Human-centric perception plays a vital role in vision and graphics. But their data annotations are prohibitively expensive. Therefore, it is desirable to have a versatile pre-train model that serves as a foundation for data-efficient downstream tasks transfer. To this end, we propose the Human-Centric Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning framework HCMoCo that leverages the multi-modal nature of human data (e.g. RGB, depth, 2D keypoints) for effective representation learning. The objective comes with two main challenges: dense pre-train for multi-modality data, efficient usage of sparse human priors. To tackle the challenges, we design the novel Dense Intra-sample Contrastive Learning and Sparse Structure-aware Contrastive Learning targets by hierarchically learning a modal-invariant latent space featured with continuous and ordinal feature distribution and structure-aware semantic consistency. HCMoCo provides pre-train for different modalities by combining heterogeneous datasets, which allows efficient usage of existing task-specific human data. Extensive experiments on four downstream tasks of different modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of HCMoCo, especially under data-efficient settings (7.16% and 12% improvement on DensePose Estimation and Human Parsing). Moreover, we demonstrate the versatility of HCMoCo by exploring cross-modality supervision and missing-modality inference, validating its strong ability in cross-modal association and reasoning.
Non-autoregressive (NAR) generation, which is first proposed in neural machine translation (NMT) to speed up inference, has attracted much attention in both machine learning and natural language processing communities. While NAR generation can significantly accelerate inference speed for machine translation, the speedup comes at the cost of sacrificed translation accuracy compared to its counterpart, auto-regressive (AR) generation. In recent years, many new models and algorithms have been designed/proposed to bridge the accuracy gap between NAR generation and AR generation. In this paper, we conduct a systematic survey with comparisons and discussions of various non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models from different aspects. Specifically, we categorize the efforts of NAT into several groups, including data manipulation, modeling methods, training criterion, decoding algorithms, and the benefit from pre-trained models. Furthermore, we briefly review other applications of NAR models beyond machine translation, such as dialogue generation, text summarization, grammar error correction, semantic parsing, speech synthesis, and automatic speech recognition. In addition, we also discuss potential directions for future exploration, including releasing the dependency of KD, dynamic length prediction, pre-training for NAR, and wider applications, etc. We hope this survey can help researchers capture the latest progress in NAR generation, inspire the design of advanced NAR models and algorithms, and enable industry practitioners to choose appropriate solutions for their applications. The web page of this survey is at \url{//github.com/LitterBrother-Xiao/Overview-of-Non-autoregressive-Applications}.
Prior studies in privacy policies frame the question answering (QA) tasks as identifying the most relevant text segment or a list of sentences from the policy document for a user query. However, annotating such a dataset is challenging as it requires specific domain expertise (e.g., law academics). Even if we manage a small-scale one, a bottleneck that remains is that the labeled data are heavily imbalanced (only a few segments are relevant) --limiting the gain in this domain. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a novel data augmentation framework based on ensembling retriever models that captures the relevant text segments from unlabeled policy documents and expand the positive examples in the training set. In addition, to improve the diversity and quality of the augmented data, we leverage multiple pre-trained language models (LMs) and cascaded them with noise reduction oracles. Using our augmented data on the PrivacyQA benchmark, we elevate the existing baseline by a large margin (10\% F1) and achieve a new state-of-the-art F1 score of 50\%. Our ablation studies provide further insights into the effectiveness of our approach.
In this paper, we propose M$^2$BEV, a unified framework that jointly performs 3D object detection and map segmentation in the Birds Eye View~(BEV) space with multi-camera image inputs. Unlike the majority of previous works which separately process detection and segmentation, M$^2$BEV infers both tasks with a unified model and improves efficiency. M$^2$BEV efficiently transforms multi-view 2D image features into the 3D BEV feature in ego-car coordinates. Such BEV representation is important as it enables different tasks to share a single encoder. Our framework further contains four important designs that benefit both accuracy and efficiency: (1) An efficient BEV encoder design that reduces the spatial dimension of a voxel feature map. (2) A dynamic box assignment strategy that uses learning-to-match to assign ground-truth 3D boxes with anchors. (3) A BEV centerness re-weighting that reinforces with larger weights for more distant predictions, and (4) Large-scale 2D detection pre-training and auxiliary supervision. We show that these designs significantly benefit the ill-posed camera-based 3D perception tasks where depth information is missing. M$^2$BEV is memory efficient, allowing significantly higher resolution images as input, with faster inference speed. Experiments on nuScenes show that M$^2$BEV achieves state-of-the-art results in both 3D object detection and BEV segmentation, with the best single model achieving 42.5 mAP and 57.0 mIoU in these two tasks, respectively.
Compared with the domain-specific model, the vision-language pre-training models (VLPMs) have shown superior performance on downstream tasks with fast fine-tuning process. For example, ERNIE-ViL, Oscar and UNIMO trained VLPMs with a uniform transformers stack architecture and large amounts of image-text paired data, achieving remarkable results on downstream tasks such as image-text reference(IR and TR), vision question answering (VQA) and image captioning (IC) etc. During the training phase, VLPMs are always fed with a combination of multiple public datasets to meet the demand of large-scare training data. However, due to the unevenness of data distribution including size, task type and quality, using the mixture of multiple datasets for model training can be problematic. In this work, we introduce a large-scale multi-modal corpora named WuDaoMM, totally containing more than 650M image-text pairs. Specifically, about 600 million pairs of data are collected from multiple webpages in which image and caption present weak correlation, and the other 50 million strong-related image-text pairs are collected from some high-quality graphic websites. We also release a base version of WuDaoMM with 5 million strong-correlated image-text pairs, which is sufficient to support the common cross-modal model pre-training. Besides, we trained both an understanding and a generation vision-language (VL) model to test the dataset effectiveness. The results show that WuDaoMM can be applied as an efficient dataset for VLPMs, especially for the model in text-to-image generation task. The data is released at //data.wudaoai.cn
Common image-text joint understanding techniques presume that images and the associated text can universally be characterized by a single implicit model. However, co-occurring images and text can be related in qualitatively different ways, and explicitly modeling it could improve the performance of current joint understanding models. In this paper, we train a Cross-Modal Coherence Modelfor text-to-image retrieval task. Our analysis shows that models trained with image--text coherence relations can retrieve images originally paired with target text more often than coherence-agnostic models. We also show via human evaluation that images retrieved by the proposed coherence-aware model are preferred over a coherence-agnostic baseline by a huge margin. Our findings provide insights into the ways that different modalities communicate and the role of coherence relations in capturing commonsense inferences in text and imagery.
Large-scale single-stream pre-training has shown dramatic performance in image-text retrieval. Regrettably, it faces low inference efficiency due to heavy attention layers. Recently, two-stream methods like CLIP and ALIGN with high inference efficiency have also shown promising performance, however, they only consider instance-level alignment between the two streams (thus there is still room for improvement). To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel COllaborative Two-Stream vision-language pretraining model termed COTS for image-text retrieval by enhancing cross-modal interaction. In addition to instance level alignment via momentum contrastive learning, we leverage two extra levels of cross-modal interactions in our COTS: (1) Token-level interaction - a masked visionlanguage modeling (MVLM) learning objective is devised without using a cross-stream network module, where variational autoencoder is imposed on the visual encoder to generate visual tokens for each image. (2) Task-level interaction - a KL-alignment learning objective is devised between text-to-image and image-to-text retrieval tasks, where the probability distribution per task is computed with the negative queues in momentum contrastive learning. Under a fair comparison setting, our COTS achieves the highest performance among all two-stream methods and comparable performance (but with 10,800X faster in inference) w.r.t. the latest single-stream methods. Importantly, our COTS is also applicable to text-to-video retrieval, yielding new state-ofthe-art on the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
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.
We propose UniViLM: a Unified Video and Language pre-training Model for multimodal understanding and generation. Motivated by the recent success of BERT based pre-training technique for NLP and image-language tasks, VideoBERT and CBT are proposed to exploit BERT model for video and language pre-training using narrated instructional videos. Different from their works which only pre-train understanding task, we propose a unified video-language pre-training model for both understanding and generation tasks. Our model comprises of 4 components including two single-modal encoders, a cross encoder and a decoder with the Transformer backbone. We first pre-train our model to learn the universal representation for both video and language on a large instructional video dataset. Then we fine-tune the model on two multimodal tasks including understanding task (text-based video retrieval) and generation task (multimodal video captioning). Our extensive experiments show that our method can improve the performance of both understanding and generation tasks and achieves the state-of-the art results.
We consider the problem of referring image segmentation. Given an input image and a natural language expression, the goal is to segment the object referred by the language expression in the image. Existing works in this area treat the language expression and the input image separately in their representations. They do not sufficiently capture long-range correlations between these two modalities. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal self-attention (CMSA) module that effectively captures the long-range dependencies between linguistic and visual features. Our model can adaptively focus on informative words in the referring expression and important regions in the input image. In addition, we propose a gated multi-level fusion module to selectively integrate self-attentive cross-modal features corresponding to different levels in the image. This module controls the information flow of features at different levels. We validate the proposed approach on four evaluation datasets. Our proposed approach consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.