Fake news travels at unprecedented speeds, reaches global audiences and puts users and communities at great risk via social media platforms. Deep learning based models show good performance when trained on large amounts of labeled data on events of interest, whereas the performance of models tends to degrade on other events due to domain shift. Therefore, significant challenges are posed for existing detection approaches to detect fake news on emergent events, where large-scale labeled datasets are difficult to obtain. Moreover, adding the knowledge from newly emergent events requires to build a new model from scratch or continue to fine-tune the model, which can be challenging, expensive, and unrealistic for real-world settings. In order to address those challenges, we propose an end-to-end fake news detection framework named MetaFEND, which is able to learn quickly to detect fake news on emergent events with a few verified posts. Specifically, the proposed model integrates meta-learning and neural process methods together to enjoy the benefits of these approaches. In particular, a label embedding module and a hard attention mechanism are proposed to enhance the effectiveness by handling categorical information and trimming irrelevant posts. Extensive experiments are conducted on multimedia datasets collected from Twitter and Weibo. The experimental results show our proposed MetaFEND model can detect fake news on never-seen events effectively and outperform the state-of-the-art methods.
Emotion plays an important role in detecting fake news online. When leveraging emotional signals, the existing methods focus on exploiting the emotions of news contents that conveyed by the publishers (i.e., publisher emotion). However, fake news is always fabricated to evoke high-arousal or activating emotions of people to spread like a virus, so the emotions of news comments that aroused by the crowd (i.e., social emotion) can not be ignored. Furthermore, it needs to be explored whether there exists a relationship between publisher emotion and social emotion (i.e., dual emotion), and how the dual emotion appears in fake news. In the paper, we propose Dual Emotion Features to mine dual emotion and the relationship between them for fake news detection. And we design a universal paradigm to plug it into any existing detectors as an enhancement. Experimental results on three real-world datasets indicate the effectiveness of the proposed features.
We address the problem of anomaly detection in videos. The goal is to identify unusual behaviours automatically by learning exclusively from normal videos. Most existing approaches are usually data-hungry and have limited generalization abilities. They usually need to be trained on a large number of videos from a target scene to achieve good results in that scene. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot scene-adaptive anomaly detection problem to address the limitations of previous approaches. Our goal is to learn to detect anomalies in a previously unseen scene with only a few frames. A reliable solution for this new problem will have huge potential in real-world applications since it is expensive to collect a massive amount of data for each target scene. We propose a meta-learning based approach for solving this new problem; extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
In this paper, we tackle the domain adaptive object detection problem, where the main challenge lies in significant domain gaps between source and target domains. Previous work seeks to plainly align image-level and instance-level shifts to eventually minimize the domain discrepancy. However, they still overlook to match crucial image regions and important instances across domains, which will strongly affect domain shift mitigation. In this work, we propose a simple but effective categorical regularization framework for alleviating this issue. It can be applied as a plug-and-play component on a series of Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN methods which are prominent for dealing with domain adaptive detection. Specifically, by integrating an image-level multi-label classifier upon the detection backbone, we can obtain the sparse but crucial image regions corresponding to categorical information, thanks to the weakly localization ability of the classification manner. Meanwhile, at the instance level, we leverage the categorical consistency between image-level predictions (by the classifier) and instance-level predictions (by the detection head) as a regularization factor to automatically hunt for the hard aligned instances of target domains. Extensive experiments of various domain shift scenarios show that our method obtains a significant performance gain over original Domain Adaptive Faster R-CNN detectors. Furthermore, qualitative visualization and analyses can demonstrate the ability of our method for attending on the key regions/instances targeting on domain adaptation. Our code is open-source and available at \url{//github.com/Megvii-Nanjing/CR-DA-DET}.
We study few-shot acoustic event detection (AED) in this paper. Few-shot learning enables detection of new events with very limited labeled data. Compared to other research areas like computer vision, few-shot learning for audio recognition has been under-studied. We formulate few-shot AED problem and explore different ways of utilizing traditional supervised methods for this setting as well as a variety of meta-learning approaches, which are conventionally used to solve few-shot classification problem. Compared to supervised baselines, meta-learning models achieve superior performance, thus showing its effectiveness on generalization to new audio events. Our analysis including impact of initialization and domain discrepancy further validate the advantage of meta-learning approaches in few-shot AED.
In recent years, disinformation including fake news, has became a global phenomenon due to its explosive growth, particularly on social media. The wide spread of disinformation and fake news can cause detrimental societal effects. Despite the recent progress in detecting disinformation and fake news, it is still non-trivial due to its complexity, diversity, multi-modality, and costs of fact-checking or annotation. The goal of this chapter is to pave the way for appreciating the challenges and advancements via: (1) introducing the types of information disorder on social media and examine their differences and connections; (2) describing important and emerging tasks to combat disinformation for characterization, detection and attribution; and (3) discussing a weak supervision approach to detect disinformation with limited labeled data. We then provide an overview of the chapters in this book that represent the recent advancements in three related parts: (1) user engagements in the dissemination of information disorder; (2) techniques on detecting and mitigating disinformation; and (3) trending issues such as ethics, blockchain, clickbaits, etc. We hope this book to be a convenient entry point for researchers, practitioners, and students to understand the problems and challenges, learn state-of-the-art solutions for their specific needs, and quickly identify new research problems in their domains.
This work aims to solve the challenging few-shot object detection problem where only a few annotated examples are available for each object category to train a detection model. Such an ability of learning to detect an object from just a few examples is common for human vision systems, but remains absent for computer vision systems. Though few-shot meta learning offers a promising solution technique, previous works mostly target the task of image classification and are not directly applicable for the much more complicated object detection task. In this work, we propose a novel meta-learning based model with carefully designed architecture, which consists of a meta-model and a base detection model. The base detection model is trained on several base classes with sufficient samples to offer basis features. The meta-model is trained to reweight importance of features from the base detection model over the input image and adapt these features to assist novel object detection from a few examples. The meta-model is light-weight, end-to-end trainable and able to entail the base model with detection ability for novel objects fast. Through experiments we demonstrated our model can outperform baselines by a large margin for few-shot object detection, on multiple datasets and settings. Our model also exhibits fast adaptation speed to novel few-shot classes.
As we move towards large-scale object detection, it is unrealistic to expect annotated training data for all object classes at sufficient scale, and so methods capable of unseen object detection are required. We propose a novel zero-shot method based on training an end-to-end model that fuses semantic attribute prediction with visual features to propose object bounding boxes for seen and unseen classes. While we utilize semantic features during training, our method is agnostic to semantic information for unseen classes at test-time. Our method retains the efficiency and effectiveness of YOLO for objects seen during training, while improving its performance for novel and unseen objects. The ability of state-of-art detection methods to learn discriminative object features to reject background proposals also limits their performance for unseen objects. We posit that, to detect unseen objects, we must incorporate semantic information into the visual domain so that the learned visual features reflect this information and leads to improved recall rates for unseen objects. We test our method on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO dataset and observed significant improvements on the average precision of unseen classes.
Deep CNN-based object detection systems have achieved remarkable success on several large-scale object detection benchmarks. However, training such detectors requires a large number of labeled bounding boxes, which are more difficult to obtain than image-level annotations. Previous work addresses this issue by transforming image-level classifiers into object detectors. This is done by modeling the differences between the two on categories with both image-level and bounding box annotations, and transferring this information to convert classifiers to detectors for categories without bounding box annotations. We improve this previous work by incorporating knowledge about object similarities from visual and semantic domains during the transfer process. The intuition behind our proposed method is that visually and semantically similar categories should exhibit more common transferable properties than dissimilar categories, e.g. a better detector would result by transforming the differences between a dog classifier and a dog detector onto the cat class, than would by transforming from the violin class. Experimental results on the challenging ILSVRC2013 detection dataset demonstrate that each of our proposed object similarity based knowledge transfer methods outperforms the baseline methods. We found strong evidence that visual similarity and semantic relatedness are complementary for the task, and when combined notably improve detection, achieving state-of-the-art detection performance in a semi-supervised setting.
We introduce a new task called Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) for noisy user-generated data such as tweets or Snapchat captions, which comprise short text with accompanying images. These social media posts often come in inconsistent or incomplete syntax and lexical notations with very limited surrounding textual contexts, bringing significant challenges for NER. To this end, we create a new dataset for MNER called SnapCaptions (Snapchat image-caption pairs submitted to public and crowd-sourced stories with fully annotated named entities). We then build upon the state-of-the-art Bi-LSTM word/character based NER models with 1) a deep image network which incorporates relevant visual context to augment textual information, and 2) a generic modality-attention module which learns to attenuate irrelevant modalities while amplifying the most informative ones to extract contexts from, adaptive to each sample and token. The proposed MNER model with modality attention significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art text-only NER models by successfully leveraging provided visual contexts, opening up potential applications of MNER on myriads of social media platforms.
We introduce Spatial-Temporal Memory Networks (STMN) for video object detection. At its core, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Memory module (STMM) as the recurrent computation unit to model long-term temporal appearance and motion dynamics. The STMM's design enables the integration of ImageNet pre-trained backbone CNN weights for both the feature stack as well as the prediction head, which we find to be critical for accurate detection. Furthermore, in order to tackle object motion in videos, we propose a novel MatchTrans module to align the spatial-temporal memory from frame to frame. We compare our method to state-of-the-art detectors on ImageNet VID, and conduct ablative studies to dissect the contribution of our different design choices. We obtain state-of-the-art results with the VGG backbone, and competitive results with the ResNet backbone. To our knowledge, this is the first video object detector that is equipped with an explicit memory mechanism to model long-term temporal dynamics.