Human affective behavior analysis has received much attention in human-computer interaction (HCI). In this paper, we introduce our submission to the CVPR 2022 Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW). To fully exploit affective knowledge from multiple views, we utilize the multimodal features of spoken words, speech prosody, and facial expression, which are extracted from the video clips in the Aff-Wild2 dataset. Based on these features, we propose a unified transformer-based multimodal framework for Action Unit detection and also expression recognition. Specifically, the static vision feature is first encoded from the current frame image. At the same time, we clip its adjacent frames by a sliding window and extract three kinds of multimodal features from the sequence of images, audio, and text. Then, we introduce a transformer-based fusion module that integrates the static vision features and the dynamic multimodal features. The cross-attention module in the fusion module makes the output integrated features focus on the crucial parts that facilitate the downstream detection tasks. We also leverage some data balancing techniques, data augmentation techniques, and postprocessing methods to further improve the model performance. In the official test of ABAW3 Competition, our model ranks first in the EXPR and AU tracks. The extensive quantitative evaluations, as well as ablation studies on the Aff-Wild2 dataset, prove the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Extreme compression, particularly ultra-low bit precision (binary/ternary) quantization, has been proposed to fit large NLP models on resource-constraint devices. However, to preserve the accuracy for such aggressive compression schemes, cutting-edge methods usually introduce complicated compression pipelines, e.g., multi-stage expensive knowledge distillation with extensive hyperparameter tuning. Also, they oftentimes focus less on smaller transformer models that have already been heavily compressed via knowledge distillation and lack a systematic study to show the effectiveness of their methods. In this paper, we perform a very comprehensive systematic study to measure the impact of many key hyperparameters and training strategies from previous works. As a result, we find out that previous baselines for ultra-low bit precision quantization are significantly under-trained. Based on our study, we propose a simple yet effective compression pipeline for extreme compression, named XTC. XTC demonstrates that (1) we can skip the pre-training knowledge distillation to obtain a 5-layer BERT while achieving better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods, e.g., the 6-layer TinyBERT; (2) extreme quantization plus layer reduction is able to reduce the model size by 50x, resulting in new state-of-the-art results on GLUE tasks.
In order to exploit representations of time-series signals, such as physiological signals, it is essential that these representations capture relevant information from the whole signal. In this work, we propose to use a Transformer-based model to process electrocardiograms (ECG) for emotion recognition. Attention mechanisms of the Transformer can be used to build contextualized representations for a signal, giving more importance to relevant parts. These representations may then be processed with a fully-connected network to predict emotions. To overcome the relatively small size of datasets with emotional labels, we employ self-supervised learning. We gathered several ECG datasets with no labels of emotion to pre-train our model, which we then fine-tuned for emotion recognition on the AMIGOS dataset. We show that our approach reaches state-of-the-art performances for emotion recognition using ECG signals on AMIGOS. More generally, our experiments show that transformers and pre-training are promising strategies for emotion recognition with physiological signals.
Supervised learning methods trained with maximum likelihood objectives often overfit on training data. Most regularizers that prevent overfitting look to increase confidence on additional examples (e.g., data augmentation, adversarial training), or reduce it on training data (e.g., label smoothing). In this work we propose a complementary regularization strategy that reduces confidence on self-generated examples. The method, which we call RCAD (Reducing Confidence along Adversarial Directions), aims to reduce confidence on out-of-distribution examples lying along directions adversarially chosen to increase training loss. In contrast to adversarial training, RCAD does not try to robustify the model to output the original label, but rather regularizes it to have reduced confidence on points generated using much larger perturbations than in conventional adversarial training. RCAD can be easily integrated into training pipelines with a few lines of code. Despite its simplicity, we find on many classification benchmarks that RCAD can be added to existing techniques (e.g., label smoothing, MixUp training) to increase test accuracy by 1-3% in absolute value, with more significant gains in the low data regime. We also provide a theoretical analysis that helps to explain these benefits in simplified settings, showing that RCAD can provably help the model unlearn spurious features in the training data.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
The goal of text generation is to make machines express in human language. It is one of the most important yet challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Since 2014, various neural encoder-decoder models pioneered by Seq2Seq have been proposed to achieve the goal by learning to map input text to output text. However, the input text alone often provides limited knowledge to generate the desired output, so the performance of text generation is still far from satisfaction in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, researchers have considered incorporating various forms of knowledge beyond the input text into the generation models. This research direction is known as knowledge-enhanced text generation. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of the research on knowledge enhanced text generation over the past five years. The main content includes two parts: (i) general methods and architectures for integrating knowledge into text generation; (ii) specific techniques and applications according to different forms of knowledge data. This survey can have broad audiences, researchers and practitioners, in academia and industry.
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.
Machine reading comprehension (MRC) aims to teach machines to read and comprehend human languages, which is a long-standing goal of natural language processing (NLP). With the burst of deep neural networks and the evolution of contextualized language models (CLMs), the research of MRC has experienced two significant breakthroughs. MRC and CLM, as a phenomenon, have a great impact on the NLP community. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and comparative review on MRC covering overall research topics about 1) the origin and development of MRC and CLM, with a particular focus on the role of CLMs; 2) the impact of MRC and CLM to the NLP community; 3) the definition, datasets, and evaluation of MRC; 4) general MRC architecture and technical methods in the view of two-stage Encoder-Decoder solving architecture from the insights of the cognitive process of humans; 5) previous highlights, emerging topics, and our empirical analysis, among which we especially focus on what works in different periods of MRC researches. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. The primary views we have arrived at are that 1) MRC boosts the progress from language processing to understanding; 2) the rapid improvement of MRC systems greatly benefits from the development of CLMs; 3) the theme of MRC is gradually moving from shallow text matching to cognitive reasoning.
Deep learning has revolutionized speech recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing since 2010, each involving a single modality in the input signal. However, many applications in artificial intelligence involve more than one modality. It is therefore of broad interest to study the more difficult and complex problem of modeling and learning across multiple modalities. In this paper, a technical review of the models and learning methods for multimodal intelligence is provided. The main focus is the combination of vision and natural language, which has become an important area in both computer vision and natural language processing research communities. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of recent work on multimodal deep learning from three new angles - learning multimodal representations, the fusion of multimodal signals at various levels, and multimodal applications. On multimodal representation learning, we review the key concept of embedding, which unifies the multimodal signals into the same vector space and thus enables cross-modality signal processing. We also review the properties of the many types of embedding constructed and learned for general downstream tasks. On multimodal fusion, this review focuses on special architectures for the integration of the representation of unimodal signals for a particular task. On applications, selected areas of a broad interest in current literature are covered, including caption generation, text-to-image generation, and visual question answering. We believe this review can facilitate future studies in the emerging field of multimodal intelligence for the community.