Perception Encoder: The best visual embeddings are not at the output of the network

Daniel Bolya, Po-Yao Huang, Peize Sun, Jang Hyun Cho, Andrea Madotto, Chen Wei, Tengyu Ma, Jiale Zhi, Jathushan Rajasegaran, Hanoona Abdul Rasheed, Junke Wang, Marco Monteiro, Hu Xu, Shiyu Dong, Nikhila Ravi, Shang-Wen Li, Piotr Dollar, Christoph Feichtenhofer

Meta· University of Texas at Austin· Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence· Fudan University

vision encoder vision-language CLIP pretraining features foundation model

⋅ NeurIPS ⋅ OpenReview ⋅Oral ⋅Oral 1D Multimodal 1 ⋅Code

Abstract

We introduce Perception Encoder (PE), a family of state-of-the-art vision encoders for image and video understanding. Traditionally, vision encoders have relied on a variety of pretraining objectives, each excelling at different downstream tasks.

Surprisingly, after scaling a carefully tuned image pretraining recipe and refining with a robust video data engine, we find that contrastive vision-language training alone can produce strong, general embeddings for all of these downstream tasks. There is only one caveat: these embeddings are hidden within the intermediate layers of the network.

To draw them out, we introduce two alignment methods: language alignment for multimodal language modeling, and spatial alignment for dense prediction. Together, our PE family of models achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of tasks, including zero-shot image and video classification and retrieval; document, image, and video Q&A; and spatial tasks such as detection, tracking, and depth estimation.

We release our models, code, and novel dataset of synthetically and human-annotated videos: https://github.com/facebookresearch/perceptionmodels