responses from Video LLMs. Based on TempCompass, we comprehensively evaluate 8 state-of-the-art (SOTA) Video LLMs and 3 Image LLMs, and reveal the discerning fact that these models exhibit notably poor temporal perception ability. The data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/llyx97/TempCompass.

Egocentric gaze anticipation serves as a key building block for the emerging capability of Augmented Reality. Notably, gaze behavior is driven by both visual cues and audio signals during daily activities. Motivated by this observation, we introduce the first model that leverages both the video and audio modalities for egocentric gaze anticipation. Specifically, we propose a Contrastive Spatial-Temporal Separable (CSTS) fusion approach that adopts two modules to separately capture audio-visual correlations in spatial and temporal dimensions, and applies a contrastive loss on the re-weighted audio-visual features from fusion modules for representation learning. We conduct extensive ablation studies and thorough analysis using two egocentric video datasets: Ego4D and Aria, to validate our model design. We demonstrate the audio improves the performance by +2.5% and +2.4% on the two datasets. Our model also outperforms the prior state-of-the-art methods by at least +1.9% and +1.6%. Moreover, we provide visualizations to show the gaze anticipation results and provide additional insights into audio-visual representation learning. The code and data split are available on our website (https://bolinlai.github.io/CSTS-EgoGazeAnticipation/).

Diffusion models generate highly realistic images through learning a multi-step denoising process, naturally embodying the principles of multi-task learning (MTL). Despite the inherent connection between diffusion models and MTL, there remains an unexplored area in designing neural architectures that explicitly incorporate MTL into the framework of diffusion models. In this paper, we present Denoising Task Routing (DTR), a simple add-on strategy for existing diffusion model architectures to establish distinct information pathways for individual tasks within a single architecture by selectively activating subsets of channels in the model. What makes DTR particularly compelling is its seamless integration of prior knowledge of denoising tasks into the framework: (1) Task Affinity: DTR activates similar channels for tasks at adjacent timesteps and shifts activated channels as sliding windows through timesteps, capitalizing on the inherent strong affinity between tasks at adjacent timesteps. (2) Task Weights: During the early stages (higher timesteps) of the denoising process, DTR assigns a greater number of task-specific channels, leveraging the insight that diffusion models prioritize reconstructing global structure and perceptually rich contents in earlier stages, and focus on simple noise removal in later stages. Our experiments demonstrate that DTR consistently enhances the performance of diffusion models across various evaluation protocols, all without introducing additional parameters. Furthermore, DTR contributes to accelerating convergence during training. Finally, we show the complementarity between our architectural approach and existing MTL optimization techniques, providing a more complete view of MTL within the context of diffusion training.

Despite the promising performance of state space models (SSMs) in long sequence modeling, limitations still exist. Advanced SSMs like S5 and S6 (Mamba) in addressing non-uniform sampling, their recursive structures impede efficient SSM computation via convolution. To overcome compatibility limitations in parallel convolutional computation, this paper proposes a novel non-recursive non-uniform sample processing strategy. Theoretical analysis of SSMs through the lens of Event-Triggered Control (ETC) theory reveals the Non-Stable State (NSS) problem, where deviations from sampling point requirements lead to error transmission and accumulation, causing the divergence of the SSM's hidden state. Our analysis further reveals that adjustments of input sequences with early memories can mitigate the NSS problem, achieving Sampling Step Adaptation (SSA). Building on this insight, we introduce a simple yet effective plug-and-play mechanism, State Memory Replay (SMR), which utilizes learnable memories to adjust the current state with multi-step information for generalization at sampling points different from those in the training data. This enables SSMs to stably model varying sampling points. Experiments on long-range modeling tasks in autoregressive language modeling and Long Range Arena demonstrate the general effectiveness of the SMR mechanism for a series of SSM models.

Spatial relationships between objects represent key scene information for humans to understand and interact with the world. To study the capability of current computer vision systems to recognize physically grounded spatial relations, we start by proposing precise relation definitions that permit consistently annotating a benchmark dataset. Despite the apparent simplicity of this task relative to others in the recognition literature, we observe that existing approaches perform poorly on this benchmark. We propose new approaches exploiting the long-range attention capabilities of transformers for this task, and evaluating key design principles. We identify a simple "RelatiViT" architecture and demonstrate that it outperforms all current approaches. To our knowledge, this is the first method to convincingly outperform naive baselines on spatial relation prediction in in-the-wild settings. The code and datasets are available in https://sites.google.com/view/spatial-relation.

Novel architectures have recently improved generative image synthesis leading to excellent visual quality in various tasks. Much of this success is due to the scalability of these architectures and hence caused by a dramatic increase in model complexity and in the computational resources invested in training these models. Our work questions the underlying paradigm of compressing large training data into ever growing parametric representations. We rather present an orthogonal, semi-parametric approach. We complement comparably small diffusion or autoregressive models with a separate image database and a retrieval strategy. During training we retrieve a set of nearest neighbors from this external database for each training instance and condition the generative model on these informative samples. While the retrieval approach is providing the (local) content, the model is focusing on learning the composition of scenes based on this content. As demonstrated by our experiments, simply swapping the database for one with different contents transfers a trained model post-hoc to a novel domain. The evaluation shows competitive performance on tasks which the generative model has not been trained on, such as class-conditional synthesis, zero-shot stylization or text-to-image synthesis without requiring paired text-image data. With negligible memory and computational overhead for the external database and retrieval we can significantly reduce the parameter count of the generative model and still outperform the state-of-the-art.

We propose a flow-guided transformer, which innovatively leverage the motion discrepancy exposed by optical flows to instruct the attention retrieval in transformer for high fidelity video inpainting. More specially, we design a novel flow completion network to complete the corrupted flows by exploiting the relevant flow features in a local temporal window. With the completed flows, we propagate the content across video frames, and adopt the flow-guided transformer to synthesize the rest corrupted regions. We decouple transformers along temporal and spatial dimension, so that we can easily integrate the locally relevant completed flows to instruct spatial attention only. Furthermore, we design a flow-reweight module to precisely control the impact of completed flows on each spatial transformer. For the sake of efficiency, we introduce window partition strategy to both spatial and temporal transformers. Especially in spatial transformer, we design a dual perspective spatial MHSA, which integrates the global tokens to the window-based attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method qualitatively and quantitatively. Codes are available at https://github.com/hitachinsk/FGT.

Current large multimodal models (LMMs) face significant challenges in processing and comprehending long-duration or high-resolution videos, which is mainly due to the lack of high-quality datasets. To address this issue from a data-centric perspective, we propose VISTA, a simple yet effective Video Spatiotemporal Augmentation framework that synthesizes long-duration and high-resolution video instruction-following pairs from existing video-caption datasets. VISTA spatially and temporally combines videos to create new synthetic videos with extended durations and enhanced resolutions, and subsequently produces question-answer pairs pertaining to these newly synthesized videos. Based on this paradigm, we develop seven video augmentation methods and curate VISTA-400K, a video instruction-following dataset aimed at enhancing long-duration and high-resolution video understanding. Finetuning various video LMMs on our data resulted in an average improvement of 3.3% across four challenging benchmarks for long-video understanding. Furthermore, we introduce the first comprehensive high-resolution video understanding benchmark HRVideoBench, on which our finetuned models achieve a 6.5% performance gain. These results highlight the effectiveness of our framework.

Predicting diverse human motions given a sequence of historical poses has received increasing attention. Despite rapid progress, existing work captures the multi-modal nature of human motions primarily through likelihood-based sampling, where the mode collapse has been widely observed. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach that disentangles randomly sampled codes with a deterministic learnable component named anchors to promote sample precision and diversity. Anchors are further factorized into spatial anchors and temporal anchors, which provide attractively interpretable control over spatial-temporal disparity. In principle, our spatial-temporal anchor-based sampling (STARS) can be applied to different motion predictors. Here we propose an interaction-enhanced spatial-temporal graph convolutional network (IE-STGCN) that encodes prior knowledge of human motions (e.g., spatial locality), and incorporate the anchors into it. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state of the art in both stochastic and deterministic prediction, suggesting it as a unified framework for modeling human motions. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/Sirui-Xu/STARS.

We propose SlowFast-LLaVA (or SF-LLaVA for short), a training-free video large language model (LLM) that can jointly capture the detailed spatial semantics and long-range temporal context without exceeding the token budget of commonly used LLMs. This is realized by using a two-stream SlowFast design of inputs for Video LLMs to aggregate features from sampled video frames in an effective way. Specifically, the Slow pathway extracts features at a low frame rate while keeping as many spatial details as possible (e.g., with 24x24 tokens), and the Fast pathway operates on a high frame rate but uses a larger spatial pooling stride (e.g., downsampling 6x) to focus on the motion cues. As a result, this design allows us to adequately capture both spatial and temporal features that are beneficial for understanding details along the video. Experimental results show that SF-LLaVA outperforms existing training-free methods on a wide range of video tasks. On some benchmarks, it achieves comparable or even better performance compared to state-of-the-art Video LLMs that are fine-tuned on video datasets.

Learning a robust video Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is essential for reducing video redundancy and facilitating efficient video generation. Directly applying image VAEs to individual frames in isolation can result in temporal inconsistencies and suboptimal compression rates due to a lack of temporal compression. Existing Video VAEs have begun to address temporal compression; however, they often suffer from inadequate reconstruction performance. In this paper, we present a novel and powerful video autoencoder capable of high-fidelity video encoding. First, we observe that entangling spatial and temporal compression by merely extending the image VAE to a 3D VAE can introduce motion blur and detail distortion artifacts. Thus, we propose temporal-aware spatial compression to better encode and decode the spatial information. Additionally, we integrate a lightweight motion compression model for further temporal compression. Second, we propose to leverage the textual information inherent in text-to-video datasets and incorporate text guidance into our model. This significantly enhances reconstruction quality, particularly in terms of detail preservation and temporal stability. Third, we further improve the versatility of our model through joint training on both images and videos, which not only enhances reconstruction quality but also enables the model to perform both image and video autoencoding. Extensive evaluations against strong recent baselines demonstrate the superior performance of our method. The project website can be found at~https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/{https://yzxing87.github.io/vae/}.

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models that were initially proposed for realistic image generation have recently shown success in various perception tasks (e.g., object detection and image segmentation) and are increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. However, extending such models to multi-frame human pose estimation is non-trivial due to the presence of the additional temporal dimension in videos. More importantly, learning representations that focus on keypoint regions is crucial for accurate localization of human joints. Nevertheless, the adaptation of the diffusion-based methods remains unclear on how to achieve such objective. In this paper, we present DiffPose, a novel diffusion architecture that formulates video-based human pose estimation as a conditional heatmap generation problem. First, to better leverage temporal information, we propose SpatioTemporal Representation Learner which aggregates visual evidences across frames and uses the resulting features in each denoising step as a condition. In addition, we present a mechanism called Lookup-based MultiScale Feature Interaction that determines the correlations between local joints and global contexts across multiple scales. This mechanism generates delicate representations that focus on keypoint regions. Altogether, by extending diffusion models, we show two unique characteristics from DiffPose on pose estimation task: (i) the ability to combine multiple sets of pose estimates to improve prediction accuracy, particularly for challenging joints, and (ii) the ability to adjust the number of iterative steps for feature refinement without retraining the model. DiffPose sets new state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: PoseTrack2017, PoseTrack2018, and PoseTrack21.

Diffusion Transformer has demonstrated powerful capability and scalability in generating high-quality images and videos. Further pursuing the unification of generation and editing tasks has yielded significant progress in the domain of image content creation. However, due to the intrinsic demands for consistency across both temporal and spatial dynamics, achieving a unified approach for video synthesis remains challenging. We introduce VACE, which enables users to perform Video tasks within an All-in-one framework for Creation and Editing. These tasks include reference-to-video generation, video-to-video editing, and masked video-to-video editing. Specifically, we effectively integrate the requirements of various tasks by organizing video task inputs, such as editing, reference, and masking, into a unified interface referred to as the Video Condition Unit (VCU). Furthermore, by utilizing a Context Adapter structure, we inject different task concepts into the model using formalized representations of temporal and spatial dimensions, allowing it to handle arbitrary video synthesis tasks flexibly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the unified model of VACE achieves performance on par with task-specific models across various subtasks. Simultaneously, it enables diverse applications through versatile task combinations. Project page: https://ali-vilab.github.io/VACE-Page/.

Modeling and re-rendering dynamic 3D scenes is a challenging task in 3D vision. Prior approaches build on NeRF and rely on implicit representations. This is slow since it requires many MLP evaluations, constraining real-world applications. We show that dynamic 3D scenes can be explicitly represented by six planes of learned features, leading to an elegant solution we call HexPlane. A HexPlane computes features for points in spacetime by fusing vectors extracted from each plane, which is highly efficient. Pairing a HexPlane with a tiny MLP to regress output colors and training via volume rendering gives impressive results for novel view synthesis on dynamic scenes, matching the image quality of prior work but reducing training time by more than 100times. Extensive ablations confirm our HexPlane design and show that it is robust to different feature fusion mechanisms, coordinate systems, and decoding mechanisms. HexPlane is a simple and effective solution for representing 4D volumes, and we hope they can broadly contribute to modeling spacetime for dynamic 3D scenes.

Motivated by the success of Transformers when applied to sequences of discrete symbols, token-based world models (TBWMs) were recently proposed as sample-efficient methods. In TBWMs, the world model consumes agent experience as a language-like sequence of tokens, where each observation constitutes a sub-sequence. However, during imagination, the sequential token-by-token generation of next observations results in a severe bottleneck, leading to long training times, poor GPU utilization, and limited representations. To resolve this bottleneck, we devise a novel Parallel Observation Prediction (POP) mechanism. POP augments a Retentive Network (RetNet) with a novel forward mode tailored to our reinforcement learning setting. We incorporate POP in a novel TBWM agent named REM (Retentive Environment Model), showcasing a 15.4x faster imagination compared to prior TBWMs. REM attains superhuman performance on 12 out of 26 games of the Atari 100K benchmark, while training in less than 12 hours. Our code is available at https://github.com/leor-c/REM.

Biological systems perceive the world by simultaneously processing high-dimensional inputs from modalities as diverse as vision, audition, touch, proprioception, etc. The perception models used in deep learning on the other hand are designed for individual modalities, often relying on domain-specific assumptions such as the local grid structures exploited by virtually all existing vision models. These priors introduce helpful inductive biases, but also lock models to individual modalities. In this paper we introduce the Perceiver - a model that builds upon Transformers and hence makes few architectural assumptions about the relationship between its inputs, but that also scales to hundreds of thousands of inputs, like ConvNets. The model leverages an asymmetric attention mechanism to iteratively distill inputs into a tight latent bottleneck, allowing it to scale to handle very large inputs. We show that this architecture is competitive with or outperforms strong, specialized models on classification tasks across various modalities: images, point clouds, audio, video, and video+audio. The Perceiver obtains performance comparable to ResNet-50 and ViT on ImageNet without 2D convolutions by directly attending to 50,000 pixels. It is also competitive in all modalities in AudioSet.

We introduce a method to generate temporally coherent human animation from a single image, a video, or a random noise. This problem has been formulated as modeling of an auto-regressive generation, i.e., to regress past frames to decode future frames. However, such unidirectional generation is highly prone to motion drifting over time, generating unrealistic human animation with significant artifacts such as appearance distortion. We claim that bidirectional temporal modeling enforces temporal coherence on a generative network by largely suppressing the motion ambiguity of human appearance. To prove our claim, we design a novel human animation framework using a denoising diffusion model: a neural network learns to generate the image of a person by denoising temporal Gaussian noises whose intermediate results are cross-conditioned bidirectionally between consecutive frames. In the experiments, our method demonstrates strong performance compared to existing unidirectional approaches with realistic temporal coherence.

By leveraging temporal dependency in video sequences, multi-frame human pose estimation algorithms have demonstrated remarkable results in complicated situations, such as occlusion, motion blur, and video defocus. These algorithms are predominantly based on heatmaps, resulting in high computation and storage requirements per frame, which limits their flexibility and real-time application in video scenarios, particularly on edge devices. In this paper, we develop an efficient and effective video-based human pose regression method, which bypasses intermediate representations such as heatmaps and instead directly maps the input to the output joint coordinates. Despite the inherent spatial correlation among adjacent joints of the human pose, the temporal trajectory of each individual joint exhibits relative independence. In light of this, we propose a novel Decoupled Space-Time Aggregation network (DSTA) to separately capture the spatial contexts between adjacent joints and the temporal cues of each individual joint, thereby avoiding the conflation of spatiotemporal dimensions. Concretely, DSTA learns a dedicated feature token for each joint to facilitate the modeling of their spatiotemporal dependencies. With the proposed joint-wise local-awareness attention mechanism, our method is capable of efficiently and flexibly utilizing the spatial dependency of adjacent joints and the temporal dependency of each joint itself. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. Compared to previous regression-based single-frame human pose estimation methods, DSTA significantly enhances performance, achieving an 8.9 mAP improvement on PoseTrack2017. Furthermore, our approach either surpasses or is on par with the state-of-the-art heatmap-based multi-frame human pose estimation methods. Project page: https://github.com/zgspose/DSTA.

Accurate traffic forecasting is challenging due to the complex dependency on road networks, various types of roads, and the abrupt speed change due to the events. Recent works mainly focus on dynamic spatial modeling with adaptive graph embedding or graph attention having less consideration for temporal characteristics and in-situ modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning model named TESTAM, which individually models recurring and non-recurring traffic patterns by a mixture-of-experts model with three experts on temporal modeling, spatio-temporal modeling with static graph, and dynamic spatio-temporal dependency modeling with dynamic graph. By introducing different experts and properly routing them, TESTAM could better model various circumstances, including spatially isolated nodes, highly related nodes, and recurring and non-recurring events. For the proper routing, we reformulate a gating problem into a classification problem with pseudo labels. Experimental results on three public traffic network datasets, METR-LA, PEMS-BAY, and EXPY-TKY, demonstrate that TESTAM achieves a better indication and modeling of recurring and non-recurring traffic. We published the official code at https://github.com/HyunWookL/TESTAM

We propose Make-A-Video -- an approach for directly translating the tremendous recent progress in Text-to-Image (T2I) generation to Text-to-Video (T2V). Our intuition is simple: learn what the world looks like and how it is described from paired text-image data, and learn how the world moves from unsupervised video footage. Make-A-Video has three advantages: (1) it accelerates training of the T2V model (it does not need to learn visual and multimodal representations from scratch), (2) it does not require paired text-video data, and (3) the generated videos inherit the vastness (diversity in aesthetic, fantastical depictions, etc.) of today's image generation models. We design a simple yet effective way to build on T2I models with novel and effective spatial-temporal modules. First, we decompose the full temporal U-Net and attention tensors and approximate them in space and time. Second, we design a spatial temporal pipeline to generate high resolution and frame rate videos with a video decoder, interpolation model and two super resolution models that can enable various applications besides T2V. In all aspects, spatial and temporal resolution, faithfulness to text, and quality, Make-A-Video sets the new state-of-the-art in text-to-video generation, as determined by both qualitative and quantitative measures.

The recent rapid development of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has indicated their potential for embodied tasks.However, the critical skill of spatial understanding in embodied environments has not been thoroughly evaluated, leaving the gap between current LVLMs and qualified embodied intelligence unknown. Therefore, we construct EmbSpatial-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating embodied spatial understanding of LVLMs.The benchmark is automatically derived from embodied scenes and covers 6 spatial relationships from an egocentric perspective.Experiments expose the insufficient capacity of current LVLMs (even GPT-4V). We further present EmbSpatial-SFT, an instruction-tuning dataset designed to improve LVLMs' embodied spatial understanding.

We propose DOME, a diffusion-based world model that predicts future occupancy frames based on past occupancy observations. The ability of this world model to capture the evolution of the environment is crucial for planning in autonomous driving. Compared to 2D video-based world models, the occupancy world model utilizes a native 3D representation, which features easily obtainable annotations and is modality-agnostic. This flexibility has the potential to facilitate the development of more advanced world models. Existing occupancy world models either suffer from detail loss due to discrete tokenization or rely on simplistic diffusion architectures, leading to inefficiencies and difficulties in predicting future occupancy with controllability. Our DOME exhibits two key features:(1) High-Fidelity and Long-Duration Generation. We adopt a spatial-temporal diffusion transformer to predict future occupancy frames based on historical context. This architecture efficiently captures spatial-temporal information, enabling high-fidelity details and the ability to generate predictions over long durations. (2)Fine-grained Controllability. We address the challenge of controllability in predictions by introducing a trajectory resampling method, which significantly enhances the model's ability to generate controlled predictions. Extensive experiments on the widely used nuScenes dataset demonstrate that our method surpasses existing baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance on nuScenes. Specifically, our approach surpasses the baseline by 10.5% in mIoU and 21.2% in IoU for occupancy reconstruction and by 36.0% in mIoU and 24.6% in IoU for 4D occupancy forecasting.

Image-to-text tasks, such as open-ended image captioning and controllable image description, have received extensive attention for decades. Here, we further advance this line of work by presenting Visual Spatial Description (VSD), a new perspective for image-to-text toward spatial semantics. Given an image and two objects inside it, VSD aims to produce one description focusing on the spatial perspective between the two objects. Accordingly, we manually annotate a dataset to facilitate the investigation of the newly-introduced task and build several benchmark encoder-decoder models by using VL-BART and VL-T5 as backbones. In addition, we investigate pipeline and joint end-to-end architectures for incorporating visual spatial relationship classification (VSRC) information into our model. Finally, we conduct experiments on our benchmark dataset to evaluate all our models. Results show that our models are impressive, providing accurate and human-like spatial-oriented text descriptions. Meanwhile, VSRC has great potential for VSD, and the joint end-to-end architecture is the better choice for their integration. We make the dataset and codes public for research purposes.

A modern challenge of Artificial Intelligence is learning multiple patterns at once (i.e.parallel learning). While this can not be accomplished by standard Hebbian associative neural networks, in this paper we show how the Multitasking Hebbian Network (a variation on theme of the Hopfield model working on sparse data-sets) is naturally able to perform this complex task. We focus on systems processing in parallel a finite (up to logarithmic growth in the size of the network) amount of patterns, mirroring the low-storage level of standard associative neural networks at work with pattern recognition. For mild dilution in the patterns, the network handles them hierarchically, distributing the amplitudes of their signals as power-laws w.r.t. their information content (hierarchical regime), while, for strong dilution, all the signals pertaining to all the patterns are raised with the same strength (parallel regime). Further, confined to the low-storage setting (i.e., far from the spin glass limit), the presence of a teacher neither alters the multitasking performances nor changes the thresholds for learning: the latter are the same whatever the training protocol is supervised or unsupervised. Results obtained through statistical mechanics, signal-to-noise technique and Monte Carlo simulations are overall in perfect agreement and carry interesting insights on multiple learning at once: for instance, whenever the cost-function of the model is minimized in parallel on several patterns (in its description via Statistical Mechanics), the same happens to the standard sum-squared error Loss function (typically used in Machine Learning).

This paper aims to address the challenge of reconstructing long volumetric videos from multi-view RGB videos. Recent dynamic view synthesis methods leverage powerful 4D representations, like feature grids or point cloud sequences, to achieve high-quality rendering results. However, they are typically limited to short (1~2s) video clips and often suffer from large memory footprints when dealing with longer videos. To solve this issue, we propose a novel 4D representation, named Temporal Gaussian Hierarchy, to compactly model long volumetric videos. Our key observation is that there are generally various degrees of temporal redundancy in dynamic scenes, which consist of areas changing at different speeds. Motivated by this, our approach builds a multi-level hierarchy of 4D Gaussian primitives, where each level separately describes scene regions with different degrees of content change, and adaptively shares Gaussian primitives to represent unchanged scene content over different temporal segments, thus effectively reducing the number of Gaussian primitives. In addition, the tree-like structure of the Gaussian hierarchy allows us to efficiently represent the scene at a particular moment with a subset of Gaussian primitives, leading to nearly constant GPU memory usage during the training or rendering regardless of the video length. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over alternative methods in terms of training cost, rendering speed, and storage usage. To our knowledge, this work is the first approach capable of efficiently handling minutes of volumetric video data while maintaining state-of-the-art rendering quality. Our project page is available at: https://zju3dv.github.io/longvolcap.

Despite progress in video-language modeling, the computational challenge of interpreting long-form videos in response to task-specific linguistic queries persists, largely due to the complexity of high-dimensional video data and the misalignment between language and visual cues over space and time. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel approach called Language-guided Spatial-Temporal Prompt Learning (LSTP). This approach features two key components: a Temporal Prompt Sampler (TPS) with optical flow prior that leverages temporal information to efficiently extract relevant video content, and a Spatial Prompt Solver (SPS) that adeptly captures the intricate spatial relationships between visual and textual elements. By harmonizing TPS and SPS with a cohesive training strategy, our framework significantly enhances computational efficiency, temporal understanding, and spatial-temporal alignment. Empirical evaluations across two challenging tasks--video question answering and temporal question grounding in videos--using a variety of video-language pretrainings (VLPs) and large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the superior performance, speed, and versatility of our proposed LSTP paradigm.

Self-supervised tasks such as colorization, inpainting and zigsaw puzzle have been utilized for visual representation learning for still images, when the number of labeled images is limited or absent at all. Recently, this worthwhile stream of study extends to video domain where the cost of human labeling is even more expensive. However, the most of existing methods are still based on 2D CNN architectures that can not directly capture spatio-temporal information for video applications. In this paper, we introduce a new self-supervised task called as Space-Time Cubic Puzzles to train 3D CNNs using large scale video dataset. This task requires a network to arrange permuted 3D spatio-temporal crops. By completing Space-Time Cubic Puzzles, the network learns both spatial appearance and temporal relation of video frames, which is our final goal. In experiments, we demonstrate that our learned 3D representation is well transferred to action recognition tasks, and outperforms state-of-the-art 2D CNN-based competitors on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets.

Machine learning is a prevalent approach to tame the complexity of design space exploration for domain-specific architectures. Using ML for design space exploration poses challenges. First, it's not straightforward to identify the suitable algorithm from an increasing pool of ML methods. Second, assessing the trade-offs between performance and sample efficiency across these methods is inconclusive. Finally, lack of a holistic framework for fair, reproducible, and objective comparison across these methods hinders progress of adopting ML-aided architecture design space exploration and impedes creating repeatable artifacts. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce ArchGym, an open-source gym and easy-to-extend framework that connects diverse search algorithms to architecture simulators. To demonstrate utility, we evaluate ArchGym across multiple vanilla and domain-specific search algorithms in designing custom memory controller, deep neural network accelerators, and custom SoC for AR/VR workloads, encompassing over 21K experiments. Results suggest that with unlimited samples, ML algorithms are equally favorable to meet user-defined target specification if hyperparameters are tuned; no solution is necessarily better than another (e.g., reinforcement learning vs. Bayesian methods). We coin the term hyperparameter lottery to describe the chance for a search algorithm to find an optimal design provided meticulously selected hyperparameters. The ease of data collection and aggregation in ArchGym facilitates research in ML-aided architecture design space exploration. As a case study, we show this advantage by developing a proxy cost model with an RMSE of 0.61% that offers a 2,000-fold reduction in simulation time. Code and data for ArchGym is available at https://bit.ly/ArchGym.

Designing architectures for deep neural networks requires expert knowledge and substantial computation time. We propose a technique to accelerate architecture selection by learning an auxiliary HyperNet that generates the weights of a main model conditioned on that model's architecture. By comparing the relative validation performance of networks with HyperNet-generated weights, we can effectively search over a wide range of architectures at the cost of a single training run. To facilitate this search, we develop a flexible mechanism based on memory read-writes that allows us to define a wide range of network connectivity patterns, with ResNet, DenseNet, and FractalNet blocks as special cases. We validate our method (SMASH) on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, STL-10, ModelNet10, and Imagenet32x32, achieving competitive performance with similarly-sized hand-designed networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/ajbrock/SMASH

Self-attention is the core mathematical operation of modern transformer architectures and is also a significant computational bottleneck due to its quadratic complexity in the sequence length. In this work, we derive the scalar energy function whose gradient computes the self-attention block, thus elucidating the theoretical underpinnings of self-attention, providing a Bayesian interpretation of the operation and linking it closely with energy-based models such as Hopfield Networks. Moreover, due to this formulation, we discover that we can use efficient and optimized automatic-differentiation techniques to derive a highly efficient Tree Attention algorithm to compute the gradient of the energy and hence self-attention. Our formulation reveals that the reduction across the sequence axis can be efficiently computed in parallel through a tree reduction. Our algorithm, for parallelizing attention computation across multiple GPUs, enables cross-device decoding to be performed asymptotically faster (up to 8x faster) than alternative approaches such as Ring Attention, while also requiring significantly less communication volume and incurring 2x less peak memory. Our code is publicly available here: https://github.com/Zyphra/tree_attention

Action detection in real-world scenarios is particularly challenging due to densely distributed actions in hour-long untrimmed videos. It requires modeling both short- and long-term temporal relationships while handling significant intra-class temporal variations. Previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) Transformer-based architectures, though effective, are impractical for real-world deployment due to their high parameter count, GPU memory usage, and limited throughput, making them unsuitable for very long videos. In this work, we innovatively adapt the Mamba architecture for action detection and propose Multi-scale Temporal Mamba (MS-Temba), comprising two key components: Temporal Mamba (Temba) Blocks and the Temporal Mamba Fuser. Temba Blocks include the Temporal Local Module (TLM) for short-range temporal modeling and the Dilated Temporal SSM (DTS) for long-range dependencies. By introducing dilations, a novel concept for Mamba, TLM and DTS capture local and global features at multiple scales. The Temba Fuser aggregates these scale-specific features using Mamba to learn comprehensive multi-scale representations of untrimmed videos. MS-Temba is validated on three public datasets, outperforming SOTA methods on long videos and matching prior methods on short videos while using only one-eighth of the parameters.

With the success of Vision Transformers (ViTs) in computer vision tasks, recent arts try to optimize the performance and complexity of ViTs to enable efficient deployment on mobile devices. Multiple approaches are proposed to accelerate attention mechanism, improve inefficient designs, or incorporate mobile-friendly lightweight convolutions to form hybrid architectures. However, ViT and its variants still have higher latency or considerably more parameters than lightweight CNNs, even true for the years-old MobileNet. In practice, latency and size are both crucial for efficient deployment on resource-constraint hardware. In this work, we investigate a central question, can transformer models run as fast as MobileNet and maintain a similar size? We revisit the design choices of ViTs and propose an improved supernet with low latency and high parameter efficiency. We further introduce a fine-grained joint search strategy that can find efficient architectures by optimizing latency and number of parameters simultaneously. The proposed models, EfficientFormerV2, achieve about 4% higher top-1 accuracy than MobileNetV2 and MobileNetV2times1.4 on ImageNet-1K with similar latency and parameters. We demonstrate that properly designed and optimized vision transformers can achieve high performance with MobileNet-level size and speed.

Motion time series collected from mobile and wearable devices such as smartphones and smartwatches offer significant insights into human behavioral patterns, with wide applications in healthcare, automation, IoT, and AR/XR due to their low-power, always-on nature. However, given security and privacy concerns, building large-scale motion time series datasets remains difficult, preventing the development of pre-trained models for human activity analysis. Typically, existing models are trained and tested on the same dataset, leading to poor generalizability across variations in device location, device mounting orientation and human activity type. In this paper, we introduce UniMTS, the first unified pre-training procedure for motion time series that generalizes across diverse device latent factors and activities. Specifically, we employ a contrastive learning framework that aligns motion time series with text descriptions enriched by large language models. This helps the model learn the semantics of time series to generalize across activities. Given the absence of large-scale motion time series data, we derive and synthesize time series from existing motion skeleton data with all-joint coverage. Spatio-temporal graph networks are utilized to capture the relationships across joints for generalization across different device locations. We further design rotation-invariant augmentation to make the model agnostic to changes in device mounting orientations. Our model shows exceptional generalizability across 18 motion time series classification benchmark datasets, outperforming the best baselines by 340% in the zero-shot setting, 16.3% in the few-shot setting, and 9.2% in the full-shot setting.

We introduce a model-based asynchronous multi-fidelity method for hyperparameter and neural architecture search that combines the strengths of asynchronous Hyperband and Gaussian process-based Bayesian optimization. At the heart of our method is a probabilistic model that can simultaneously reason across hyperparameters and resource levels, and supports decision-making in the presence of pending evaluations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of challenging benchmarks, for tabular data, image classification and language modelling, and report substantial speed-ups over current state-of-the-art methods. Our new methods, along with asynchronous baselines, are implemented in a distributed framework which will be open sourced along with this publication.

Motion trajectories offer reliable references for physics-based motion learning but suffer from sparsity, particularly in regions that lack sufficient data coverage. To address this challenge, we introduce a self-supervised, structured representation and generation method that extracts spatial-temporal relationships in periodic or quasi-periodic motions. The motion dynamics in a continuously parameterized latent space enable our method to enhance the interpolation and generalization capabilities of motion learning algorithms. The motion learning controller, informed by the motion parameterization, operates online tracking of a wide range of motions, including targets unseen during training. With a fallback mechanism, the controller dynamically adapts its tracking strategy and automatically resorts to safe action execution when a potentially risky target is proposed. By leveraging the identified spatial-temporal structure, our work opens new possibilities for future advancements in general motion representation and learning algorithms.

Many deep learning applications benefit from using large models with billions of parameters. Training these models is notoriously expensive due to the need for specialized HPC clusters. In this work, we consider alternative setups for training large models: using cheap "preemptible" instances or pooling existing resources from multiple regions. We analyze the performance of existing model-parallel algorithms in these conditions and find configurations where training larger models becomes less communication-intensive. Based on these findings, we propose SWARM parallelism, a model-parallel training algorithm designed for poorly connected, heterogeneous and unreliable devices. SWARM creates temporary randomized pipelines between nodes that are rebalanced in case of failure. We empirically validate our findings and compare SWARM parallelism with existing large-scale training approaches. Finally, we combine our insights with compression strategies to train a large Transformer language model with 1B shared parameters (approximately 13B before sharing) on preemptible T4 GPUs with less than 200Mb/s network.

Recognizing and comprehending human actions and gestures is a crucial perception requirement for robots to interact with humans and carry out tasks in diverse domains, including service robotics, healthcare, and manufacturing. Event cameras, with their ability to capture fast-moving objects at a high temporal resolution, offer new opportunities compared to standard action recognition in RGB videos. However, previous research on event camera action recognition has primarily focused on sensor-specific network architectures and image encoding, which may not be suitable for new sensors and limit the use of recent advancements in transformer-based architectures. In this study, we employ a computationally efficient model, namely the video transformer network (VTN), which initially acquires spatial embeddings per event-frame and then utilizes a temporal self-attention mechanism. In order to better adopt the VTN for the sparse and fine-grained nature of event data, we design Event-Contrastive Loss (L_{EC}) and event-specific augmentations. Proposed L_{EC} promotes learning fine-grained spatial cues in the spatial backbone of VTN by contrasting temporally misaligned frames. We evaluate our method on real-world action recognition of N-EPIC Kitchens dataset, and achieve state-of-the-art results on both protocols - testing in seen kitchen (74.9\% accuracy) and testing in unseen kitchens (42.43\% and 46.66\% Accuracy). Our approach also takes less computation time compared to competitive prior approaches, which demonstrates the potential of our framework EventTransAct for real-world applications of event-camera based action recognition. Project Page: https://tristandb8.github.io/EventTransAct_webpage/

Arbitrary-scale video super-resolution (AVSR) aims to enhance the resolution of video frames, potentially at various scaling factors, which presents several challenges regarding spatial detail reproduction, temporal consistency, and computational complexity. In this paper, we first describe a strong baseline for AVSR by putting together three variants of elementary building blocks: 1) a flow-guided recurrent unit that aggregates spatiotemporal information from previous frames, 2) a flow-refined cross-attention unit that selects spatiotemporal information from future frames, and 3) a hyper-upsampling unit that generates scaleaware and content-independent upsampling kernels. We then introduce ST-AVSR by equipping our baseline with a multi-scale structural and textural prior computed from the pre-trained VGG network. This prior has proven effective in discriminating structure and texture across different locations and scales, which is beneficial for AVSR. Comprehensive experiments show that ST-AVSR significantly improves super-resolution quality, generalization ability, and inference speed over the state-of-theart. The code is available at https://github.com/shangwei5/ST-AVSR.

Video Captioning and Summarization have become very popular in the recent years due to advancements in Sequence Modelling, with the resurgence of Long-Short Term Memory networks (LSTMs) and introduction of Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs). Existing architectures extract spatio-temporal features using CNNs and utilize either GRUs or LSTMs to model dependencies with soft attention layers. These attention layers do help in attending to the most prominent features and improve upon the recurrent units, however, these models suffer from the inherent drawbacks of the recurrent units themselves. The introduction of the Transformer model has driven the Sequence Modelling field into a new direction. In this project, we implement a Transformer-based model for Video captioning, utilizing 3D CNN architectures like C3D and Two-stream I3D for video extraction. We also apply certain dimensionality reduction techniques so as to keep the overall size of the model within limits. We finally present our results on the MSVD and ActivityNet datasets for Single and Dense video captioning tasks respectively.

Spatial reasoning tasks in multi-agent environments such as event prediction, agent type identification, or missing data imputation are important for multiple applications (e.g., autonomous surveillance over sensor networks and subtasks for reinforcement learning (RL)). StarCraft II game replays encode intelligent (and adversarial) multi-agent behavior and could provide a testbed for these tasks; however, extracting simple and standardized representations for prototyping these tasks is laborious and hinders reproducibility. In contrast, MNIST and CIFAR10, despite their extreme simplicity, have enabled rapid prototyping and reproducibility of ML methods. Following the simplicity of these datasets, we construct a benchmark spatial reasoning dataset based on StarCraft II replays that exhibit complex multi-agent behaviors, while still being as easy to use as MNIST and CIFAR10. Specifically, we carefully summarize a window of 255 consecutive game states to create 3.6 million summary images from 60,000 replays, including all relevant metadata such as game outcome and player races. We develop three formats of decreasing complexity: Hyperspectral images that include one channel for every unit type (similar to multispectral geospatial images), RGB images that mimic CIFAR10, and grayscale images that mimic MNIST. We show how this dataset can be used for prototyping spatial reasoning methods. All datasets, code for extraction, and code for dataset loading can be found at https://starcraftdata.davidinouye.com

We propose an efficient diffusion-based text-to-video super-resolution (SR) tuning approach that leverages the readily learned capacity of pixel level image diffusion model to capture spatial information for video generation. To accomplish this goal, we design an efficient architecture by inflating the weightings of the text-to-image SR model into our video generation framework. Additionally, we incorporate a temporal adapter to ensure temporal coherence across video frames. We investigate different tuning approaches based on our inflated architecture and report trade-offs between computational costs and super-resolution quality. Empirical evaluation, both quantitative and qualitative, on the Shutterstock video dataset, demonstrates that our approach is able to perform text-to-video SR generation with good visual quality and temporal consistency. To evaluate temporal coherence, we also present visualizations in video format in https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YVc-KMSJqOrEUdQWVaI-Yfu8Vsfu_1aO?usp=sharing .

Despite the typical inversion-then-editing paradigm using text-to-image (T2I) models has demonstrated promising results, directly extending it to text-to-video (T2V) models still suffers severe artifacts such as color flickering and content distortion. Consequently, current video editing methods primarily rely on T2I models, which inherently lack temporal-coherence generative ability, often resulting in inferior editing results. In this paper, we attribute the failure of the typical editing paradigm to: 1) Tightly Spatial-temporal Coupling. The vanilla pivotal-based inversion strategy struggles to disentangle spatial-temporal information in the video diffusion model; 2) Complicated Spatial-temporal Layout. The vanilla cross-attention control is deficient in preserving the unedited content. To address these limitations, we propose a spatial-temporal decoupled guidance (STDG) and multi-frame null-text optimization strategy to provide pivotal temporal cues for more precise pivotal inversion. Furthermore, we introduce a self-attention control strategy to maintain higher fidelity for precise partial content editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method (termed VideoDirector) effectively harnesses the powerful temporal generation capabilities of T2V models, producing edited videos with state-of-the-art performance in accuracy, motion smoothness, realism, and fidelity to unedited content.

Designing domain specific neural networks is a time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive task. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) exists to simplify domain-specific model development but there is a gap in the literature for time series classification on microcontrollers. Therefore, we adapt the concept of differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) to solve the time-series classification problem on resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). We introduce MicroNAS, a domain-specific HW-NAS system integration of DNAS, Latency Lookup Tables, dynamic convolutions and a novel search space specifically designed for time-series classification on MCUs. The resulting system is hardware-aware and can generate neural network architectures that satisfy user-defined limits on the execution latency and peak memory consumption. Our extensive studies on different MCUs and standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that MicroNAS finds MCU-tailored architectures that achieve performance (F1-score) near to state-of-the-art desktop models. We also show that our approach is superior in adhering to memory and latency constraints compared to domain-independent NAS baselines such as DARTS.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are rich in spatio-temporal dynamics and are suitable for processing event-based neuromorphic data. However, event-based datasets are usually less annotated than static datasets. This small data scale makes SNNs prone to overfitting and limits their performance. In order to improve the generalization ability of SNNs on event-based datasets, we use static images to assist SNN training on event data. In this paper, we first discuss the domain mismatch problem encountered when directly transferring networks trained on static datasets to event data. We argue that the inconsistency of feature distributions becomes a major factor hindering the effective transfer of knowledge from static images to event data. To address this problem, we propose solutions in terms of two aspects: feature distribution and training strategy. Firstly, we propose a knowledge transfer loss, which consists of domain alignment loss and spatio-temporal regularization. The domain alignment loss learns domain-invariant spatial features by reducing the marginal distribution distance between the static image and the event data. Spatio-temporal regularization provides dynamically learnable coefficients for domain alignment loss by using the output features of the event data at each time step as a regularization term. In addition, we propose a sliding training strategy, which gradually replaces static image inputs probabilistically with event data, resulting in a smoother and more stable training for the network. We validate our method on neuromorphic datasets, including N-Caltech101, CEP-DVS, and N-Omniglot. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves better performance on all datasets compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Brain-Cog-Lab/Transfer-for-DVS.

Enhancing low-resolution, low-frame-rate videos to high-resolution, high-frame-rate quality is essential for a seamless user experience, motivating advancements in Continuous Spatial-Temporal Video Super Resolution (C-STVSR). While prior methods employ Implicit Neural Representation (INR) for continuous encoding, they often struggle to capture the complexity of video data, relying on simple coordinate concatenation and pre-trained optical flow network for motion representation. Interestingly, we find that adding position encoding, contrary to common observations, does not improve-and even degrade performance. This issue becomes particularly pronounced when combined with pre-trained optical flow networks, which can limit the model's flexibility. To address these issues, we propose BF-STVSR, a C-STVSR framework with two key modules tailored to better represent spatial and temporal characteristics of video: 1) B-spline Mapper for smooth temporal interpolation, and 2) Fourier Mapper for capturing dominant spatial frequencies. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art PSNR and SSIM performance, showing enhanced spatial details and natural temporal consistency.

While Transformers have become the dominant architecture for visual generation, linear attention models, such as the state-space models (SSM), are increasingly recognized for their efficiency in processing long visual sequences. However, the essential efficiency of these models comes from formulating a limited recurrent state, enforcing causality among tokens that are prone to inconsistent modeling of N-dimensional visual data, leaving questions on their capacity to generate long non-causal sequences. In this paper, we explore the boundary of SSM on image and video generation by building the largest-scale diffusion SSM-Transformer hybrid model to date (5B parameters) based on the sub-quadratic bi-directional Hydra and self-attention, and generate up to 2K images and 360p 8 seconds (16 FPS) videos. Our results demonstrate that the model can produce faithful results aligned with complex text prompts and temporal consistent videos with high dynamics, suggesting the great potential of using SSMs for visual generation tasks.

The explosive growth of videos on streaming media platforms has underscored the urgent need for effective video quality assessment (VQA) algorithms to monitor and perceptually optimize the quality of streaming videos. However, VQA remains an extremely challenging task due to the diverse video content and the complex spatial and temporal distortions, thus necessitating more advanced methods to address these issues. Nowadays, large multimodal models (LMMs), such as GPT-4V, have exhibited strong capabilities for various visual understanding tasks, motivating us to leverage the powerful multimodal representation ability of LMMs to solve the VQA task. Therefore, we propose the first Large Multi-Modal Video Quality Assessment (LMM-VQA) model, which introduces a novel spatiotemporal visual modeling strategy for quality-aware feature extraction. Specifically, we first reformulate the quality regression problem into a question and answering (Q&A) task and construct Q&A prompts for VQA instruction tuning. Then, we design a spatiotemporal vision encoder to extract spatial and temporal features to represent the quality characteristics of videos, which are subsequently mapped into the language space by the spatiotemporal projector for modality alignment. Finally, the aligned visual tokens and the quality-inquired text tokens are aggregated as inputs for the large language model (LLM) to generate the quality score and level. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LMM-VQA achieves state-of-the-art performance across five VQA benchmarks, exhibiting an average improvement of 5% in generalization ability over existing methods. Furthermore, due to the advanced design of the spatiotemporal encoder and projector, LMM-VQA also performs exceptionally well on general video understanding tasks, further validating its effectiveness. Our code will be released at https://github.com/Sueqk/LMM-VQA.

Neuromorphic computing with spiking neural networks is promising for energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI) applications. However, different from humans who continually learn different tasks in a lifetime, neural network models suffer from catastrophic forgetting. How could neuronal operations solve this problem is an important question for AI and neuroscience. Many previous studies draw inspiration from observed neuroscience phenomena and propose episodic replay or synaptic metaplasticity, but they are not guaranteed to explicitly preserve knowledge for neuron populations. Other works focus on machine learning methods with more mathematical grounding, e.g., orthogonal projection on high dimensional spaces, but there is no neural correspondence for neuromorphic computing. In this work, we develop a new method with neuronal operations based on lateral connections and Hebbian learning, which can protect knowledge by projecting activity traces of neurons into an orthogonal subspace so that synaptic weight update will not interfere with old tasks. We show that Hebbian and anti-Hebbian learning on recurrent lateral connections can effectively extract the principal subspace of neural activities and enable orthogonal projection. This provides new insights into how neural circuits and Hebbian learning can help continual learning, and also how the concept of orthogonal projection can be realized in neuronal systems. Our method is also flexible to utilize arbitrary training methods based on presynaptic activities/traces. Experiments show that our method consistently solves forgetting for spiking neural networks with nearly zero forgetting under various supervised training methods with different error propagation approaches, and outperforms previous approaches under various settings. Our method can pave a solid path for building continual neuromorphic computing systems.

With the rapid development of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), a number of diagnostic benchmarks have recently emerged to evaluate the comprehension capabilities of these models. However, most benchmarks predominantly assess spatial understanding in the static image tasks, while overlooking temporal understanding in the dynamic video tasks. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a comprehensive Multi-modal Video understanding Benchmark, namely MVBench, which covers 20 challenging video tasks that cannot be effectively solved with a single frame. Specifically, we first introduce a novel static-to-dynamic method to define these temporal-related tasks. By transforming various static tasks into dynamic ones, we enable the systematic generation of video tasks that require a broad spectrum of temporal skills, ranging from perception to cognition. Then, guided by the task definition, we automatically convert public video annotations into multiple-choice QA to evaluate each task. On one hand, such a distinct paradigm allows us to build MVBench efficiently, without much manual intervention. On the other hand, it guarantees evaluation fairness with ground-truth video annotations, avoiding the biased scoring of LLMs. Moreover, we further develop a robust video MLLM baseline, i.e., VideoChat2, by progressive multi-modal training with diverse instruction-tuning data. The extensive results on our MVBench reveal that, the existing MLLMs are far from satisfactory in temporal understanding, while our VideoChat2 largely surpasses these leading models by over 15% on MVBench. All models and data are available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Ask-Anything.

We present the design of a new large scale orchestration layer for accelerators. Our system, Pathways, is explicitly designed to enable exploration of new systems and ML research ideas, while retaining state of the art performance for current models. Pathways uses a sharded dataflow graph of asynchronous operators that consume and produce futures, and efficiently gang-schedules heterogeneous parallel computations on thousands of accelerators while coordinating data transfers over their dedicated interconnects. Pathways makes use of a novel asynchronous distributed dataflow design that lets the control plane execute in parallel despite dependencies in the data plane. This design, with careful engineering, allows Pathways to adopt a single-controller model that makes it easier to express complex new parallelism patterns. We demonstrate that Pathways can achieve performance parity (~100% accelerator utilization) with state-of-the-art systems when running SPMD computations over 2048 TPUs, while also delivering throughput comparable to the SPMD case for Transformer models that are pipelined across 16 stages, or sharded across two islands of accelerators connected over a data center network.

The scaling hypothesis motivates the expansion of models past trillions of parameters as a path towards better performance. Recent significant developments, such as GPT-3, have been driven by this conjecture. However, as models scale-up, training them efficiently with backpropagation becomes difficult. Because model, pipeline, and data parallelism distribute parameters and gradients over compute nodes, communication is challenging to orchestrate: this is a bottleneck to further scaling. In this work, we argue that alternative training methods can mitigate these issues, and can inform the design of extreme-scale training hardware. Indeed, using a synaptically asymmetric method with a parallelizable backward pass, such as Direct Feedback Alignement, communication needs are drastically reduced. We present a photonic accelerator for Direct Feedback Alignment, able to compute random projections with trillions of parameters. We demonstrate our system on benchmark tasks, using both fully-connected and graph convolutional networks. Our hardware is the first architecture-agnostic photonic co-processor for training neural networks. This is a significant step towards building scalable hardware, able to go beyond backpropagation, and opening new avenues for deep learning.

Modeling dynamic, large-scale urban scenes is challenging due to their highly intricate geometric structures and unconstrained dynamics in both space and time. Prior methods often employ high-level architectural priors, separating static and dynamic elements, resulting in suboptimal capture of their synergistic interactions. To address this challenge, we present a unified representation model, called Periodic Vibration Gaussian (PVG). PVG builds upon the efficient 3D Gaussian splatting technique, originally designed for static scene representation, by introducing periodic vibration-based temporal dynamics. This innovation enables PVG to elegantly and uniformly represent the characteristics of various objects and elements in dynamic urban scenes. To enhance temporally coherent representation learning with sparse training data, we introduce a novel flow-based temporal smoothing mechanism and a position-aware adaptive control strategy. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and KITTI benchmarks demonstrate that PVG surpasses state-of-the-art alternatives in both reconstruction and novel view synthesis for both dynamic and static scenes. Notably, PVG achieves this without relying on manually labeled object bounding boxes or expensive optical flow estimation. Moreover, PVG exhibits 50/6000-fold acceleration in training/rendering over the best alternative.

The development of text-to-video (T2V), i.e., generating videos with a given text prompt, has been significantly advanced in recent years. However, relying solely on text prompts often results in ambiguous frame composition due to spatial uncertainty. The research community thus leverages the dense structure signals, e.g., per-frame depth/edge sequences, to enhance controllability, whose collection accordingly increases the burden of inference. In this work, we present SparseCtrl to enable flexible structure control with temporally sparse signals, requiring only one or a few inputs, as shown in Figure 1. It incorporates an additional condition encoder to process these sparse signals while leaving the pre-trained T2V model untouched. The proposed approach is compatible with various modalities, including sketches, depth maps, and RGB images, providing more practical control for video generation and promoting applications such as storyboarding, depth rendering, keyframe animation, and interpolation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the generalization of SparseCtrl on both original and personalized T2V generators. Codes and models will be publicly available at https://guoyww.github.io/projects/SparseCtrl .

Large model inference is shifting from cloud to edge due to concerns about the privacy of user interaction data. However, edge devices often struggle with limited computing power, memory, and bandwidth, requiring collaboration across multiple devices to run and speed up LLM inference. Pipeline parallelism, the mainstream solution, is inefficient for single-user scenarios, while tensor parallelism struggles with frequent communications. In this paper, we argue that tensor parallelism can be more effective than pipeline on low-resource devices, and present a compute- and memory-efficient tensor parallel inference system, named TPI-LLM, to serve 70B-scale models. TPI-LLM keeps sensitive raw data local in the users' devices and introduces a sliding window memory scheduler to dynamically manage layer weights during inference, with disk I/O latency overlapped with the computation and communication. This allows larger models to run smoothly on memory-limited devices. We analyze the communication bottleneck and find that link latency, not bandwidth, emerges as the main issue, so a star-based allreduce algorithm is implemented. Through extensive experiments on both emulated and real testbeds, TPI-LLM demonstrated over 80% less time-to-first-token and token latency compared to Accelerate, and over 90% compared to Transformers and Galaxy, while cutting the peak memory footprint of Llama 2-70B by 90%, requiring only 3.1 GB of memory for 70B-scale models.

Existing benchmarks often highlight the remarkable performance achieved by state-of-the-art Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) in leveraging temporal context for video understanding. However, how well do the models truly perform visual temporal reasoning? Our study of existing benchmarks shows that this capability of MFMs is likely overestimated as many questions can be solved by using a single, few, or out-of-order frames. To systematically examine current visual temporal reasoning tasks, we propose three principles with corresponding metrics: (1) Multi-Frame Gain, (2) Frame Order Sensitivity, and (3) Frame Information Disparity. Following these principles, we introduce TOMATO, Temporal Reasoning Multimodal Evaluation, a novel benchmark crafted to rigorously assess MFMs' temporal reasoning capabilities in video understanding. TOMATO comprises 1,484 carefully curated, human-annotated questions spanning six tasks (i.e., action count, direction, rotation, shape & trend, velocity & frequency, and visual cues), applied to 1,417 videos, including 805 self-recorded and -generated videos, that encompass human-centric, real-world, and simulated scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals a human-model performance gap of 57.3% with the best-performing model. Moreover, our in-depth analysis uncovers more fundamental limitations beyond this gap in current MFMs. While they can accurately recognize events in isolated frames, they fail to interpret these frames as a continuous sequence. We believe TOMATO will serve as a crucial testbed for evaluating the next-generation MFMs and as a call to the community to develop AI systems capable of comprehending human world dynamics through the video modality.

Techniques for automatically designing deep neural network architectures such as reinforcement learning based approaches have recently shown promising results. However, their success is based on vast computational resources (e.g. hundreds of GPUs), making them difficult to be widely used. A noticeable limitation is that they still design and train each network from scratch during the exploration of the architecture space, which is highly inefficient. In this paper, we propose a new framework toward efficient architecture search by exploring the architecture space based on the current network and reusing its weights. We employ a reinforcement learning agent as the meta-controller, whose action is to grow the network depth or layer width with function-preserving transformations. As such, the previously validated networks can be reused for further exploration, thus saves a large amount of computational cost. We apply our method to explore the architecture space of the plain convolutional neural networks (no skip-connections, branching etc.) on image benchmark datasets (CIFAR-10, SVHN) with restricted computational resources (5 GPUs). Our method can design highly competitive networks that outperform existing networks using the same design scheme. On CIFAR-10, our model without skip-connections achieves 4.23\% test error rate, exceeding a vast majority of modern architectures and approaching DenseNet. Furthermore, by applying our method to explore the DenseNet architecture space, we are able to achieve more accurate networks with fewer parameters.

Diverse actions give rise to rich audio-visual signals in long videos. Recent works showcase that the two modalities of audio and video exhibit different temporal extents of events and distinct labels. We address the interplay between the two modalities in long videos by explicitly modelling the temporal extents of audio and visual events. We propose the Time Interval Machine (TIM) where a modality-specific time interval poses as a query to a transformer encoder that ingests a long video input. The encoder then attends to the specified interval, as well as the surrounding context in both modalities, in order to recognise the ongoing action. We test TIM on three long audio-visual video datasets: EPIC-KITCHENS, Perception Test, and AVE, reporting state-of-the-art (SOTA) for recognition. On EPIC-KITCHENS, we beat previous SOTA that utilises LLMs and significantly larger pre-training by 2.9% top-1 action recognition accuracy. Additionally, we show that TIM can be adapted for action detection, using dense multi-scale interval queries, outperforming SOTA on EPIC-KITCHENS-100 for most metrics, and showing strong performance on the Perception Test. Our ablations show the critical role of integrating the two modalities and modelling their time intervals in achieving this performance. Code and models at: https://github.com/JacobChalk/TIM

Recently, advancements in video synthesis have attracted significant attention. Video synthesis models such as AnimateDiff and Stable Video Diffusion have demonstrated the practical applicability of diffusion models in creating dynamic visual content. The emergence of SORA has further spotlighted the potential of video generation technologies. Nonetheless, the extension of video lengths has been constrained by the limitations in computational resources. Most existing video synthesis models can only generate short video clips. In this paper, we propose a novel post-tuning methodology for video synthesis models, called ExVideo. This approach is designed to enhance the capability of current video synthesis models, allowing them to produce content over extended temporal durations while incurring lower training expenditures. In particular, we design extension strategies across common temporal model architectures respectively, including 3D convolution, temporal attention, and positional embedding. To evaluate the efficacy of our proposed post-tuning approach, we conduct extension training on the Stable Video Diffusion model. Our approach augments the model's capacity to generate up to 5times its original number of frames, requiring only 1.5k GPU hours of training on a dataset comprising 40k videos. Importantly, the substantial increase in video length doesn't compromise the model's innate generalization capabilities, and the model showcases its advantages in generating videos of diverse styles and resolutions. We will release the source code and the enhanced model publicly.

Skeleton-based action recognition has attracted considerable attention due to its compact representation of the human body's skeletal sructure. Many recent methods have achieved remarkable performance using graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which extract spatial and temporal features, respectively. Although spatial and temporal dependencies in the human skeleton have been explored separately, spatio-temporal dependency is rarely considered. In this paper, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Curve Network (STC-Net) to effectively leverage the spatio-temporal dependency of the human skeleton. Our proposed network consists of two novel elements: 1) The Spatio-Temporal Curve (STC) module; and 2) Dilated Kernels for Graph Convolution (DK-GC). The STC module dynamically adjusts the receptive field by identifying meaningful node connections between every adjacent frame and generating spatio-temporal curves based on the identified node connections, providing an adaptive spatio-temporal coverage. In addition, we propose DK-GC to consider long-range dependencies, which results in a large receptive field without any additional parameters by applying an extended kernel to the given adjacency matrices of the graph. Our STC-Net combines these two modules and achieves state-of-the-art performance on four skeleton-based action recognition benchmarks.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant progress in offline video understanding. However, applying these models to real-world scenarios, such as autonomous driving and human-computer interaction, presents unique challenges due to the need for real-time processing of continuous online video streams. To this end, this paper presents systematic efforts from three perspectives: evaluation benchmark, model architecture, and training strategy. First, we introduce OVBench, a comprehensive question-answering benchmark specifically designed to evaluate models' ability to perceive, memorize, and reason within online video contexts. It features six core task types across three temporal contexts-past, present, and future-forming 16 subtasks from diverse datasets. Second, we propose a new Pyramid Memory Bank (PMB) that effectively retains key spatiotemporal information in video streams. Third, we proposed an offline-to-online learning paradigm, designing an interleaved dialogue format for online video data and constructing an instruction-tuning dataset tailored for online video training. This framework led to the development of VideoChat-Online, a robust and efficient model for online video understanding. Despite the lower computational cost and higher efficiency, VideoChat-Online outperforms existing state-of-the-art offline and online models across popular offline video benchmarks and OVBench, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model architecture and training strategy.

The increasing demand for immersive AR/VR applications and spatial intelligence has heightened the need to generate high-quality scene-level and 360{\deg} panoramic video. However, most video diffusion models are constrained by limited resolution and aspect ratio, which restricts their applicability to scene-level dynamic content synthesis. In this work, we propose the DynamicScaler, addressing these challenges by enabling spatially scalable and panoramic dynamic scene synthesis that preserves coherence across panoramic scenes of arbitrary size. Specifically, we introduce a Offset Shifting Denoiser, facilitating efficient, synchronous, and coherent denoising panoramic dynamic scenes via a diffusion model with fixed resolution through a seamless rotating Window, which ensures seamless boundary transitions and consistency across the entire panoramic space, accommodating varying resolutions and aspect ratios. Additionally, we employ a Global Motion Guidance mechanism to ensure both local detail fidelity and global motion continuity. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves superior content and motion quality in panoramic scene-level video generation, offering a training-free, efficient, and scalable solution for immersive dynamic scene creation with constant VRAM consumption regardless of the output video resolution. Our project page is available at https://dynamic-scaler.pages.dev/.