Microsoft Vision+Language Summer Talk Series

This talk series is a special Vision-and-Language Summer Talk Series in 2021 summer, jointly hosted by Microsoft Research Deep Learning Team and Azure Computer Vision Science Team. By bringing together experts of vision-language intelligence from both academia and industry, we hope that this special talk series can (1) enchance the broad communication in the vision-language research community, and (2) expose the most recent researches to students, researchers, and practitioners who are interested in vision-language intelligence.

Xinlei Chen

September 10, 2021

In this talk, I am going to cover three of our recent explorations on pre-training. First is an analysis on object/attribute detection pre-training, which produces bottom-attention features extensively used in vision and language research. The main finding is that plain grid features can work equally well without object proposals, while being significantly faster. Next is an approach for self-supervised visual representation learning. The main message is that a simple Siamese network can learn competitive representations, without commonly believed essential components such as contrastive pairs, or momentum encoders. Last is an architecture extension of major frameworks in self-supervised learning from convolutional networks to transformers. We find vision transformers can work out-of-box, subject to instability issues which we call out for awareness.

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Xinlei Chen is a research scientist working at Facebook AI Research since 2018. He obtained a Ph.D. from the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and before that obtained a Batchelor degree from Zhejiang University, China. He is mainly interested in computer vision, machine learning and natural language processing, and particularly in pre-training recently. He is a recipient of CVPR 2021 best paper honorable mentions, and ICML 2021 outstanding paper honorable mentions award for works in self-supervised learning.