Recent advancements in video semantic segmentation have made substantial progress by exploiting temporal correlations. Nevertheless, persistent challenges, including redundant computation and the reliability of the feature propagation process, underscore the need for further innovation. In response, we present Deep Common Feature Mining (DCFM), a novel approach strategically designed to address these challenges by leveraging the concept of feature sharing. DCFM explicitly decomposes features into two complementary components. The common representation extracted from a key-frame furnishes essential high-level information to neighboring non-key frames, allowing for direct re-utilization without feature propagation. Simultaneously, the independent feature, derived from each video frame, captures rapidly changing information, providing frame-specific clues crucial for segmentation. To achieve such decomposition, we employ a symmetric training strategy tailored for sparsely annotated data, empowering the backbone to learn a robust high-level representation enriched with common information. Additionally, we incorporate a self-supervised loss function to reinforce intra-class feature similarity and enhance temporal consistency. Experimental evaluations on the VSPW and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing a superior balance between accuracy and efficiency.
Standardized lossy video coding is at the core of almost all real-world video processing pipelines. Rate control is used to enable standard codecs to adapt to different network bandwidth conditions or storage constraints. However, standard video codecs (e.g., H.264) and their rate control modules aim to minimize video distortion w.r.t. human quality assessment. We demonstrate empirically that standard-coded videos vastly deteriorate the performance of deep vision models. To overcome the deterioration of vision performance, this paper presents the first end-to-end learnable deep video codec control that considers both bandwidth constraints and downstream deep vision performance, while adhering to existing standardization. We demonstrate that our approach better preserves downstream deep vision performance than traditional standard video coding.
Detecting dialogue breakdown in real time is critical for conversational AI systems, because it enables taking corrective action to successfully complete a task. In spoken dialog systems, this breakdown can be caused by a variety of unexpected situations including high levels of background noise, causing STT mistranscriptions, or unexpected user flows. In particular, industry settings like healthcare, require high precision and high flexibility to navigate differently based on the conversation history and dialogue states. This makes it both more challenging and more critical to accurately detect dialog breakdown. To accurately detect breakdown, we found it requires processing audio inputs along with downstream NLP model inferences on transcribed text in real time. In this paper, we introduce a Multimodal Contextual Dialogue Breakdown (MultConDB) model. This model significantly outperforms other known best models by achieving an F1 of 69.27.
Understanding how individuals focus and perform visual searches during collaborative tasks can help improve user engagement. Eye tracking measures provide informative cues for such understanding. This article presents A-DisETrac, an advanced analytic dashboard for distributed eye tracking. It uses off-the-shelf eye trackers to monitor multiple users in parallel, compute both traditional and advanced gaze measures in real-time, and display them on an interactive dashboard. Using two pilot studies, the system was evaluated in terms of user experience and utility, and compared with existing work. Moreover, the system was used to study how advanced gaze measures such as ambient-focal coefficient K and real-time index of pupillary activity relate to collaborative behavior. It was observed that the time a group takes to complete a puzzle is related to the ambient visual scanning behavior quantified and groups that spent more time had more scanning behavior. User experience questionnaire results suggest that their dashboard provides a comparatively good user experience.
Aspect Category Detection (ACD) aims to identify implicit and explicit aspects in a given review sentence. The state-of-the-art approaches for ACD use Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to address the problem as a multi-label classification task. However, learning category-specific representations heavily rely on the amount of labeled examples, which may not readily available in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tackle the ACD task by combining DNNs with Gradual Machine Learning (GML) in a supervised setting. we aim to leverage the strength of DNN in semantic relation modeling, which can facilitate effective knowledge transfer between labeled and unlabeled instances during the gradual inference of GML. To achieve this, we first analyze the learned latent space of the DNN to model the relations, i.e., similar or opposite, between instances. We then represent these relations as binary features in a factor graph to efficiently convey knowledge. Finally, we conduct a comparative study of our proposed solution on real benchmark datasets and demonstrate that the GML approach, in collaboration with DNNs for feature extraction, consistently outperforms pure DNN solutions.
We propose a novel approach to the action segmentation task for long, untrimmed videos, based on solving an optimal transport problem. By encoding a temporal consistency prior into a Gromov-Wasserstein problem, we are able to decode a temporally consistent segmentation from a noisy affinity/matching cost matrix between video frames and action classes. Unlike previous approaches, our method does not require knowing the action order for a video to attain temporal consistency. Furthermore, our resulting (fused) Gromov-Wasserstein problem can be efficiently solved on GPUs using a few iterations of projected mirror descent. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in an unsupervised learning setting, where our method is used to generate pseudo-labels for self-training. We evaluate our segmentation approach and unsupervised learning pipeline on the Breakfast, 50-Salads, YouTube Instructions and Desktop Assembly datasets, yielding state-of-the-art results for the unsupervised video action segmentation task.
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly increased their presence in human-facing Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. However, LLMs could reproduce and even exacerbate stereotypical outputs from training data. This work introduces the Multi-Grain Stereotype (MGS) dataset, encompassing 51,867 instances across gender, race, profession, religion, and stereotypical text, collected by fusing multiple previously publicly available stereotype detection datasets. We explore different machine learning approaches aimed at establishing baselines for stereotype detection, and fine-tune several language models of various architectures and model sizes, presenting in this work a series of stereotypes classifier models for English text trained on MGS. To understand whether our stereotype detectors capture relevant features (aligning with human common sense) we utilise a variety of explanainable AI tools, including SHAP, LIME, and BertViz, and analyse a series of example cases discussing the results. Finally, we develop a series of stereotype elicitation prompts and evaluate the presence of stereotypes in text generation tasks with popular LLMs, using one of our best performing previously presented stereotypes detectors. Our experiments yielded several key findings: i) Training stereotype detectors in a multi-dimension setting yields better results than training multiple single-dimension classifiers.ii) The integrated MGS Dataset enhances both the in-dataset and cross-dataset generalisation ability of stereotype detectors compared to using the datasets separately. iii) There is a reduction in stereotypes in the content generated by GPT Family LLMs with newer versions.
Recent advancements in integrating external tools with Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened new frontiers, with applications in mathematical reasoning, code generators, and smart assistants. However, existing methods, relying on simple one-time retrieval strategies, fall short on effectively and accurately shortlisting relevant tools. This paper introduces a novel \modelname (\modelmeaning) approach, encompassing ``Plan-and-Retrieve (P\&R)'' and ``Edit-and-Ground (E\&G)'' paradigms. The P\&R paradigm consists of a neural retrieval module for shortlisting relevant tools and an LLM-based query planner that decomposes complex queries into actionable tasks, enhancing the effectiveness of tool utilization. The E\&G paradigm utilizes LLMs to enrich tool descriptions based on user scenarios, bridging the gap between user queries and tool functionalities. Experiment results demonstrate that these paradigms significantly improve the recall and NDCG in tool retrieval tasks, significantly surpassing current state-of-the-art models.
Video Temporal Grounding is to identify specific moments or highlights from a video corresponding to textual descriptions. Typical approaches in temporal grounding treat all video clips equally during the encoding process regardless of their semantic relevance with the text query. Therefore, we propose Correlation-Guided DEtection TRansformer(CG-DETR), exploring to provide clues for query-associated video clips within the cross-modal attention. First, we design an adaptive cross-attention with dummy tokens. Dummy tokens conditioned by text query take portions of the attention weights, preventing irrelevant video clips from being represented by the text query. Yet, not all words equally inherit the text query's correlation to video clips. Thus, we further guide the cross-attention map by inferring the fine-grained correlation between video clips and words. We enable this by learning a joint embedding space for high-level concepts, i.e., moment and sentence level, and inferring the clip-word correlation. Lastly, we exploit the moment-specific characteristics and combine them with the context of each video to form a moment-adaptive saliency detector. By exploiting the degrees of text engagement in each video clip, it precisely measures the highlightness of each clip. CG-DETR achieves state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks for temporal grounding.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
Medical image segmentation requires consensus ground truth segmentations to be derived from multiple expert annotations. A novel approach is proposed that obtains consensus segmentations from experts using graph cuts (GC) and semi supervised learning (SSL). Popular approaches use iterative Expectation Maximization (EM) to estimate the final annotation and quantify annotator's performance. Such techniques pose the risk of getting trapped in local minima. We propose a self consistency (SC) score to quantify annotator consistency using low level image features. SSL is used to predict missing annotations by considering global features and local image consistency. The SC score also serves as the penalty cost in a second order Markov random field (MRF) cost function optimized using graph cuts to derive the final consensus label. Graph cut obtains a global maximum without an iterative procedure. Experimental results on synthetic images, real data of Crohn's disease patients and retinal images show our final segmentation to be accurate and more consistent than competing methods.