Making image retrieval methods practical for real-world search applications requires significant progress in dataset scales, entity comprehension, and multimodal information fusion. In this work, we introduce \textbf{E}ntity-\textbf{D}riven \textbf{I}mage \textbf{S}earch (EDIS), a challenging dataset for cross-modal image search in the news domain. EDIS consists of 1 million web images from actual search engine results and curated datasets, with each image paired with a textual description. Unlike datasets that assume a small set of single-modality candidates, EDIS reflects real-world web image search scenarios by including a million multimodal image-text pairs as candidates. EDIS encourages the development of retrieval models that simultaneously address cross-modal information fusion and matching. To achieve accurate ranking results, a model must: 1) understand named entities and events from text queries, 2) ground entities onto images or text descriptions, and 3) effectively fuse textual and visual representations. Our experimental results show that EDIS challenges state-of-the-art methods with dense entities and a large-scale candidate set. The ablation study also proves that fusing textual features with visual features is critical in improving retrieval results.
This paper presents a hierarchical classification system that automatically categorizes a scholarly publication using its abstract into a three-tier hierarchical label set (discipline, field, subfield) in a multi-class setting. This system enables a holistic categorization of research activities in the mentioned hierarchy in terms of knowledge production through articles and impact through citations, permitting those activities to fall into multiple categories. The classification system distinguishes 44 disciplines, 718 fields and 1,485 subfields among 160 million abstract snippets in Microsoft Academic Graph (version 2018-05-17). We used batch training in a modularized and distributed fashion to address and allow for interdisciplinary and interfield classifications in single-label and multi-label settings. In total, we have conducted 3,140 experiments in all considered models (Convolutional Neural Networks, Recurrent Neural Networks, Transformers). The classification accuracy is > 90% in 77.13% and 78.19% of the single-label and multi-label classifications, respectively. We examine the advantages of our classification by its ability to better align research texts and output with disciplines, to adequately classify them in an automated way, and to capture the degree of interdisciplinarity. The proposed system (a set of pre-trained models) can serve as a backbone to an interactive system for indexing scientific publications in the future.
Radiotherapists require accurate registration of MR/CT images to effectively use information from both modalities. In a typical registration pipeline, rigid or affine transformations are applied to roughly align the fixed and moving images before proceeding with the deformation step. While recent learning-based methods have shown promising results in the rigid/affine step, these methods often require images with similar field-of-view (FOV) for successful alignment. As a result, aligning images with different FOVs remains a challenging task. Self-supervised landmark detection methods like self-supervised Anatomical eMbedding (SAM) have emerged as a useful tool for mapping and cropping images to similar FOVs. However, these methods are currently limited to intra-modality use only. To address this limitation and enable cross-modality matching, we propose a new approach called Cross-SAM. Our approach utilizes a novel iterative process that alternates between embedding learning and CT-MRI registration. We start by applying aggressive contrast augmentation on both CT and MRI images to train a SAM model. We then use this SAM to identify corresponding regions on paired images using robust grid-points matching, followed by a point-set based affine/rigid registration, and a deformable fine-tuning step to produce registered paired images. We use these registered pairs to enhance the matching ability of SAM, which is then processed iteratively. We use the final model for cross-modality matching tasks. We evaluated our approach on two CT-MRI affine registration datasets and found that Cross-SAM achieved robust affine registration on both datasets, significantly outperforming other methods and achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR), aiming to deduce new facts from existing facts based on mined logic rules underlying knowledge graphs (KGs), has become a fast-growing research direction. It has been proven to significantly benefit the usage of KGs in many AI applications, such as question answering and recommendation systems, etc. According to the graph types, the existing KGR models can be roughly divided into three categories, \textit{i.e.,} static models, temporal models, and multi-modal models. The early works in this domain mainly focus on static KGR and tend to directly apply general knowledge graph embedding models to the reasoning task. However, these models are not suitable for more complex but practical tasks, such as inductive static KGR, temporal KGR, and multi-modal KGR. To this end, multiple works have been developed recently, but no survey papers and open-source repositories comprehensively summarize and discuss models in this important direction. To fill the gap, we conduct a survey for knowledge graph reasoning tracing from static to temporal and then to multi-modal KGs. Concretely, the preliminaries, summaries of KGR models, and typical datasets are introduced and discussed consequently. Moreover, we discuss the challenges and potential opportunities. The corresponding open-source repository is shared on GitHub: //github.com/LIANGKE23/Awesome-Knowledge-Graph-Reasoning.
Connecting Vision and Language plays an essential role in Generative Intelligence. For this reason, in the last few years, a large research effort has been devoted to image captioning, i.e. the task of describing images with syntactically and semantically meaningful sentences. Starting from 2015 the task has generally been addressed with pipelines composed of a visual encoding step and a language model for text generation. During these years, both components have evolved considerably through the exploitation of object regions, attributes, and relationships and the introduction of multi-modal connections, fully-attentive approaches, and BERT-like early-fusion strategies. However, regardless of the impressive results obtained, research in image captioning has not reached a conclusive answer yet. This work aims at providing a comprehensive overview and categorization of image captioning approaches, from visual encoding and text generation to training strategies, used datasets, and evaluation metrics. In this respect, we quantitatively compare many relevant state-of-the-art approaches to identify the most impactful technical innovations in image captioning architectures and training strategies. Moreover, many variants of the problem and its open challenges are analyzed and discussed. The final goal of this work is to serve as a tool for understanding the existing state-of-the-art and highlighting the future directions for an area of research where Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing can find an optimal synergy.
In recent years a vast amount of visual content has been generated and shared from various fields, such as social media platforms, medical images, and robotics. This abundance of content creation and sharing has introduced new challenges. In particular, searching databases for similar content, i.e. content based image retrieval (CBIR), is a long-established research area, and more efficient and accurate methods are needed for real time retrieval. Artificial intelligence has made progress in CBIR and has significantly facilitated the process of intelligent search. In this survey we organize and review recent CBIR works that are developed based on deep learning algorithms and techniques, including insights and techniques from recent papers. We identify and present the commonly-used databases, benchmarks, and evaluation methods used in the field. We collect common challenges and propose promising future directions. More specifically, we focus on image retrieval with deep learning and organize the state of the art methods according to the types of deep network structure, deep features, feature enhancement methods, and network fine-tuning strategies. Our survey considers a wide variety of recent methods, aiming to promote a global view of the field of category-based CBIR.
Search in social networks such as Facebook poses different challenges than in classical web search: besides the query text, it is important to take into account the searcher's context to provide relevant results. Their social graph is an integral part of this context and is a unique aspect of Facebook search. While embedding-based retrieval (EBR) has been applied in eb search engines for years, Facebook search was still mainly based on a Boolean matching model. In this paper, we discuss the techniques for applying EBR to a Facebook Search system. We introduce the unified embedding framework developed to model semantic embeddings for personalized search, and the system to serve embedding-based retrieval in a typical search system based on an inverted index. We discuss various tricks and experiences on end-to-end optimization of the whole system, including ANN parameter tuning and full-stack optimization. Finally, we present our progress on two selected advanced topics about modeling. We evaluated EBR on verticals for Facebook Search with significant metrics gains observed in online A/B experiments. We believe this paper will provide useful insights and experiences to help people on developing embedding-based retrieval systems in search engines.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.
With the rapid growth of knowledge bases (KBs), question answering over knowledge base, a.k.a. KBQA has drawn huge attention in recent years. Most of the existing KBQA methods follow so called encoder-compare framework. They map the question and the KB facts to a common embedding space, in which the similarity between the question vector and the fact vectors can be conveniently computed. This, however, inevitably loses original words interaction information. To preserve more original information, we propose an attentive recurrent neural network with similarity matrix based convolutional neural network (AR-SMCNN) model, which is able to capture comprehensive hierarchical information utilizing the advantages of both RNN and CNN. We use RNN to capture semantic-level correlation by its sequential modeling nature, and use an attention mechanism to keep track of the entities and relations simultaneously. Meanwhile, we use a similarity matrix based CNN with two-directions pooling to extract literal-level words interaction matching utilizing CNNs strength of modeling spatial correlation among data. Moreover, we have developed a new heuristic extension method for entity detection, which significantly decreases the effect of noise. Our method has outperformed the state-of-the-arts on SimpleQuestion benchmark in both accuracy and efficiency.
Automatic image captioning has recently approached human-level performance due to the latest advances in computer vision and natural language understanding. However, most of the current models can only generate plain factual descriptions about the content of a given image. However, for human beings, image caption writing is quite flexible and diverse, where additional language dimensions, such as emotion, humor and language styles, are often incorporated to produce diverse, emotional, or appealing captions. In particular, we are interested in generating sentiment-conveying image descriptions, which has received little attention. The main challenge is how to effectively inject sentiments into the generated captions without altering the semantic matching between the visual content and the generated descriptions. In this work, we propose two different models, which employ different schemes for injecting sentiments into image captions. Compared with the few existing approaches, the proposed models are much simpler and yet more effective. The experimental results show that our model outperform the state-of-the-art models in generating sentimental (i.e., sentiment-bearing) image captions. In addition, we can also easily manipulate the model by assigning different sentiments to the testing image to generate captions with the corresponding sentiments.
Most of the internet today is composed of digital media that includes videos and images. With pixels becoming the currency in which most transactions happen on the internet, it is becoming increasingly important to have a way of browsing through this ocean of information with relative ease. YouTube has 400 hours of video uploaded every minute and many million images are browsed on Instagram, Facebook, etc. Inspired by recent advances in the field of deep learning and success that it has gained on various problems like image captioning and, machine translation , word2vec , skip thoughts, etc, we present DeepSeek a natural language processing based deep learning model that allows users to enter a description of the kind of images that they want to search, and in response the system retrieves all the images that semantically and contextually relate to the query. Two approaches are described in the following sections.