In this paper, we study a challenging task of zero-shot referring image segmentation. This task aims to identify the instance mask that is most related to a referring expression without training on pixel-level annotations. Previous research takes advantage of pre-trained cross-modal models, e.g., CLIP, to align instance-level masks with referring expressions. %Yet, CLIP only considers image-text pair level alignment, which neglects fine-grained image region and complex sentence matching. Yet, CLIP only considers the global-level alignment of image-text pairs, neglecting fine-grained matching between the referring sentence and local image regions. To address this challenge, we introduce a Text Augmented Spatial-aware (TAS) zero-shot referring image segmentation framework that is training-free and robust to various visual encoders. TAS incorporates a mask proposal network for instance-level mask extraction, a text-augmented visual-text matching score for mining the image-text correlation, and a spatial rectifier for mask post-processing. Notably, the text-augmented visual-text matching score leverages a $P$ score and an $N$-score in addition to the typical visual-text matching score. The $P$-score is utilized to close the visual-text domain gap through a surrogate captioning model, where the score is computed between the surrogate model-generated texts and the referring expression. The $N$-score considers the fine-grained alignment of region-text pairs via negative phrase mining, encouraging the masked image to be repelled from the mined distracting phrases. Extensive experiments are conducted on various datasets, including RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg. The proposed method clearly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot referring image segmentation methods.
This paper addresses the challenge of 3D instance segmentation by simultaneously leveraging 3D geometric and multi-view image information. Many previous works have applied deep learning techniques to 3D point clouds for instance segmentation. However, these methods often failed to generalize to various types of scenes due to the scarcity and low-diversity of labeled 3D point cloud data. Some recent works have attempted to lift 2D instance segmentations to 3D within a bottom-up framework. The inconsistency in 2D instance segmentations among views can substantially degrade the performance of 3D segmentation. In this work, we introduce a novel 3D-to-2D query framework to effectively exploit 2D segmentation models for 3D instance segmentation. Specifically, we pre-segment the scene into several superpoints in 3D, formulating the task into a graph cut problem. The superpoint graph is constructed based on 2D segmentation models, where node features are obtained from multi-view image features and edge weights are computed based on multi-view segmentation results, enabling the better generalization ability. To process the graph, we train a graph neural network using pseudo 3D labels from 2D segmentation models. Experimental results on the ScanNet, ScanNet++ and KITTI-360 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves robust segmentation performance and can generalize across different types of scenes. Our project page is available at //zju3dv.github.io/sam_graph.
We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at //github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
In this paper, we focus on the self-supervised learning of visual correspondence using unlabeled videos in the wild. Our method simultaneously considers intra- and inter-video representation associations for reliable correspondence estimation. The intra-video learning transforms the image contents across frames within a single video via the frame pair-wise affinity. To obtain the discriminative representation for instance-level separation, we go beyond the intra-video analysis and construct the inter-video affinity to facilitate the contrastive transformation across different videos. By forcing the transformation consistency between intra- and inter-video levels, the fine-grained correspondence associations are well preserved and the instance-level feature discrimination is effectively reinforced. Our simple framework outperforms the recent self-supervised correspondence methods on a range of visual tasks including video object tracking (VOT), video object segmentation (VOS), pose keypoint tracking, etc. It is worth mentioning that our method also surpasses the fully-supervised affinity representation (e.g., ResNet) and performs competitively against the recent fully-supervised algorithms designed for the specific tasks (e.g., VOT and VOS).
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.
As a crucial component in task-oriented dialog systems, the Natural Language Generation (NLG) module converts a dialog act represented in a semantic form into a response in natural language. The success of traditional template-based or statistical models typically relies on heavily annotated data, which is infeasible for new domains. Therefore, it is pivotal for an NLG system to generalize well with limited labelled data in real applications. To this end, we present FewShotWoz, the first NLG benchmark to simulate the few-shot learning setting in task-oriented dialog systems. Further, we develop the SC-GPT model. It is pre-trained on a large set of annotated NLG corpus to acquire the controllable generation ability, and fine-tuned with only a few domain-specific labels to adapt to new domains. Experiments on FewShotWoz and the large Multi-Domain-WOZ datasets show that the proposed SC-GPT significantly outperforms existing methods, measured by various automatic metrics and human evaluations.
In this paper, we proposed to apply meta learning approach for low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). We formulated ASR for different languages as different tasks, and meta-learned the initialization parameters from many pretraining languages to achieve fast adaptation on unseen target language, via recently proposed model-agnostic meta learning algorithm (MAML). We evaluated the proposed approach using six languages as pretraining tasks and four languages as target tasks. Preliminary results showed that the proposed method, MetaASR, significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art multitask pretraining approach on all target languages with different combinations of pretraining languages. In addition, since MAML's model-agnostic property, this paper also opens new research direction of applying meta learning to more speech-related applications.
In this paper, we present an accurate and scalable approach to the face clustering task. We aim at grouping a set of faces by their potential identities. We formulate this task as a link prediction problem: a link exists between two faces if they are of the same identity. The key idea is that we find the local context in the feature space around an instance (face) contains rich information about the linkage relationship between this instance and its neighbors. By constructing sub-graphs around each instance as input data, which depict the local context, we utilize the graph convolution network (GCN) to perform reasoning and infer the likelihood of linkage between pairs in the sub-graphs. Experiments show that our method is more robust to the complex distribution of faces than conventional methods, yielding favorably comparable results to state-of-the-art methods on standard face clustering benchmarks, and is scalable to large datasets. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method does not need the number of clusters as prior, is aware of noises and outliers, and can be extended to a multi-view version for more accurate clustering accuracy.
BERT, a pre-trained Transformer model, has achieved ground-breaking performance on multiple NLP tasks. In this paper, we describe BERTSUM, a simple variant of BERT, for extractive summarization. Our system is the state of the art on the CNN/Dailymail dataset, outperforming the previous best-performed system by 1.65 on ROUGE-L. The codes to reproduce our results are available at //github.com/nlpyang/BertSum
Most deep learning-based models for speech enhancement have mainly focused on estimating the magnitude of spectrogram while reusing the phase from noisy speech for reconstruction. This is due to the difficulty of estimating the phase of clean speech. To improve speech enhancement performance, we tackle the phase estimation problem in three ways. First, we propose Deep Complex U-Net, an advanced U-Net structured model incorporating well-defined complex-valued building blocks to deal with complex-valued spectrograms. Second, we propose a polar coordinate-wise complex-valued masking method to reflect the distribution of complex ideal ratio masks. Third, we define a novel loss function, weighted source-to-distortion ratio (wSDR) loss, which is designed to directly correlate with a quantitative evaluation measure. Our model was evaluated on a mixture of the Voice Bank corpus and DEMAND database, which has been widely used by many deep learning models for speech enhancement. Ablation experiments were conducted on the mixed dataset showing that all three proposed approaches are empirically valid. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in all metrics, outperforming previous approaches by a large margin.
We consider the task of weakly supervised one-shot detection. In this task, we attempt to perform a detection task over a set of unseen classes, when training only using weak binary labels that indicate the existence of a class instance in a given example. The model is conditioned on a single exemplar of an unseen class and a target example that may or may not contain an instance of the same class as the exemplar. A similarity map is computed by using a Siamese neural network to map the exemplar and regions of the target example to a latent representation space and then computing cosine similarity scores between representations. An attention mechanism weights different regions in the target example, and enables learning of the one-shot detection task using the weaker labels alone. The model can be applied to detection tasks from different domains, including computer vision object detection. We evaluate our attention Siamese networks on a one-shot detection task from the audio domain, where it detects audio keywords in spoken utterances. Our model considerably outperforms a baseline approach and yields a 42.6% average precision for detection across 10 unseen classes. Moreover, architectural developments from computer vision object detection models such as a region proposal network can be incorporated into the model architecture, and results show that performance is expected to improve by doing so.