Eye typing interfaces enable a person to enter text into an interface using only their own eyes. But despite the inherent advantages of touchless operation and intuitive design, such eye-typing interfaces often suffer from slow typing speeds, resulting in slow words per minute (WPM) counts. In this study, we add word and letter prediction to the eye-typing interface and investigate users' typing performance as well as their subjective experience while using the interface. In experiment 1, we compared three typing interfaces with letter prediction (LP), letter+word prediction (L+WP), and no prediction (NoP), respectively. We found that the interface with L+WP achieved the highest average text entry speed (5.48 WPM), followed by the interface with LP (3.42 WPM), and the interface with NoP (3.39 WPM). Participants were able to quickly understand the procedural design for word prediction and perceived this function as very helpful. Compared to LP and NoP, participants needed more time to familiarize themselves with L+WP in order to reach a plateau regarding text entry speed. Experiment 2 explored training effects in L+WP interfaces. Two moving speeds were implemented: slow (6.4{\deg}/s same speed as in experiment 1) and fast (10{\deg}/s). The study employed a mixed experimental design, incorporating moving speeds as a between-subjects factor, to evaluate its influence on typing performance throughout 10 consecutive training sessions. The results showed that the typing speed reached 6.17 WPM for the slow group and 7.35 WPM for the fast group after practice. Overall, the two experiments show that adding letter and word prediction to eye-typing interfaces increases typing speeds. We also find that more extended training is required to achieve these high typing speeds.
Recent text-to-video diffusion models have achieved impressive progress. In practice, users often desire the ability to control object motion and camera movement independently for customized video creation. However, current methods lack the focus on separately controlling object motion and camera movement in a decoupled manner, which limits the controllability and flexibility of text-to-video models. In this paper, we introduce Direct-a-Video, a system that allows users to independently specify motions for one or multiple objects and/or camera movements, as if directing a video. We propose a simple yet effective strategy for the decoupled control of object motion and camera movement. Object motion is controlled through spatial cross-attention modulation using the model's inherent priors, requiring no additional optimization. For camera movement, we introduce new temporal cross-attention layers to interpret quantitative camera movement parameters. We further employ an augmentation-based approach to train these layers in a self-supervised manner on a small-scale dataset, eliminating the need for explicit motion annotation. Both components operate independently, allowing individual or combined control, and can generalize to open-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method. Project page: //direct-a-video.github.io/.
Explainable AI (XAI) aids in deciphering 'black-box' models. While several methods have been proposed and evaluated primarily in the image domain, the exploration of explainability in the text domain remains a growing research area. In this paper, we delve into the applicability of XAI methods for the text domain. In this context, the 'Similarity Difference and Uniqueness' (SIDU) XAI method, recognized for its superior capability in localizing entire salient regions in image-based classification is extended to textual data. The extended method, SIDU-TXT, utilizes feature activation maps from 'black-box' models to generate heatmaps at a granular, word-based level, thereby providing explanations that highlight contextually significant textual elements crucial for model predictions. Given the absence of a unified standard for assessing XAI methods, this study applies a holistic three-tiered comprehensive evaluation framework: Functionally-Grounded, Human-Grounded and Application-Grounded, to assess the effectiveness of the proposed SIDU-TXT across various experiments. We find that, in sentiment analysis task of a movie review dataset, SIDU-TXT excels in both functionally and human-grounded evaluations, demonstrating superior performance through quantitative and qualitative analyses compared to benchmarks like Grad-CAM and LIME. In the application-grounded evaluation within the sensitive and complex legal domain of asylum decision-making, SIDU-TXT and Grad-CAM demonstrate comparable performances, each with its own set of strengths and weaknesses. However, both methods fall short of entirely fulfilling the sophisticated criteria of expert expectations, highlighting the imperative need for additional research in XAI methods suitable for such domains.
Persons with visual impairments (PwVI) have difficulties understanding and navigating spaces around them. Current wayfinding technologies either focus solely on navigation or provide limited communication about the environment. Motivated by recent advances in visual-language grounding and semantic navigation, we propose DRAGON, a guiding robot powered by a dialogue system and the ability to associate the environment with natural language. By understanding the commands from the user, DRAGON is able to guide the user to the desired landmarks on the map, describe the environment, and answer questions from visual observations. Through effective utilization of dialogue, the robot can ground the user's free-form descriptions to landmarks in the environment, and give the user semantic information through spoken language. We conduct a user study with blindfolded participants in an everyday indoor environment. Our results demonstrate that DRAGON is able to communicate with the user smoothly, provide a good guiding experience, and connect users with their surrounding environment in an intuitive manner. Videos and code are available at //sites.google.com/view/dragon-wayfinding/home.
Adapting the Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) for direct image super-resolution is wasteful, given that a simple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can recover the main low-frequency content. Therefore, we present ResDiff, a novel Diffusion Probabilistic Model based on Residual structure for Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). ResDiff utilizes a combination of a CNN, which restores primary low-frequency components, and a DPM, which predicts the residual between the ground-truth image and the CNN predicted image. In contrast to the common diffusion-based methods that directly use LR images to guide the noise towards HR space, ResDiff utilizes the CNN's initial prediction to direct the noise towards the residual space between HR space and CNN-predicted space, which not only accelerates the generation process but also acquires superior sample quality. Additionally, a frequency-domain-based loss function for CNN is introduced to facilitate its restoration, and a frequency-domain guided diffusion is designed for DPM on behalf of predicting high-frequency details. The extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that ResDiff outperforms previous diffusion based methods in terms of shorter model convergence time, superior generation quality, and more diverse samples.
We introduce ViCA-NeRF, the first view-consistency-aware method for 3D editing with text instructions. In addition to the implicit neural radiance field (NeRF) modeling, our key insight is to exploit two sources of regularization that explicitly propagate the editing information across different views, thus ensuring multi-view consistency. For geometric regularization, we leverage the depth information derived from NeRF to establish image correspondences between different views. For learned regularization, we align the latent codes in the 2D diffusion model between edited and unedited images, enabling us to edit key views and propagate the update throughout the entire scene. Incorporating these two strategies, our ViCA-NeRF operates in two stages. In the initial stage, we blend edits from different views to create a preliminary 3D edit. This is followed by a second stage of NeRF training, dedicated to further refining the scene's appearance. Experimental results demonstrate that ViCA-NeRF provides more flexible, efficient (3 times faster) editing with higher levels of consistency and details, compared with the state of the art. Our code is publicly available.
In many visual systems, visual tracking often bases on RGB image sequences, in which some targets are invalid in low-light conditions, and tracking performance is thus affected significantly. Introducing other modalities such as depth and infrared data is an effective way to handle imaging limitations of individual sources, but multi-modal imaging platforms usually require elaborate designs and cannot be applied in many real-world applications at present. Near-infrared (NIR) imaging becomes an essential part of many surveillance cameras, whose imaging is switchable between RGB and NIR based on the light intensity. These two modalities are heterogeneous with very different visual properties and thus bring big challenges for visual tracking. However, existing works have not studied this challenging problem. In this work, we address the cross-modal object tracking problem and contribute a new video dataset, including 654 cross-modal image sequences with over 481K frames in total, and the average video length is more than 735 frames. To promote the research and development of cross-modal object tracking, we propose a new algorithm, which learns the modality-aware target representation to mitigate the appearance gap between RGB and NIR modalities in the tracking process. It is plug-and-play and could thus be flexibly embedded into different tracking frameworks. Extensive experiments on the dataset are conducted, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in two representative tracking frameworks against 17 state-of-the-art tracking methods. We will release the dataset for free academic usage, dataset download link and code will be released soon.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA approach, Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN). It first represents an image as a graph consisting of three sub-graphs, depicting visual, semantic, and numeric modalities respectively. Then, we introduce three aggregators which guide the message passing from one graph to another to utilize the contexts in various modalities, so as to refine the features of nodes. The updated nodes have better features for the downstream question answering module. Experimental evaluations show that our MM-GNN represents the scene texts better and obviously facilitates the performances on two VQA tasks that require reading scene texts.
Video captioning is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of visual scenes. State-of-the-art methods generate captions using either scene-level or object-level information but without explicitly modeling object interactions. Thus, they often fail to make visually grounded predictions, and are sensitive to spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal graph model for video captioning that exploits object interactions in space and time. Our model builds interpretable links and is able to provide explicit visual grounding. To avoid unstable performance caused by the variable number of objects, we further propose an object-aware knowledge distillation mechanism, in which local object information is used to regularize global scene features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on two benchmarks, showing our approach yields competitive performance with interpretable predictions.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.