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 Bangalath, Junke Wang, Marco Monteiro, Hu Xu, Shiyu Dong, Nikhila Ravi, Shang-Wen Li, Piotr Dollar, Christoph Feichtenhofer
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. To foster further research, we will release our models, code, and novel dataset of synthetically and human-annotated videos.