Florian Bordes

IntPhys 2: Benchmarking Intuitive Physics Understanding In Complex Synthetic Environments

Quentin Garrido

Justine T Kao

Adina Williams

Michael Rabbat

Emmanuel Dupoux

We present IntPhys 2, a video benchmark designed to evaluate the intuitive physics understanding of deep learning models. Building on the or… (see more)iginal IntPhys benchmark, IntPhys 2 focuses on four core principles related to macroscopic objects: Permanence, Immutability, Spatio-Temporal Continuity, and Solidity. These conditions are inspired by research into intuitive physical understanding emerging during early childhood. IntPhys 2 offers a comprehensive suite of tests, based on the violation of expectation framework, that challenge models to differentiate between possible and impossible events within controlled and diverse virtual environments. Alongside the benchmark, we provide performance evaluations of several state-of-the-art models. Our findings indicate that while these models demonstrate basic visual understanding, they face significant challenges in grasping intuitive physics across the four principles in complex scenes, with most models performing at chance levels (50%), in stark contrast to human performance, which achieves near-perfect accuracy. This underscores the gap between current models and human-like intuitive physics understanding, highlighting the need for advancements in model architectures and training methodologies.

2025-06-11

ArXiv (preprint)

Improving the Scaling Laws of Synthetic Data with Deliberate Practice

Mohammad Pezeshki

Elvis Dohmatob

Pietro Astolfi

Melissa Hall

Jakob Verbeek

Michal Drozdzal

2025-05-01

ICML.cc/2025/Conference (oral)

Improving the Scaling Laws of Synthetic Data with Deliberate Practice

Mohammad Pezeshki

Elvis Dohmatob

Pietro Astolfi

Melissa Hall

Jakob Verbeek

Michal Drozdzal

Inspired by the principle of deliberate practice in human learning, we propose Deliberate Practice for Synthetic Data Generation (DP), a nov… (see more)el framework that improves sample efficiency through dynamic synthetic data generation. Prior work has shown that scaling synthetic data is inherently challenging, as naively adding new data leads to diminishing returns. To address this, pruning has been identified as a key mechanism for improving scaling, enabling models to focus on the most informative synthetic samples. Rather than generating a large dataset and pruning it afterward, DP efficiently approximates the direct generation of informative samples. We theoretically show how training on challenging, informative examples improves scaling laws and empirically validate that DP achieves better scaling performance with significantly fewer training samples and iterations. On ImageNet-100, DP generates 3.4x fewer samples and requires six times fewer iterations, while on ImageNet-1k, it generates 8x fewer samples with a 30 percent reduction in iterations, all while achieving superior performance compared to prior work.

2025-02-21

ArXiv (preprint)

Object-centric Binding in Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining

Pietro Astolfi

Michal Drozdzal

2025-02-19

ArXiv (preprint)

Object-centric Binding in Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining

Pietro Astolfi

Michal Drozdzal

Recent advances in vision language models (VLM) have been driven by contrastive models such as CLIP, which learn to associate visual informa… (see more)tion with their corresponding text descriptions. However, these models have limitations in understanding complex compositional scenes involving multiple objects and their spatial relationships. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that diverges from commonly used strategies, which rely on the design of hard-negative augmentations. Instead, our work focuses on integrating inductive biases into pre-trained CLIP-like models to improve their compositional understanding without using any additional hard-negatives. To that end, we introduce a binding module that connects a scene graph, derived from a text description, with a slot-structured image representation, facilitating a structured similarity assessment between the two modalities. We also leverage relationships as text-conditioned visual constraints, thereby capturing the intricate interactions between objects and their contextual relationships more effectively. Our resulting model not only enhances the performance of CLIP-based models in multi-object compositional understanding but also paves the way towards more accurate and sample-efficient image-text matching of complex scenes.

2025-02-19

ArXiv (preprint)

Deliberate Practice with Synthetic Data

Mohammad Pezeshki

Pietro Astolfi

Melissa Hall

Jakob Verbeek

Michal Drozdzal

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/AFM (poster)

OC-CLIP : Object-centric binding in Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining

Pietro Astolfi

Michal Drozdzal

Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) have been driven by contrastive models like CLIP which learn to associate visual inform… (see more)ation with their corresponding text descriptions. However, these models have limitations in understanding complex compositional scenes involving multiple objects and their spatial relationships. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that diverges from traditional data-centric methods of enhancing model performance with hard negatives examples. Our work instead focuses on integrating sufficient inductive biases into pre-trained CLIP-like models to improve their compositional understanding without using additional data annotations. We introduce a binding module that connects a scene graph of the text with an induced graph-like representation of the image, facilitating a structured similarity assessment. We also leverage relationships as text-conditioned visual constraints, thereby capturing the intricate interactions between objects and their contextual relationships more effectively. Our resulting model (OC-CLIP) not only enhances the performance of CLIP in multi-object compositional understanding but also paves the way for more accurate and efficient image-text matching in complex scenes.

2024-10-10

NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/Compositional_Learning (poster)

Stochastic positional embeddings improve masked image modeling

Amir Bar

Assaf Shocher

Mahmoud Assran

Pascal Vincent

Nicolas Ballas

Trevor Darrell

Amir Globerson

Yann LeCun

2024-07-08

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

A Picture is Worth More Than 77 Text Tokens: Evaluating CLIP-Style Models on Dense Captions

Jack Urbanek

Pietro Astolfi

Mary Williamson

Vasu Sharma

2024-06-16

2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (published)

An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling

Richard Yuanzhe Pang

Anurag Ajay

Alexander C. Li

Adrien Bardes

Suzanne Petryk

Oscar Mañas

Zhiqiu Lin

Anas Mahmoud

Bargav Jayaraman

Mark Ibrahim

Melissa Hall

Yunyang Xiong

Jonathan Lebensold

Candace Ross

Srihari Jayakumar

Chuan Guo

Diane Bouchacourt

Haider Al-Tahan

Karthik Padthe … (see 21 more)

Vasu Sharma

Huijuan Xu 0001

Xiaoqing Ellen Tan

Megan Richards

Samuel Lavoie

Pietro Astolfi

Jun Chen

Kushal Tirumala

Mazda Moayeri

Arjang Talattof

Kamalika Chaudhuri

Zechun Liu

Xilun Chen

Quentin Garrido

Karen Ullrich

Aishwarya Agrawal

Kate Saenko

Asli Celikyilmaz

Vikas Chandra

Following the recent popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), several attempts have been made to extend them to the visual domain. From h… (see more)aving a visual assistant that could guide us through unfamiliar environments to generative models that produce images using only a high-level text description, the vision-language model (VLM) applications will significantly impact our relationship with technology. However, there are many challenges that need to be addressed to improve the reliability of those models. While language is discrete, vision evolves in a much higher dimensional space in which concepts cannot always be easily discretized. To better understand the mechanics behind mapping vision to language, we present this introduction to VLMs which we hope will help anyone who would like to enter the field. First, we introduce what VLMs are, how they work, and how to train them. Then, we present and discuss approaches to evaluate VLMs. Although this work primarily focuses on mapping images to language, we also discuss extending VLMs to videos.

2024-05-27

ArXiv (preprint)

An Introduction to Vision-Language Modeling

Richard Yuanzhe Pang

Anurag Ajay

Alexander C. Li

Adrien Bardes

Suzanne Petryk

Oscar Mañas

Zhiqiu Lin

Anas Mahmoud

Bargav Jayaraman

Mark Ibrahim

Melissa Hall

Yunyang Xiong

Jonathan Lebensold

Candace Ross

Srihari Jayakumar

Chuan Guo

Diane Bouchacourt

Haider Al-Tahan

Karthik Padthe … (see 21 more)

Vasu Sharma

Huijuan Xu 0001

Xiaoqing Ellen Tan

Megan Richards

Samuel Lavoie

Pietro Astolfi

Jun Chen

Kushal Tirumala

Mazda Moayeri

Arjang Talattof

Kamalika Chaudhuri

Zechun Liu

Xilun Chen

Quentin Garrido

Karen Ullrich

Aishwarya Agrawal

Kate Saenko

Asli Celikyilmaz

Vikas Chandra

Following the recent popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs), several attempts have been made to extend them to the visual domain. From h… (see more)aving a visual assistant that could guide us through unfamiliar environments to generative models that produce images using only a high-level text description, the vision-language model (VLM) applications will significantly impact our relationship with technology. However, there are many challenges that need to be addressed to improve the reliability of those models. While language is discrete, vision evolves in a much higher dimensional space in which concepts cannot always be easily discretized. To better understand the mechanics behind mapping vision to language, we present this introduction to VLMs which we hope will help anyone who would like to enter the field. First, we introduce what VLMs are, how they work, and how to train them. Then, we present and discuss approaches to evaluate VLMs. Although this work primarily focuses on mapping images to language, we also discuss extending VLMs to videos.

2024-05-27

ArXiv (preprint)