Despite impressive advancements in recent multimodal reasoning approaches, they are still limited in flexibility and efficiency, as these models typically process only a few fixed modality inputs and require updates to numerous parameters. This paper tackles these critical challenges and proposes CREMA, a generalizable, highly efficient, and modular modality-fusion framework that can incorporate any new modality to enhance video reasoning. We first augment multiple informative modalities (such as optical flow, 3D point cloud, audio, thermal heatmap, and touch map) from given videos without extra human annotation by leveraging sensors or existing pre-trained models. Next, we introduce a query transformer with multiple parameter-efficient modules associated with each accessible modality. It projects diverse modality features to the LLM token embedding space, allowing the model to integrate different data types for response generation. Furthermore, we propose a novel progressive multimodal fusion design supported by a lightweight fusion module and modality-sequential training strategy. It helps compress information across various assisting modalities, maintaining computational efficiency in the LLM while improving performance. We validate our method on 7 video-language reasoning tasks assisted by diverse modalities, including conventional VideoQA and Video-Audio/3D/Touch/Thermal QA, and achieve better/equivalent performance against strong multimodal LLMs, including OneLLM, BLIP-2, and SeViLA while reducing over 90% trainable parameters. We provide extensive analyses of CREMA, including the impact of each modality on reasoning domains, the design of the fusion module, and example visualizations.
In the rapidly advancing realm of visual generation, diffusion models have revolutionized the landscape, marking a significant shift in capabilities with their impressive text-guided generative functions. However, relying solely on text for conditioning these models does not fully cater to the varied and complex requirements of different applications and scenarios. Acknowledging this shortfall, a variety of studies aim to control pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models to support novel conditions. In this survey, we undertake a thorough review of the literature on controllable generation with T2I diffusion models, covering both the theoretical foundations and practical advancements in this domain. Our review begins with a brief introduction to the basics of denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) and widely used T2I diffusion models. We then reveal the controlling mechanisms of diffusion models, theoretically analyzing how novel conditions are introduced into the denoising process for conditional generation. Additionally, we offer a detailed overview of research in this area, organizing it into distinct categories from the condition perspective: generation with specific conditions, generation with multiple conditions, and universal controllable generation. For an exhaustive list of the controllable generation literature surveyed, please refer to our curated repository at \url{//github.com/PRIV-Creation/Awesome-Controllable-T2I-Diffusion-Models}.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Hierarchical structures are popular in recent vision transformers, however, they require sophisticated designs and massive datasets to work well. In this paper, we explore the idea of nesting basic local transformers on non-overlapping image blocks and aggregating them in a hierarchical way. We find that the block aggregation function plays a critical role in enabling cross-block non-local information communication. This observation leads us to design a simplified architecture that requires minor code changes upon the original vision transformer. The benefits of the proposed judiciously-selected design are threefold: (1) NesT converges faster and requires much less training data to achieve good generalization on both ImageNet and small datasets like CIFAR; (2) when extending our key ideas to image generation, NesT leads to a strong decoder that is 8$\times$ faster than previous transformer-based generators; and (3) we show that decoupling the feature learning and abstraction processes via this nested hierarchy in our design enables constructing a novel method (named GradCAT) for visually interpreting the learned model. Source code is available //github.com/google-research/nested-transformer.
Learning disentanglement aims at finding a low dimensional representation which consists of multiple explanatory and generative factors of the observational data. The framework of variational autoencoder (VAE) is commonly used to disentangle independent factors from observations. However, in real scenarios, factors with semantics are not necessarily independent. Instead, there might be an underlying causal structure which renders these factors dependent. We thus propose a new VAE based framework named CausalVAE, which includes a Causal Layer to transform independent exogenous factors into causal endogenous ones that correspond to causally related concepts in data. We further analyze the model identifiabitily, showing that the proposed model learned from observations recovers the true one up to a certain degree. Experiments are conducted on various datasets, including synthetic and real word benchmark CelebA. Results show that the causal representations learned by CausalVAE are semantically interpretable, and their causal relationship as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is identified with good accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed CausalVAE model is able to generate counterfactual data through "do-operation" to the causal factors.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.
The accurate and interpretable prediction of future events in time-series data often requires the capturing of representative patterns (or referred to as states) underpinning the observed data. To this end, most existing studies focus on the representation and recognition of states, but ignore the changing transitional relations among them. In this paper, we present evolutionary state graph, a dynamic graph structure designed to systematically represent the evolving relations (edges) among states (nodes) along time. We conduct analysis on the dynamic graphs constructed from the time-series data and show that changes on the graph structures (e.g., edges connecting certain state nodes) can inform the occurrences of events (i.e., time-series fluctuation). Inspired by this, we propose a novel graph neural network model, Evolutionary State Graph Network (EvoNet), to encode the evolutionary state graph for accurate and interpretable time-series event prediction. Specifically, Evolutionary State Graph Network models both the node-level (state-to-state) and graph-level (segment-to-segment) propagation, and captures the node-graph (state-to-segment) interactions over time. Experimental results based on five real-world datasets show that our approach not only achieves clear improvements compared with 11 baselines, but also provides more insights towards explaining the results of event predictions.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.
To provide more accurate, diverse, and explainable recommendation, it is compulsory to go beyond modeling user-item interactions and take side information into account. Traditional methods like factorization machine (FM) cast it as a supervised learning problem, which assumes each interaction as an independent instance with side information encoded. Due to the overlook of the relations among instances or items (e.g., the director of a movie is also an actor of another movie), these methods are insufficient to distill the collaborative signal from the collective behaviors of users. In this work, we investigate the utility of knowledge graph (KG), which breaks down the independent interaction assumption by linking items with their attributes. We argue that in such a hybrid structure of KG and user-item graph, high-order relations --- which connect two items with one or multiple linked attributes --- are an essential factor for successful recommendation. We propose a new method named Knowledge Graph Attention Network (KGAT) which explicitly models the high-order connectivities in KG in an end-to-end fashion. It recursively propagates the embeddings from a node's neighbors (which can be users, items, or attributes) to refine the node's embedding, and employs an attention mechanism to discriminate the importance of the neighbors. Our KGAT is conceptually advantageous to existing KG-based recommendation methods, which either exploit high-order relations by extracting paths or implicitly modeling them with regularization. Empirical results on three public benchmarks show that KGAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods like Neural FM and RippleNet. Further studies verify the efficacy of embedding propagation for high-order relation modeling and the interpretability benefits brought by the attention mechanism.
Object detection is considered as one of the most challenging problems in computer vision, since it requires correct prediction of both classes and locations of objects in images. In this study, we define a more difficult scenario, namely zero-shot object detection (ZSD) where no visual training data is available for some of the target object classes. We present a novel approach to tackle this ZSD problem, where a convex combination of embeddings are used in conjunction with a detection framework. For evaluation of ZSD methods, we propose a simple dataset constructed from Fashion-MNIST images and also a custom zero-shot split for the Pascal VOC detection challenge. The experimental results suggest that our method yields promising results for ZSD.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis.