new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Mar 10

GeoDiv: Framework For Measuring Geographical Diversity In Text-To-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) models are rapidly gaining popularity, yet their outputs often lack geographical diversity, reinforce stereotypes, and misrepresent regions. Given their broad reach, it is critical to rigorously evaluate how these models portray the world. Existing diversity metrics either rely on curated datasets or focus on surface-level visual similarity, limiting interpretability. We introduce GeoDiv, a framework leveraging large language and vision-language models to assess geographical diversity along two complementary axes: the Socio-Economic Visual Index (SEVI), capturing economic and condition-related cues, and the Visual Diversity Index (VDI), measuring variation in primary entities and backgrounds. Applied to images generated by models such as Stable Diffusion and FLUX.1-dev across 10 entities and 16 countries, GeoDiv reveals a consistent lack of diversity and identifies fine-grained attributes where models default to biased portrayals. Strikingly, depictions of countries like India, Nigeria, and Colombia are disproportionately impoverished and worn, reflecting underlying socio-economic biases. These results highlight the need for greater geographical nuance in generative models. GeoDiv provides the first systematic, interpretable framework for measuring such biases, marking a step toward fairer and more inclusive generative systems. Project page: https://abhipsabasu.github.io/geodiv

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 25

The SA-FARI Dataset: Segment Anything in Footage of Animals for Recognition and Identification

Automated video analysis is critical for wildlife conservation. A foundational task in this domain is multi-animal tracking (MAT), which underpins applications such as individual re-identification and behavior recognition. However, existing datasets are limited in scale, constrained to a few species, or lack sufficient temporal and geographical diversity - leaving no suitable benchmark for training general-purpose MAT models applicable across wild animal populations. To address this, we introduce SA-FARI, the largest open-source MAT dataset for wild animals. It comprises 11,609 camera trap videos collected over approximately 10 years (2014-2024) from 741 locations across 4 continents, spanning 99 species categories. Each video is exhaustively annotated culminating in ~46 hours of densely annotated footage containing 16,224 masklet identities and 942,702 individual bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and species labels. Alongside the task-specific annotations, we publish anonymized camera trap locations for each video. Finally, we present comprehensive benchmarks on SA-FARI using state-of-the-art vision-language models for detection and tracking, including SAM 3, evaluated with both species-specific and generic animal prompts. We also compare against vision-only methods developed specifically for wildlife analysis. SA-FARI is the first large-scale dataset to combine high species diversity, multi-region coverage, and high-quality spatio-temporal annotations, offering a new foundation for advancing generalizable multianimal tracking in the wild. The dataset is available at https://www.conservationxlabs.com/sa-fari{conservationxlabs.com/SA-FARI}.

  • 24 authors
·
Nov 19, 2025

Vision Models Are More Robust And Fair When Pretrained On Uncurated Images Without Supervision

Discriminative self-supervised learning allows training models on any random group of internet images, and possibly recover salient information that helps differentiate between the images. Applied to ImageNet, this leads to object centric features that perform on par with supervised features on most object-centric downstream tasks. In this work, we question if using this ability, we can learn any salient and more representative information present in diverse unbounded set of images from across the globe. To do so, we train models on billions of random images without any data pre-processing or prior assumptions about what we want the model to learn. We scale our model size to dense 10 billion parameters to avoid underfitting on a large data size. We extensively study and validate our model performance on over 50 benchmarks including fairness, robustness to distribution shift, geographical diversity, fine grained recognition, image copy detection and many image classification datasets. The resulting model, not only captures well semantic information, it also captures information about artistic style and learns salient information such as geolocations and multilingual word embeddings based on visual content only. More importantly, we discover that such model is more robust, more fair, less harmful and less biased than supervised models or models trained on object centric datasets such as ImageNet.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 16, 2022

Consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts of conditional image generative models

Building world models that accurately and comprehensively represent the real world is the utmost aspiration for conditional image generative models as it would enable their use as world simulators. For these models to be successful world models, they should not only excel at image quality and prompt-image consistency but also ensure high representation diversity. However, current research in generative models mostly focuses on creative applications that are predominantly concerned with human preferences of image quality and aesthetics. We note that generative models have inference time mechanisms - or knobs - that allow the control of generation consistency, quality, and diversity. In this paper, we use state-of-the-art text-to-image and image-and-text-to-image models and their knobs to draw consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts that provide a holistic view on consistency-diversity-realism multi-objective. Our experiments suggest that realism and consistency can both be improved simultaneously; however there exists a clear tradeoff between realism/consistency and diversity. By looking at Pareto optimal points, we note that earlier models are better at representation diversity and worse in consistency/realism, and more recent models excel in consistency/realism while decreasing significantly the representation diversity. By computing Pareto fronts on a geodiverse dataset, we find that the first version of latent diffusion models tends to perform better than more recent models in all axes of evaluation, and there exist pronounced consistency-diversity-realism disparities between geographical regions. Overall, our analysis clearly shows that there is no best model and the choice of model should be determined by the downstream application. With this analysis, we invite the research community to consider Pareto fronts as an analytical tool to measure progress towards world models.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 14, 2024

Cousins Of The Vendi Score: A Family Of Similarity-Based Diversity Metrics For Science And Machine Learning

Measuring diversity accurately is important for many scientific fields, including machine learning (ML), ecology, and chemistry. The Vendi Score was introduced as a generic similarity-based diversity metric that extends the Hill number of order q=1 by leveraging ideas from quantum statistical mechanics. Contrary to many diversity metrics in ecology, the Vendi Score accounts for similarity and does not require knowledge of the prevalence of the categories in the collection to be evaluated for diversity. However, the Vendi Score treats each item in a given collection with a level of sensitivity proportional to the item's prevalence. This is undesirable in settings where there is a significant imbalance in item prevalence. In this paper, we extend the other Hill numbers using similarity to provide flexibility in allocating sensitivity to rare or common items. This leads to a family of diversity metrics -- Vendi scores with different levels of sensitivity -- that can be used in a variety of applications. We study the properties of the scores in a synthetic controlled setting where the ground truth diversity is known. We then test their utility in improving molecular simulations via Vendi Sampling. Finally, we use the Vendi scores to better understand the behavior of image generative models in terms of memorization, duplication, diversity, and sample quality.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 19, 2023

Multi-scale species richness estimation with deep learning

Biodiversity assessments are critically affected by the spatial scale at which species richness is measured. How species richness accumulates with sampling area depends on natural and anthropogenic processes whose effects can change depending on the spatial scale considered. These accumulation dynamics, described by the species-area relationship (SAR), are challenging to assess because most biodiversity surveys are restricted to sampling areas much smaller than the scales at which these processes operate. Here, we combine sampling theory and deep learning to predict local species richness within arbitrarily large sampling areas, enabling for the first time to estimate spatial differences in SARs. We demonstrate our approach by predicting vascular plant species richness across Europe and evaluate predictions against an independent dataset of plant community inventories. The resulting model, named deep SAR, delivers multi-scale species richness maps, improving coarse grain richness estimates by 32% compared to conventional methods, while delivering finer grain estimates. Additional to its predictive capabilities, we show how our deep SAR model can provide fundamental insights on the multi-scale effects of key biodiversity processes. The capacity of our approach to deliver comprehensive species richness estimates across the full spectrum of ecologically relevant scales is essential for robust biodiversity assessments and forecasts under global change.

  • 19 authors
·
Jul 8, 2025

GeoPlant: Spatial Plant Species Prediction Dataset

The difficulty of monitoring biodiversity at fine scales and over large areas limits ecological knowledge and conservation efforts. To fill this gap, Species Distribution Models (SDMs) predict species across space from spatially explicit features. Yet, they face the challenge of integrating the rich but heterogeneous data made available over the past decade, notably millions of opportunistic species observations and standardized surveys, as well as multi-modal remote sensing data. In light of that, we have designed and developed a new European-scale dataset for SDMs at high spatial resolution (10-50 m), including more than 10k species (i.e., most of the European flora). The dataset comprises 5M heterogeneous Presence-Only records and 90k exhaustive Presence-Absence survey records, all accompanied by diverse environmental rasters (e.g., elevation, human footprint, and soil) that are traditionally used in SDMs. In addition, it provides Sentinel-2 RGB and NIR satellite images with 10 m resolution, a 20-year time-series of climatic variables, and satellite time-series from the Landsat program. In addition to the data, we provide an openly accessible SDM benchmark (hosted on Kaggle), which has already attracted an active community and a set of strong baselines for single predictor/modality and multimodal approaches. All resources, e.g., the dataset, pre-trained models, and baseline methods (in the form of notebooks), are available on Kaggle, allowing one to start with our dataset literally with two mouse clicks.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 25, 2024

G3: An Effective and Adaptive Framework for Worldwide Geolocalization Using Large Multi-Modality Models

Worldwide geolocalization aims to locate the precise location at the coordinate level of photos taken anywhere on the Earth. It is very challenging due to 1) the difficulty of capturing subtle location-aware visual semantics, and 2) the heterogeneous geographical distribution of image data. As a result, existing studies have clear limitations when scaled to a worldwide context. They may easily confuse distant images with similar visual contents, or cannot adapt to various locations worldwide with different amounts of relevant data. To resolve these limitations, we propose G3, a novel framework based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). In particular, G3 consists of three steps, i.e., Geo-alignment, Geo-diversification, and Geo-verification to optimize both retrieval and generation phases of worldwide geolocalization. During Geo-alignment, our solution jointly learns expressive multi-modal representations for images, GPS and textual descriptions, which allows us to capture location-aware semantics for retrieving nearby images for a given query. During Geo-diversification, we leverage a prompt ensembling method that is robust to inconsistent retrieval performance for different image queries. Finally, we combine both retrieved and generated GPS candidates in Geo-verification for location prediction. Experiments on two well-established datasets IM2GPS3k and YFCC4k verify the superiority of G3 compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

  • 10 authors
·
May 23, 2024

Speech Analysis of Language Varieties in Italy

Italy exhibits rich linguistic diversity across its territory due to the distinct regional languages spoken in different areas. Recent advances in self-supervised learning provide new opportunities to analyze Italy's linguistic varieties using speech data alone. This includes the potential to leverage representations learned from large amounts of data to better examine nuances between closely related linguistic varieties. In this study, we focus on automatically identifying the geographic region of origin of speech samples drawn from Italy's diverse language varieties. We leverage self-supervised learning models to tackle this task and analyze differences and similarities between Italy's regional languages. In doing so, we also seek to uncover new insights into the relationships among these diverse yet closely related varieties, which may help linguists understand their interconnected evolution and regional development over time and space. To improve the discriminative ability of learned representations, we evaluate several supervised contrastive learning objectives, both as pre-training steps and additional fine-tuning objectives. Experimental evidence shows that pre-trained self-supervised models can effectively identify regions from speech recording. Additionally, incorporating contrastive objectives during fine-tuning improves classification accuracy and yields embeddings that distinctly separate regional varieties, demonstrating the value of combining self-supervised pre-training and contrastive learning for this task.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 22, 2024

Improving Geo-diversity of Generated Images with Contextualized Vendi Score Guidance

With the growing popularity of text-to-image generative models, there has been increasing focus on understanding their risks and biases. Recent work has found that state-of-the-art models struggle to depict everyday objects with the true diversity of the real world and have notable gaps between geographic regions. In this work, we aim to increase the diversity of generated images of common objects such that per-region variations are representative of the real world. We introduce an inference time intervention, contextualized Vendi Score Guidance (c-VSG), that guides the backwards steps of latent diffusion models to increase the diversity of a sample as compared to a "memory bank" of previously generated images while constraining the amount of variation within that of an exemplar set of real-world contextualizing images. We evaluate c-VSG with two geographically representative datasets and find that it substantially increases the diversity of generated images, both for the worst performing regions and on average, while simultaneously maintaining or improving image quality and consistency. Additionally, qualitative analyses reveal that diversity of generated images is significantly improved, including along the lines of reductive region portrayals present in the original model. We hope that this work is a step towards text-to-image generative models that reflect the true geographic diversity of the world.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

NEVIS'22: A Stream of 100 Tasks Sampled from 30 Years of Computer Vision Research

A shared goal of several machine learning communities like continual learning, meta-learning and transfer learning, is to design algorithms and models that efficiently and robustly adapt to unseen tasks. An even more ambitious goal is to build models that never stop adapting, and that become increasingly more efficient through time by suitably transferring the accrued knowledge. Beyond the study of the actual learning algorithm and model architecture, there are several hurdles towards our quest to build such models, such as the choice of learning protocol, metric of success and data needed to validate research hypotheses. In this work, we introduce the Never-Ending VIsual-classification Stream (NEVIS'22), a benchmark consisting of a stream of over 100 visual classification tasks, sorted chronologically and extracted from papers sampled uniformly from computer vision proceedings spanning the last three decades. The resulting stream reflects what the research community thought was meaningful at any point in time, and it serves as an ideal test bed to assess how well models can adapt to new tasks, and do so better and more efficiently as time goes by. Despite being limited to classification, the resulting stream has a rich diversity of tasks from OCR, to texture analysis, scene recognition, and so forth. The diversity is also reflected in the wide range of dataset sizes, spanning over four orders of magnitude. Overall, NEVIS'22 poses an unprecedented challenge for current sequential learning approaches due to the scale and diversity of tasks, yet with a low entry barrier as it is limited to a single modality and well understood supervised learning problems. Moreover, we provide a reference implementation including strong baselines and an evaluation protocol to compare methods in terms of their trade-off between accuracy and compute.

  • 20 authors
·
Nov 15, 2022

The Vendi Score: A Diversity Evaluation Metric for Machine Learning

Diversity is an important criterion for many areas of machine learning (ML), including generative modeling and dataset curation. Yet little work has gone into understanding, formalizing, and measuring diversity in ML. In this paper, we address the diversity evaluation problem by proposing the Vendi Score, which connects and extends ideas from ecology and quantum statistical mechanics to ML. The Vendi Score is defined as the exponential of the Shannon entropy of the eigenvalues of a similarity matrix. This matrix is induced by a user-defined similarity function applied to the sample to be evaluated for diversity. In taking a similarity function as input, the Vendi Score enables its user to specify any desired form of diversity. Importantly, unlike many existing metrics in ML, the Vendi Score doesn't require a reference dataset or distribution over samples or labels, it is therefore general and applicable to any generative model, decoding algorithm, and dataset from any domain where similarity can be defined. We showcased the Vendi Score on molecular generative modeling, a domain where diversity plays an important role in enabling the discovery of novel molecules. We found that the Vendi Score addresses shortcomings of the current diversity metric of choice in that domain. We also applied the Vendi Score to generative models of images and decoding algorithms of text and found it confirms known results about diversity in those domains. Furthermore, we used the Vendi Score to measure mode collapse, a known limitation of generative adversarial networks (GANs). In particular, the Vendi Score revealed that even GANs that capture all the modes of a labeled dataset can be less diverse than the original dataset. Finally, the interpretability of the Vendi Score allowed us to diagnose several benchmark ML datasets for diversity, opening the door for diversity-informed data augmentation.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 5, 2022

Broaden the Vision: Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning

Commonsense is defined as the knowledge that is shared by everyone. However, certain types of commonsense knowledge are correlated with culture and geographic locations and they are only shared locally. For example, the scenarios of wedding ceremonies vary across regions due to different customs influenced by historical and religious factors. Such regional characteristics, however, are generally omitted in prior work. In this paper, we construct a Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning dataset (GD-VCR) to test vision-and-language models' ability to understand cultural and geo-location-specific commonsense. In particular, we study two state-of-the-art Vision-and-Language models, VisualBERT and ViLBERT trained on VCR, a standard multimodal commonsense benchmark with images primarily from Western regions. We then evaluate how well the trained models can generalize to answering the questions in GD-VCR. We find that the performance of both models for non-Western regions including East Asia, South Asia, and Africa is significantly lower than that for Western region. We analyze the reasons behind the performance disparity and find that the performance gap is larger on QA pairs that: 1) are concerned with culture-related scenarios, e.g., weddings, religious activities, and festivals; 2) require high-level geo-diverse commonsense reasoning rather than low-order perception and recognition. Dataset and code are released at https://github.com/WadeYin9712/GD-VCR.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 14, 2021