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Ranjay Krishna

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25 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Towards Acyclic Preference Evaluation of Language Models via Multiple Evaluators

Zhengyu Hu
Jieyu Zhang
Zhihan Xiong
Alexander Ratner
Kaize Ding
Ranjay Krishna

Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), evaluating their outputs' quality regarding preference remains a critical challenge. While existing works usually leverage a strong LLM as the judge for comparing LLMs' response pairwisely, such a single-evaluator approach is vulnerable to cyclic preference, i.e., output A is better than B, B than C, but C is better than A, causing contradictory evaluation results. To address this, we introduce PGED (Preference Graph Ensemble and Denoise), a novel approach that leverages multiple model-based evaluators to construct preference graphs, and then ensembles and denoises these graphs for acyclic, non-contradictory evaluation results. We provide theoretical guarantees for our framework, demonstrating its efficacy in recovering the ground truth preference structure. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks demonstrate PGED 's superiority in three applications: 1) model ranking for evaluation, 2) response selection for test-time scaling, and 3) data selection for model fine-tuning. Notably, PGED combines small LLM evaluators (e.g., Llama3-8B, Mistral-7B, Qwen2-7B) to outperform strong ones (e.g., Qwen2-72B), showcasing its effectiveness in enhancing evaluation reliability and improving model performance.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AHA: A Vision-Language-Model for Detecting and Reasoning Over Failures in Robotic Manipulation

Jiafei Duan
Wilbert Pumacay
Nishanth Kumar
Yi Ru Wang
Shulin Tian
Wentao Yuan
Ranjay Krishna
Dieter Fox

Robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only task execution but also the ability to detect and learn from failures. While recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have improved robots' spatial reasoning and problem-solving abilities, they still struggle with failure recognition, limiting their real-world applicability. We introduce AHA, an open-source VLM designed to detect and reason about failures in robotic manipulation using natural language. By framing failure detection as a free-form reasoning task, AHA identifies failures and provides detailed, adaptable explanations across different robots, tasks, and environments. We fine-tuned AHA using FailGen, a scalable framework that generates the first large-scale dataset of robotic failure trajectories, the AHA dataset. FailGen achieves this by procedurally perturbing successful demonstrations from simulation. Despite being trained solely on the AHA dataset, AHA generalizes effectively to real-world failure datasets, robotic systems, and unseen tasks. It surpasses the second-best model (GPT-4o in-context learning) by 10.3% and exceeds the average performance of six compared models including five state-of-the-art VLMs by 35.3% across multiple metrics and datasets. We integrate AHA into three manipulation frameworks that utilize LLMs/VLMs for reinforcement learning, task and motion planning, and zero-shot trajectory generation. AHA’s failure feedback enhances these policies' performances by refining dense reward functions, optimizing task planning, and improving sub-task verification, boosting task success rates by an average of 21.4% across all three tasks compared to GPT-4 models. Project page: https://aha-vlm.github.io

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Convergent Functions, Divergent Forms

Hyeonseong Jeon
Ainaz Eftekhar
Aaron Walsman
Kuo-Hao Zeng
Ali Farhadi
Ranjay Krishna

We introduce LOKI, a compute-efficient framework for co-designing morphologies and control policies that generalize across unseen tasks. Inspired by biological adaptation—where animals quickly adjust to morphological changes—our method overcomes the inefficiencies of traditional evolutionary and quality-diversity algorithms. We propose learning convergent functions: shared control policies trained across clusters of morphologically similar designs in a learned latent space, drastically reducing the training cost per design. Simultaneously, we promote divergent forms by replacing mutation with dynamic local search, enabling broader exploration and preventing premature convergence. The policy reuse allows us to explore $\sim780\times$ more designs using 78\% fewer simulation steps and 40\% less compute per design. Local competition paired with a broader search results in a diverse set of high-performing final morphologies. Using the UNIMAL design space and a flat-terrain locomotion task, LOKI discovers a rich variety of designs—ranging from quadrupeds to crabs, bipedals, and spinners—far more diverse than those produced by prior work. These morphologies also transfer better to unseen downstream tasks in agility, stability, and manipulation domains (e. g. $2 \times$ higher reward on bump and push box incline tasks). Overall, our approach produces designs that are both diverse and adaptable, with substantially greater sample efficiency than existing co-design methods.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Interleaved Scene Graphs for Interleaved Text-and-Image Generation Assessment

Dongping Chen
Ruoxi Chen
Shu Pu
Zhaoyi Liu
Yanru Wu
Caixi Chen
Benlin Liu
Yue Huang 0001

Many real-world user queries (e.g. *"How do to make egg fried rice?"*) could benefit from systems capable of generating responses with both textual steps with accompanying images, similar to a cookbook. Models designed to generate interleaved text and images face challenges in ensuring consistency within and across these modalities. To address these challenges, we present ISG, a comprehensive evaluation framework for interleaved text-and-image generation. ISG leverages a scene graph structure to capture relationships between text and image blocks, evaluating responses on four levels of granularity: holistic, structural, block-level, and image-specific. This multi-tiered evaluation allows for a nuanced assessment of consistency, coherence, and accuracy, and provides interpretable question-answer feedback. In conjunction with ISG, we introduce a benchmark, ISG-Bench, encompassing 1,150 samples across 8 categories and 21 subcategories. This benchmark dataset includes complex language-vision dependencies and golden answers to evaluate models effectively on vision-centric tasks such as style transfer, a challenging area for current models. Using ISG-Bench, we demonstrate that recent unified vision-language models perform poorly on generating interleaved content. While compositional approaches that combine separate language and image models show a 111% improvement over unified models at the holistic level, their performance remains suboptimal at both block and image levels. To facilitate future work, we develop ISG-Agent, a baseline agent employing a *"plan-execute-refine"* pipeline to invoke tools, achieving a 122% performance improvement.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SAM2Act: Integrating Visual Foundation Model with A Memory Architecture for Robotic Manipulation

Haoquan Fang
Markus Grotz
Wilbert Pumacay
Yi Ru Wang
Dieter Fox
Ranjay Krishna
Jiafei Duan

Robotic manipulation systems operating in diverse, dynamic environments must exhibit three critical abilities: multitask interaction, generalization to unseen scenarios, and spatial memory. While significant progress has been made in robotic manipulation, existing approaches often fall short in generalization to complex environmental variations and addressing memory-dependent tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SAM2Act, a multi-view robotic transformer-based policy that leverages multi-resolution upsampling with visual representations from large-scale foundation model. SAM2Act achieves a state-of-the-art average success rate of 86. 8% across 18 tasks in the RLBench benchmark, and demonstrates robust generalization on The Colosseum benchmark, with only a 4. 3% performance gap under diverse environmental perturbations. Building on this foundation, we propose SAM2Act+, a memory-based architecture inspired by SAM2, which incorporates a memory bank, an encoder, and an attention mechanism to enhance spatial memory. To address the need for evaluating memory-dependent tasks, we introduce MemoryBench, a novel benchmark designed to assess spatial memory and action recall in robotic manipulation. SAM2Act+ achieves an average success rate of 94. 3% on memory-based tasks in MemoryBench, significantly outperforming existing approaches and pushing the boundaries of memory-based robotic systems. Project page: sam2act. github. io.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Seeking and Updating with Live Visual Knowledge

Mingyang Fu
Yuyang Peng
Dongping Chen
Zetong Zhou
Benlin Liu
Yao Wan
Zhou Zhao
Philip S Yu

The visual world around us constantly evolves, from real-time news and social media trends to global infrastructure changes visible through satellite imagery and augmented reality enhancements. However, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which automate many tasks, struggle to stay current, limited by the cutoff dates in their fixed training datasets. To quantify this stagnation, we introduce LiveVQA, the first-of-its-kind dataset featuring 107, 143 samples and 12 categories data specifically designed to support research in both seeking and updating with live visual knowledge. Drawing from recent news articles, video platforms, and academic publications in April 2024-May 2025, LiveVQA enables evaluation of how models handle latest visual information beyond their knowledge boundaries and how current methods help to update them. Our comprehensive benchmarking of 17 state-of-the-art MLLMs reveals significant performance gaps on content beyond knowledge cutoff, and tool-use or agentic visual seeking framework drastically gain an average of 327% improvement. Furthermore, we explore parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods to update MLLMs with new visual knowledge. We dive deeply to the critical balance between adapter capacity and model capability when updating MLLMs with new visual knowledge. All the experimental dataset and source code are publicly available at: https: //livevqa. github. io.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

VAGEN: Reinforcing World Model Reasoning for Multi-Turn VLM Agents

Kangrui Wang
Pingyue Zhang
Zihan Wang
Yaning Gao
Linjie Li
Qineng Wang
Hanyang Chen
Yiping Lu

A major challenge in training VLM agents, compared to LLM agents, is that states shift from simple texts to complex visual observations, which introduces partial observability and demands robust world modeling. We ask: can VLM agents build internal world models through explicit visual state reasoning? In this work, we architecturally enforce and reward VLM agent’s reasoning process via reinforcement learning (RL), formulating the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). We demonstrate that structuring agent’s reasoning into StateEstimation (“what is the current state? ”) and TransitionModeling (“what is next? ”) is critical by studying five reasoning strategies. Investigating how agents should ground visual states and represent these internal beliefs, we reveal the optimal representations are task-dependent: Natural Language excels at capturing semantic relationships for general tasks, while Structured formats are essential for high-precision manipulation. These insights motivate our approach to reward shaping and credit assignment. We leverage a WorldModeling Reward to densely rewards the agent’s turn-by-turn state predictions, while our Bi-Level General Advantage Estimation (Bi-Level GAE) enables turn-aware credit assignment. Through such world model reasoning, we enable a 3B model to achieve performance of 0. 82 on a set of five diverse agent tasks, nearly 3× improvement over its untrained counterpart (0. 21) and surpassing proprietary reasoning models like GPT-5 (0. 75), Gemini 2. 5 Pro (0. 67) and Claude 4. 5 (0. 62). All experiments are supported by our VAGEN framework, a scalable system for training and analyzing multi-turn VLM agents across diverse visual environments

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

ActionAtlas: A VideoQA Benchmark for Domain-specialized Action Recognition

Mohammadreza Salehi
Jae S. Park
Tanush Yadav
Aditya Kusupati
Ranjay Krishna
Yejin Choi
Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Ali Farhadi

Our world is full of varied actions and moves in specialized fields that we, as humans, seek to identify and learn about. To evaluate the effectiveness of multi-modal models in helping us recognize such fine-grained actions, we introduce ActionAtlas, a video question answering (VideoQA) benchmark on fine-grained action recognition with short videos across various sports. ActionAtlas contains 554 videos spanning 284 actions across 42 sports with 1161 actions as total potential choices. Unlike most existing action recognition benchmarks that focus on simplistic actions, often identifiable from a single frame, ActionAtlas focuses on intricate movements and tests the models' ability to discern subtle differences. Additionally, each video in ActionAtlas also includes a question, which helps to more accurately pinpoint the action's performer in scenarios where multiple individuals are involved in different activities. We evaluate proprietary and open models on this benchmark and show that the state-of-the-art models only perform at most 48. 73% accurately where random chance is 20%. Furthermore, our results show that a high frame sampling rate is essential for recognizing actions in ActionAtlas, a feature that current top proprietary models like Gemini lack in their default settings.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Davidsonian Scene Graph: Improving Reliability in Fine-grained Evaluation for Text-to-Image Generation

Jaemin Cho 0001
Yushi Hu
Jason M. Baldridge
Roopal Garg
Peter Anderson
Ranjay Krishna
Mohit Bansal
Jordi Pont-Tuset

Evaluating text-to-image models is notoriously difficult. A strong recent approach for assessing text-image faithfulness is based on QG/A (question generation and answering), which uses pre-trained foundational models to automatically generate a set of questions and answers from the prompt, and output images are scored based on whether these answers extracted with a visual question answering model are consistent with the prompt-based answers. This kind of evaluation is naturally dependent on the quality of the underlying QG and VQA models. We identify and address several reliability challenges in existing QG/A work: (a) QG questions should respect the prompt (avoiding hallucinations, duplications, and omissions) and (b) VQA answers should be consistent (not asserting that there is no motorcycle in an image while also claiming the motorcycle is blue). We address these issues with Davidsonian Scene Graph (DSG), an empirically grounded evaluation framework inspired by formal semantics, which is adaptable to any QG/A frameworks. DSG produces atomic and unique questions organized in dependency graphs, which (i) ensure appropriate semantic coverage and (ii) sidestep inconsistent answers. With extensive experimentation and human evaluation on a range of model configurations (LLM, VQA, and T2I), we empirically demonstrate that DSG addresses the challenges noted above. Finally, we present DSG-1k, an open-sourced evaluation benchmark that includes 1,060 prompts, covering a wide range of fine-grained semantic categories with a balanced distribution. We release the DSG-1k prompts and the corresponding DSG questions.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Multilingual Diversity Improves Vision-Language Representations

Thao Nguyen
Matthew Wallingford
Sebastin Santy
Wei-Chiu Ma
Sewoong Oh
Ludwig Schmidt
Pang W. Koh
Ranjay Krishna

Massive web-crawled image-text datasets lay the foundation for recent progress in multimodal learning. These datasets are designed with the goal of training a model to do well on standard computer vision benchmarks, many of which, however, have been shown to be English-centric (e. g. , ImageNet). Consequently, existing data curation techniques gravitate towards using predominantly English image-text pairs and discard many potentially useful non-English samples. Our work questions this practice. Multilingual data is inherently enriching not only because it provides a gateway to learn about culturally salient concepts, but also because it depicts common concepts differently from monolingual data. We thus conduct a systematic study to explore the performance benefits of using more samples of non-English origins with respect to English vision tasks. By translating all multilingual image-text pairs from a raw web crawl to English and re-filtering them, we increase the prevalence of (translated) multilingual data in the resulting training set. Pre-training on this dataset outperforms using English-only or English-dominated datasets on ImageNet, ImageNet distribution shifts, image-English-text retrieval and on average across 38 tasks from the DataComp benchmark. On a geographically diverse task like GeoDE, we also observe improvements across all regions, with the biggest gain coming from Africa. In addition, we quantitatively show that English and non-English data are significantly different in both image and (translated) text space. We hope that our findings motivate future work to be more intentional about including multicultural and multilingual data, not just when non-English or geographically diverse tasks are involved, but to enhance model capabilities at large.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

NaturalBench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Natural Adversarial Samples

Baiqi Li
Zhiqiu Lin
Wenxuan Peng
Jean de Dieu Nyandwi
Daniel Jiang
Zixian Ma
Simran Khanuja
Ranjay Krishna

Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in recent visual-question-answering (VQA) benchmarks that evaluate complex visio-linguistic reasoning. However, are these models truly effective? In this work, we show that VLMs still struggle with natural images and questions that humans can easily answer, which we term $\textbf{natural adversarial samples}$. We also find it surprisingly easy to generate these VQA samples from natural image-text corpora using off-the-shelf models like CLIP and ChatGPT. We propose a semi-automated approach to collect a new benchmark, ${\bf NaturalBench}$, for reliably evaluating VLMs with 10, 000 human-verified VQA samples. Crucially, we adopt a $\textbf{vision-centric}$ design by pairing each question with two images that yield different answers, preventing ``blind'' solutions from answering without using the images. This makes NaturalBench more challenging than previous benchmarks that can largely be solved with language priors like commonsense knowledge. We evaluate ${\bf 53}$ state-of-the-art VLMs on NaturalBench, showing that models like BLIP-3, LLaVA-OneVision, Cambrian-1, InternLM-XC2, Llama3. 2-Vision, Molmo, Qwen2-VL, and even the (closed-source) GPT-4o lag 50%-70% behind human performance (which is above 90%). We analyze why NaturalBench is hard from two angles: (1) ${\bf Compositionality: }$ Solving NaturalBench requires diverse visio-linguistic skills, including understanding attribute bindings, object relationships, and advanced reasoning like logic and counting. To this end, unlike prior work that uses a single tag per sample, we tag each NaturalBench sample with 1 to 8 skill tags for fine-grained evaluation. (2) ${\bf Biases: }$ NaturalBench exposes severe biases in VLMs, as models often choose the same answer regardless of the image. We show that debiasing can be crucial for VLM performance. Lastly, we apply our benchmark curation method to diverse data sources, including long captions (over 100 words) and non-English languages like Chinese and Hindi, highlighting its potential for dynamic evaluations of VLMs.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Offline Training of Language Model Agents with Functions as Learnable Weights

Shaokun Zhang
Jieyu Zhang 0001
Jiale Liu
Linxin Song
Chi Wang 0001
Ranjay Krishna
Qingyun Wu

Researchers and practitioners have recently reframed powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents, enabling them to automate complex tasks largely via the use of specialized functions. To facilitate the development of LLM agents, we present a novel paradigm of training LLM agents without modifying the LLM weights, which is particularly useful when the LLMs are difficult or inaccessible for modifications. Inspired by how humans continuously forge tools to adapt to real-world tasks, rather than change our biological structure to fit a static set of tools, we propose to progressively forge agent’s functions to better solve the downstream tasks instead of modifying the LLM weights. By treating the functions as learnable ‘agent parameters’ and leveraging the fundamental idea of model training in artificial intelligence, we develop AgentOptimizer that employs the LLM to update agents’ functions and devise an agent training algorithm with two strategies, roll-back, and early-stop, to streamline the training process. With extensive experiments, we showcase that the agent training paradigm could significantly improve the performance of representative LLM agents in various downstream tasks. We also study the behavior of the agent training regarding aspects like the learning curve and domain transferability.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Selective Visual Representations Improve Convergence and Generalization for Embodied AI

Ainaz Eftekhar
Kuo-Hao Zeng
Jiafei Duan
Ali Farhadi
Aniruddha Kembhavi
Ranjay Krishna

Embodied AI models often employ off the shelf vision backbones like CLIP to encode their visual observations. Although such general purpose representations encode rich syntactic and semantic information about the scene, much of this information is often irrelevant to the specific task at hand. This introduces noise within the learning process and distracts the agent's focus from task-relevant visual cues. Inspired by selective attention in humans—the process through which people filter their perception based on their experiences, knowledge, and the task at hand—we introduce a parameter-efficient approach to filter visual stimuli for embodied AI. Our approach induces a task-conditioned bottleneck using a small learnable codebook module. This codebook is trained jointly to optimize task reward and acts as a task-conditioned selective filter over the visual observation. Our experiments showcase state-of-the-art performance for object goal navigation and object displacement across $5$ benchmarks, ProcTHOR, ArchitecTHOR, RoboTHOR, AI2-iTHOR, and ManipulaTHOR. The filtered representations produced by the codebook are also able generalize better and converge faster when adapted to other simulation environments such as Habitat. Our qualitative analyses show that agents explore their environments more effectively and their representations retain task-relevant information like target object recognition while ignoring superfluous information about other objects.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Superposed Decoding: Multiple Generations from a Single Autoregressive Inference Pass

Ethan Shen
Alan Fan
Sarah Pratt
Jae Sung Park
Matthew Wallingford
Sham Kakade
Ari Holtzman
Ranjay Krishna

Many applications today provide users with multiple auto-complete drafts as they type, including GitHub's code completion, Gmail's smart compose, and Apple's messaging auto-suggestions. Under the hood, language models support this by running an autoregressive inference pass to provide a draft. Consequently, providing $k$ drafts to the user requires running an expensive language model $k$ times. To alleviate the computation cost of running $k$ inference passes, we propose Superposed Decoding, a new decoding algorithm that generates $k$ drafts at the computation cost of one autoregressive inference pass. We achieve this by feeding a superposition of the most recent token embeddings from the $k$ drafts as input to the next decoding step of the language model. At every inference step we combine the $k$ drafts with the top-$k$ tokens to get $k^2$ new drafts and cache the $k$ most likely options, using an n-gram interpolation with minimal compute overhead to filter out incoherent generations. Our experiments show that $k$ drafts from Superposed Decoding are at least as coherent and factual as Nucleus Sampling and Greedy Decoding respectively, while being at least $2. 44\times$ faster for $k\ge3$. In a compute-normalized setting, user evaluations demonstrably favor text generated by Superposed Decoding over Nucleus Sampling. Superposed Decoding can also be combined with other decoding strategies, resulting in universal coverage gains when scaling inference time compute. Code and more examples open-sourced at https: //github. com/RAIVNLab/SuperposedDecoding.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Task Me Anything

Jieyu Zhang
Weikai Huang
Zixian Ma
Oscar Michel
Dong He
Tanmay Gupta
Wei-Chiu Ma
Ali Farhadi

Benchmarks for large multimodal language models (MLMs) now serve to simultaneously assess the general capabilities of models instead of evaluating for a specific capability. As a result, when a developer wants to identify which models to use for their application, they are overwhelmed by the number of benchmarks and remain uncertain about which benchmark's results are most reflective of their specific use case. This paper introduces Task-Me-Anything, a benchmark generation engine which produces a benchmark tailored to a user's needs. Task-Me-Anything maintains an extendable taxonomy of visual assets and can programmatically generate a vast number of task instances. Additionally, it algorithmically addresses user queries regarding MLM performance efficiently within a computational budget. It contains 113K images, 10K videos, 2K 3D object assets, over 365 object categories, 655 attributes, and 335 relationships. It can generate 500M image/video question-answering pairs, which focus on evaluating MLM perceptual capabilities. Task-Me-Anything reveals critical insights: open-source MLMs excel in object and attribute recognition but lack spatial and temporal understanding; each model exhibits unique strengths and weaknesses; larger models generally perform better, though exceptions exist; and GPT4O demonstrates challenges in recognizing rotating/moving objects and distinguishing colors.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

The Unmet Promise of Synthetic Training Images: Using Retrieved Real Images Performs Better

Scott Geng
Cheng-Yu Hsieh
Vivek Ramanujan
Matthew Wallingford
Chun-Liang Li
Pang W. Koh
Ranjay Krishna

Generative text-to-image models enable us to synthesize unlimited amounts of images in a controllable manner, spurring many recent efforts to train vision models with synthetic data. However, every synthetic image ultimately originates from the upstream data used to train the generator. Does the intermediate generator provide additional information over directly training on relevant parts of the upstream data? Grounding this question in the setting of image classification, we compare finetuning on task-relevant, targeted synthetic data generated by Stable Diffusion---a generative model trained on the LAION-2B dataset---against finetuning on targeted real images retrieved directly from LAION-2B. We show that while synthetic data can benefit some downstream tasks, it is universally matched or outperformed by real data from the simple retrieval baseline. Our analysis suggests that this underperformance is partially due to generator artifacts and inaccurate task-relevant visual details in the synthetic images. Overall, we argue that targeted retrieval is a critical baseline to consider when training with synthetic data---a baseline that current methods do not yet surpass. We release code, data, and models at https: //github. com/scottgeng00/unmet-promise/.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Visual Sketchpad: Sketching as a Visual Chain of Thought for Multimodal Language Models

Yushi Hu
Weijia Shi
Xingyu Fu
Dan Roth
Mari Ostendorf
Luke Zettlemoyer
Noah A. Smith
Ranjay Krishna

Humans draw to facilitate reasoning: we draw auxiliary lines when solving geometry problems; we mark and circle when reasoning on maps; we use sketches to amplify our ideas and relieve our limited-capacity working memory. However, such actions are missing in current multimodal language models (LMs). Current chain-of-thought and tool-use paradigms only use text as intermediate reasoning steps. In this work, we introduce Sketchpad, a framework that gives multimodal LMs a visual sketchpad and tools to draw on the sketchpad. The LM conducts planning and reasoning according to the visual artifacts it has drawn. Different from prior work, which uses text-to-image models to enable LMs to draw, Sketchpad enables LMs to draw with lines, boxes, marks, etc. , which is closer to human sketching and better facilitates reasoning. \name can also use specialist vision models during the sketching process (e. g. , draw bounding boxes with object detection models, draw masks with segmentation models), to further enhance visual perception and reasoning. We experiment on a wide range of math tasks (including geometry, functions, graph, chess) and complex visual reasoning tasks. Sketchpad substantially improves performance on all tasks over strong base models with no sketching, yielding an average gain of 12. 7% on math tasks, and 8. 6% on vision tasks. GPT-4o with Sketchpad sets a new state of the art on all tasks, including V*Bench (80. 3%), BLINK spatial reasoning (83. 9%), and visual correspondence (80. 8%). We will release all code and data.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Cola: A Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-image Retrieval

Arijit Ray
Filip Radenovic
Abhimanyu Dubey
Bryan Plummer
Ranjay Krishna
Kate Saenko

Compositional reasoning is a hallmark of human visual intelligence. Yet, despite the size of large vision-language models, they struggle to represent simple compositions by combining objects with their attributes. To measure this lack of compositional capability, we design Cola, a text-to-image retrieval benchmark to Compose Objects Localized with Attributes. To solve Cola, a model must retrieve images with the correct configuration of attributes and objects and avoid choosing a distractor image with the same objects and attributes but in the wrong configuration. Cola contains about 1. 2k composed queries of 168 objects and 197 attributes on around 30K images. Our human evaluation finds that Cola is 83. 33% accurate, similar to contemporary compositionality benchmarks. Using Cola as a testbed, we explore empirical modeling designs to adapt pre-trained vision-language models to reason compositionally. We explore 6 adaptation strategies on 2 seminal vision-language models, using compositionality-centric test benchmarks - Cola and CREPE. We find the optimal adaptation strategy is to train a multi-modal attention layer that jointly attends over the frozen pre-trained image and language features. Surprisingly, training multimodal layers on CLIP performs better than tuning a larger FLAVA model with already pre-trained multimodal layers. Furthermore, our adaptation strategy improves CLIP and FLAVA to comparable levels, suggesting that training multimodal layers using contrastive attribute-object data is key, as opposed to using them pre-trained. Lastly, we show that Cola is harder than a closely related contemporary benchmark, CREPE, since simpler fine-tuning strategies without multimodal layers suffice on CREPE, but not on Cola. However, we still see a significant gap between our best adaptation and human accuracy, suggesting considerable room for further research. Project page: https: //cs-people. bu. edu/array/research/cola/

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets

Samir Yitzhak Gadre
Gabriel Ilharco
Alex Fang
Jonathan Hayase
Georgios Smyrnis
Thao Nguyen
Ryan Marten
Mitchell Wortsman

Multimodal datasets are a critical component in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion and GPT-4, yet their design does not receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a testbed for dataset experiments centered around a new candidate pool of 12. 8 billion image-text pairs from Common Crawl. Participants in our benchmark design new filtering techniques or curate new data sources and then evaluate their new dataset by running our standardized CLIP training code and testing the resulting model on 38 downstream test sets. Our benchmark consists of multiple compute scales spanning four orders of magnitude, which enables the study of scaling trends and makes the benchmark accessible to researchers with varying resources. Our baseline experiments show that the DataComp workflow leads to better training sets. Our best baseline, DataComp-1B, enables training a CLIP ViT-L/14 from scratch to 79. 2% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming OpenAI's CLIP ViT-L/14 by 3. 7 percentage points while using the same training procedure and compute. We release \datanet and all accompanying code at www. datacomp. ai.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Large Language Model as Attributed Training Data Generator: A Tale of Diversity and Bias

Yue Yu
Yuchen Zhuang
Jieyu Zhang
Yu Meng
Alexander J. Ratner
Ranjay Krishna
Jiaming Shen
Chao Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have been recently leveraged as training data generators for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While previous research has explored different approaches to training models using generated data, they generally rely on simple class-conditional prompts, which may limit the diversity of the generated data and inherit systematic biases of LLM. Thus, we investigate training data generation with diversely attributed prompts (e. g. , specifying attributes like length and style), which have the potential to yield diverse and attributed generated data. Our investigation focuses on datasets with high cardinality and diverse domains, wherein we demonstrate that attributed prompts outperform simple class-conditional prompts in terms of the resulting model's performance. Additionally, we present a comprehensive empirical study on data generation encompassing vital aspects like bias, diversity, and efficiency, and highlight three key observations: firstly, synthetic datasets generated by simple prompts exhibit significant biases, such as regional bias; secondly, attribute diversity plays a pivotal role in enhancing model performance; lastly, attributed prompts achieve the performance of simple class-conditional prompts while utilizing only 5\% of the querying cost of ChatGPT associated with the latter. The data and code are available on {\url{https: //github. com/yueyu1030/AttrPrompt}}.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

OBJECT 3DIT: Language-guided 3D-aware Image Editing

Oscar Michel
Anand Bhattad
Eli VanderBilt
Ranjay Krishna
Aniruddha Kembhavi
Tanmay Gupta

Existing image editing tools, while powerful, typically disregard the underlying 3D geometry from which the image is projected. As a result, edits made using these tools may become detached from the geometry and lighting conditions that are at the foundation of the image formation process; such edits break the portrayal of a coherent 3D world. 3D-aware generative models are a promising solution, but currently only succeed on small datasets or at the level of a single object. In this work, we formulate the new task of language-guided 3D-aware editing, where objects in an image should be edited according to a language instruction while remaining consistent with the underlying 3D scene. To promote progress towards this goal, we release OBJect: a benchmark dataset of 400K editing examples created from procedurally generated 3D scenes. Each example consists of an input image, editing instruction in language, and the edited image. We also introduce 3DIT: single and multi-task models for four editing tasks. Our models show impressive abilities to understand the 3D composition of entire scenes, factoring in surrounding objects, surfaces, lighting conditions, shadows, and physically-plausible object configurations. Surprisingly, training on only synthetic scenes from \dataset, editing capabilities of 3DIT generalize to real-world images.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Quilt-1M: One Million Image-Text Pairs for Histopathology

Wisdom Ikezogwo
Saygin Seyfioglu
Fatemeh Ghezloo
Dylan Geva
Fatwir Sheikh Mohammed
Pavan Kumar Anand
Ranjay Krishna
Linda Shapiro

Recent accelerations in multi-modal applications have been made possible with the plethora of image and text data available online. However, the scarcity of analogous data in the medical field, specifically in histopathology, has slowed comparable progress. To enable similar representation learning for histopathology, we turn to YouTube, an untapped resource of videos, offering $1, 087$ hours of valuable educational histopathology videos from expert clinicians. From YouTube, we curate QUILT: a large-scale vision-language dataset consisting of $802, 144$ image and text pairs. QUILT was automatically curated using a mixture of models, including large language models, handcrafted algorithms, human knowledge databases, and automatic speech recognition. In comparison, the most comprehensive datasets curated for histopathology amass only around $200$K samples. We combine QUILT with datasets from other sources, including Twitter, research papers, and the internet in general, to create an even larger dataset: QUILT-1M, with $1$M paired image-text samples, marking it as the largest vision-language histopathology dataset to date. We demonstrate the value of QUILT-1M by fine-tuning a pre-trained CLIP model. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on both zero-shot and linear probing tasks for classifying new histopathology images across $13$ diverse patch-level datasets of $8$ different sub-pathologies and cross-modal retrieval tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

SugarCrepe: Fixing Hackable Benchmarks for Vision-Language Compositionality

Cheng-Yu Hsieh
Jieyu Zhang
Zixian Ma
Aniruddha Kembhavi
Ranjay Krishna

In the last year alone, a surge of new benchmarks to measure $\textit{compositional}$ understanding of vision-language models have permeated the machine learning ecosystem. Given an image, these benchmarks probe a model's ability to identify its associated caption amongst a set of compositional distractors. Surprisingly, we find significant biases in $\textit{all}$ these benchmarks rendering them hackable. This hackability is so dire that blind models with no access to the image outperform state-of-the-art vision-language models. To remedy this rampant vulnerability, we introduce $\textit{SugarCrepe}$, a new benchmark for vision-language compositionality evaluation. We employ large language models, instead of rule-based templates used in previous benchmarks, to generate fluent and sensical hard negatives, and utilize an adversarial refinement mechanism to maximally reduce biases. We re-evaluate state-of-the-art models and recently proposed compositionality inducing strategies, and find that their improvements were hugely overestimated, suggesting that more innovation is needed in this important direction. We release $\textit{SugarCrepe}$ and the code for evaluation at: https: //github. com/RAIVNLab/sugar-crepe.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

ELIGN: Expectation Alignment as a Multi-Agent Intrinsic Reward

Zixian Ma
Rose Wang
Fei-Fei Li
Michael Bernstein
Ranjay Krishna

Modern multi-agent reinforcement learning frameworks rely on centralized training and reward shaping to perform well. However, centralized training and dense rewards are not readily available in the real world. Current multi-agent algorithms struggle to learn in the alternative setup of decentralized training or sparse rewards. To address these issues, we propose a self-supervised intrinsic reward \textit{ELIGN - expectation alignment - } inspired by the self-organization principle in Zoology. Similar to how animals collaborate in a decentralized manner with those in their vicinity, agents trained with expectation alignment learn behaviors that match their neighbors' expectations. This allows the agents to learn collaborative behaviors without any external reward or centralized training. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach across 6 tasks in the multi-agent particle and the complex Google Research football environments, comparing ELIGN to sparse and curiosity-based intrinsic rewards. When the number of agents increases, ELIGN scales well in all multi-agent tasks except for one where agents have different capabilities. We show that agent coordination improves through expectation alignment because agents learn to divide tasks amongst themselves, break coordination symmetries, and confuse adversaries. These results identify tasks where expectation alignment is a more useful strategy than curiosity-driven exploration for multi-agent coordination, enabling agents to do zero-shot coordination.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

HYPE: A Benchmark for Human eYe Perceptual Evaluation of Generative Models

Sharon Zhou
Mitchell Gordon
Ranjay Krishna
Austin Narcomey
Li Fei-Fei
Michael Bernstein

Generative models often use human evaluations to measure the perceived quality of their outputs. Automated metrics are noisy indirect proxies, because they rely on heuristics or pretrained embeddings. However, up until now, direct human evaluation strategies have been ad-hoc, neither standardized nor validated. Our work establishes a gold standard human benchmark for generative realism. We construct Human eYe Perceptual Evaluation (HYPE) a human benchmark that is (1) grounded in psychophysics research in perception, (2) reliable across different sets of randomly sampled outputs from a model, (3) able to produce separable model performances, and (4) efficient in cost and time. We introduce two variants: one that measures visual perception under adaptive time constraints to determine the threshold at which a model's outputs appear real (e. g. $250$ms), and the other a less expensive variant that measures human error rate on fake and real images sans time constraints. We test HYPE across six state-of-the-art generative adversarial networks and two sampling techniques on conditional and unconditional image generation using four datasets: CelebA, FFHQ, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet. We find that HYPE can track model improvements across training epochs, and we confirm via bootstrap sampling that HYPE rankings are consistent and replicable.

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