Systems that can efficiently search collections of sign language videos have been highlighted as a useful application of sign language technology. However, the problem of searching videos beyond individual keywords has received limited attention in the literature. To address this gap, in this work we introduce the task of sign language retrieval with free-form textual queries: given a written query (e.g., a sentence) and a large collection of sign language videos, the objective is to find the signing video in the collection that best matches the written query. We propose to tackle this task by learning cross-modal embeddings on the recently introduced large-scale How2Sign dataset of American Sign Language (ASL). We identify that a key bottleneck in the performance of the system is the quality of the sign video embedding which suffers from a scarcity of labeled training data. We, therefore, propose SPOT-ALIGN, a framework for interleaving iterative rounds of sign spotting and feature alignment to expand the scope and scale of available training data. We validate the effectiveness of SPOT-ALIGN for learning a robust sign video embedding through improvements in both sign recognition and the proposed video retrieval task.
Despite the excellent performance of large-scale vision-language pre-trained models (VLPs) on conventional visual question answering task, they still suffer from two problems: First, VLPs tend to rely on language biases in datasets and fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Second, they are inefficient in terms of memory footprint and computation. Although promising progress has been made in both problems, most existing works tackle them independently. To facilitate the application of VLP to VQA tasks, it is imperative to jointly study VLP compression and OOD robustness, which, however, has not yet been explored. In this paper, we investigate whether a VLP can be compressed and debiased simultaneously by searching sparse and robust subnetworks. To this end, we conduct extensive experiments with LXMERT, a representative VLP, on the OOD dataset VQA-CP v2. We systematically study the design of a training and compression pipeline to search the subnetworks, as well as the assignment of sparsity to different modality-specific modules. Our results show that there indeed exist sparse and robust LXMERT subnetworks, which significantly outperform the full model (without debiasing) with much fewer parameters. These subnetworks also exceed the current SoTA debiasing models with comparable or fewer parameters. We will release the codes on publication.
We present IMU2CLIP, a novel pre-training approach to align Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) motion sensor recordings with video and text, by projecting them into the joint representation space of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP). The proposed approach allows IMU2CLIP to translate human motions (as measured by IMU sensors) into their corresponding textual descriptions and videos -- while preserving the transitivity across these modalities. We explore several new IMU-based applications that IMU2CLIP enables, such as motion-based media retrieval and natural language reasoning tasks with motion data. In addition, we show that IMU2CLIP can significantly improve the downstream performance when fine-tuned for each application (e.g. activity recognition), demonstrating the universal usage of IMU2CLIP as a new pre-trained resource. Our code will be made publicly available.
Building dense retrievers requires a series of standard procedures, including training and validating neural models and creating indexes for efficient search. However, these procedures are often misaligned in that training objectives do not exactly reflect the retrieval scenario at inference time. In this paper, we explore how the gap between training and inference in dense retrieval can be reduced, focusing on dense phrase retrieval (Lee et al., 2021) where billions of representations are indexed at inference. Since validating every dense retriever with a large-scale index is practically infeasible, we propose an efficient way of validating dense retrievers using a small subset of the entire corpus. This allows us to validate various training strategies including unifying contrastive loss terms and using hard negatives for phrase retrieval, which largely reduces the training-inference discrepancy. As a result, we improve top-1 phrase retrieval accuracy by 2~3 points and top-20 passage retrieval accuracy by 2~4 points for open-domain question answering. Our work urges modeling dense retrievers with careful consideration of training and inference via efficient validation while advancing phrase retrieval as a general solution for dense retrieval.
Given an untrimmed video and a language query depicting a specific temporal moment in the video, video grounding aims to localize the time interval by understanding the text and video simultaneously. One of the most challenging issues is an extremely time- and cost-consuming annotation collection, including video captions in a natural language form and their corresponding temporal regions. In this paper, we present a simple yet novel training framework for video grounding in the zero-shot setting, which learns a network with only video data without any annotation. Inspired by the recent language-free paradigm, i.e. training without language data, we train the network without compelling the generation of fake (pseudo) text queries into a natural language form. Specifically, we propose a method for learning a video grounding model by selecting a temporal interval as a hypothetical correct answer and considering the visual feature selected by our method in the interval as a language feature, with the help of the well-aligned visual-language space of CLIP. Extensive experiments demonstrate the prominence of our language-free training framework, outperforming the existing zero-shot video grounding method and even several weakly-supervised approaches with large margins on two standard datasets.
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been deployed in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks and in various domains. Language model pre-training from general or mixed domain rich data plus fine-tuning using small amounts of available data in a low resource domain demonstrated beneficial results by researchers. In this work, we question this statement and verify if BERT-based PLMs from the biomedical domain can perform well in clinical text mining tasks via fine-tuning. We test the state-of-the-art models, i.e. Bioformer which is pre-trained on a large amount of biomedical data from PubMed corpus. We use a historical n2c2 clinical NLP challenge dataset for fine-tuning its task-adapted version (BioformerApt), and show that their performances are actually very low. We also present our own end-to-end model, TransformerCRF, which is developed using Transformer and conditional random fields (CRFs) as encoder and decoder. We further create a new variation model by adding a CRF layer on top of PLM Bioformer (BioformerCRF). We investigate the performances of TransformerCRF on clinical text mining tasks by training from scratch using a limited amount of data, as well as the model BioformerCRF. Experimental evaluation shows that, in a \textit{constrained setting}, all tested models are \textit{far from ideal} regarding extreme low-frequency special token recognition, even though they can achieve relatively higher accuracy on overall text tagging. Our models including source codes will be hosted at \url{//github.com/poethan/TransformerCRF}.
Protecting large language models from privacy leakage is becoming increasingly crucial with their wide adoption in real-world products. Yet applying differential privacy (DP), a canonical notion with provable privacy guarantees for machine learning models, to those models remains challenging due to the trade-off between model utility and privacy loss. Utilizing the fact that sensitive information in language data tends to be sparse, Shi et al. (2021) formalized a DP notion extension called Selective Differential Privacy (SDP) to protect only the sensitive tokens defined by a policy function. However, their algorithm only works for RNN-based models. In this paper, we develop a novel framework, Just Fine-tune Twice (JFT), that achieves SDP for state-of-the-art large transformer-based models. Our method is easy to implement: it first fine-tunes the model with redacted in-domain data, and then fine-tunes it again with the original in-domain data using a private training mechanism. Furthermore, we study the scenario of imperfect implementation of policy functions that misses sensitive tokens and develop systematic methods to handle it. Experiments show that our method achieves strong utility compared to previous baselines. We also analyze the SDP privacy guarantee empirically with the canary insertion attack.
With the recent success of dense retrieval methods based on bi-encoders, studies have applied this approach to various interesting downstream retrieval tasks with good efficiency and in-domain effectiveness. Recently, we have also seen the presence of dense retrieval models in Math Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks, but the most effective systems remain classic retrieval methods that consider hand-crafted structure features. In this work, we try to combine the best of both worlds:\ a well-defined structure search method for effective formula search and efficient bi-encoder dense retrieval models to capture contextual similarities. Specifically, we have evaluated two representative bi-encoder models for token-level and passage-level dense retrieval on recent MIR tasks. Our results show that bi-encoder models are highly complementary to existing structure search methods, and we are able to advance the state-of-the-art on MIR datasets.
Vision transformers have achieved remarkable progress in vision tasks such as image classification and detection. However, in instance-level image retrieval, transformers have not yet shown good performance compared to convolutional networks. We propose a number of improvements that make transformers outperform the state of the art for the first time. (1) We show that a hybrid architecture is more effective than plain transformers, by a large margin. (2) We introduce two branches collecting global (classification token) and local (patch tokens) information, from which we form a global image representation. (3) In each branch, we collect multi-layer features from the transformer encoder, corresponding to skip connections across distant layers. (4) We enhance locality of interactions at the deeper layers of the encoder, which is the relative weakness of vision transformers. We train our model on all commonly used training sets and, for the first time, we make fair comparisons separately per training set. In all cases, we outperform previous models based on global representation. Public code is available at //github.com/dealicious-inc/DToP.
Most Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering (OK-VQA) systems employ a two-stage framework that first retrieves external knowledge given the visual question and then predicts the answer based on the retrieved content. However, the retrieved knowledge is often inadequate. Retrievals are frequently too general and fail to cover specific knowledge needed to answer the question. Also, the naturally available supervision (whether the passage contains the correct answer) is weak and does not guarantee question relevancy. To address these issues, we propose an Entity-Focused Retrieval (EnFoRe) model that provides stronger supervision during training and recognizes question-relevant entities to help retrieve more specific knowledge. Experiments show that our EnFoRe model achieves superior retrieval performance on OK-VQA, the currently largest outside-knowledge VQA dataset. We also combine the retrieved knowledge with state-of-the-art VQA models, and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on OK-VQA.
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.