Project description
Teaching AI to see and understand our world like humans
AI has taken leaps forward in language and vision. However, today’s systems still cannot really comprehend the world accurately. In particular, they correlate words and images but are unable to accurately reason about space, time, and meaning in concert. Reaching that unification is paramount in achieving advances in robotics, autonomous driving, and intelligent assistants. In this context, the ERC-funded 4DLang project aims to construct a symbolic, geometric abstraction of physical scenes and convert it into a spatio-temporal language. This will allow AI to process spatial and semantic information in unison, allowing further deeper reasoning and human-like understanding across real-world domains.
Objective
We have recently experienced a boost in AI as the performance of ChatGPT-like large language models has matured from a purely scientific endeavor to deployment in various businesses and real-world applications. Also in computer vision, we have seen tremendous gains that were enabled by scaling to large models trained on vast corpuses of data in an unsupervised fashion.
Language is symbolic and can inform about abstract properties and relationships, while vision without human labels does not model explicit semantics and brings distributed representations for spatial structures. Both are complementary, and the fundamental unsolved challenge is to bring them together. The current state of the art is to follow the common paradigm of scale and to naively train models on large amounts of data to exploit the co-occurence of objects in single images and words in text captions to learn their correlation. However, looking at the outputs of these models reveals that they in fact perform extremely poorly in many cases.
The next step to approach human-level AI requires reasoning about scenes spatially and semantically at the same time and demands an abstraction of our real world that brings both of these modalities together, while being lightweight and highly efficient. 4DLang presents the solution and introduces a new approach by first creating a primitive-based geometric symbolic abstraction of physical scenes that is then shaped into a spatio-temporal language. It will enable the fine-grained coupling of both modalities and go beyond the state of the art by augmenting large language models with real-world understanding that is only present in observations of moving scenes, as we humans perceive them. This design will fundamentally advance the generalization abilities of AI and have a large impact on downstream applications, such as content interpretation and generation, AI assistants, robotics, and autonomous driving.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering electronic engineering robotics
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
90461 NUREMBERG
Germany
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.