Yong Jae Lee | Next Steps in Generalist Multimodal Models

Virtual London Machine Learning Meetup.

Title: Next Steps in Generalist Multimodal Models

Abstract: The field of computer vision is undergoing another profound change. Recently, “generalist” models have emerged that can solve a variety of visual perception tasks. Also known as foundation models, they are trained on huge internet-scale unlabeled or weakly labeled data and can adapt to new tasks without any additional supervision or with just a small number of manually labeled samples. Moreover, some are multimodal: they understand both language and images and can support other perceptual modes as well. In this talk, I will present our group's recent research on the LLaVA series, which are intelligent assistants that can learn to understand our visual world and communicate in natural language. I will focus on how to make these models understand visual prompts, be personalized, and more efficient. I’ll conclude by highlighting key remaining challenges and promising research directions.
https://llava-vl.github.io/, https://vip-llava.github.io/, https://thaoshibe.github.io/YoLLaVA/, https://matryoshka-mm.github.io/

Bio: Yong Jae Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests are in computer vision and machine learning, with a focus on creating robust visual recognition systems that can learn to understand the visual world with minimal human supervision. Before joining UW-Madison in 2021, he spent one year as an AI Visiting Faculty at Cruise, and before that, six years as an Assistant and then Associate Professor at UC Davis. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012 advised by Kristen Grauman, and was a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University (2012-2013) and UC Berkeley (2013-2014) advised by Alyosha Efros. He is a recipient of the Army Research Office Young Investigator Program Award, NSF CAREER Award, industry awards from AWS, Adobe, and Sony, UC Davis College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, and UW-Madison SACM Student Choice Professor of the Year Award. He and his collaborators received the Most Innovative Award at the COCO Object Detection Challenge ICCV 2019 and the Best Paper Award at BMVC 2020.

Agenda:

• 18:25: Virtual doors open
• 18:30: Talk
• 19:10: Q&A session
• 19:30: Close

Sponsor: Evolution AI - Generative AI-powered data extraction & analysis of financial documents.