Due to recent advances in pose-estimation methods, human motion can be extracted from a common video in the form of 3D skeleton sequences. Despite wonderful application opportunities, effective and efficient content-based access to large volumes of such spatio-temporal skeleton data still remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel content-based text-to-motion retrieval task, which aims at retrieving relevant motions based on a specified natural-language textual description. To define baselines for this uncharted task, we employ the BERT and CLIP language representations to encode the text modality and successful spatio-temporal models to encode the motion modality. We additionally introduce our transformer-based approach, called Motion Transformer (MoT), which employs divided space-time attention to effectively aggregate the different skeleton joints in space and time. Inspired by the recent progress in text-to-image/video matching, we experiment with two widely-adopted metric-learning loss functions. Finally, we set up a common evaluation protocol by defining qualitative metrics for assessing the quality of the retrieved motions, targeting the two recently-introduced KIT Motion-Language and HumanML3D datasets. The code for reproducing our results is available at //github.com/mesnico/text-to-motion-retrieval.
This paper introduces InternVid, a large-scale video-centric multimodal dataset that enables learning powerful and transferable video-text representations for multimodal understanding and generation. The InternVid dataset contains over 7 million videos lasting nearly 760K hours, yielding 234M video clips accompanied by detailed descriptions of total 4.1B words. Our core contribution is to develop a scalable approach to autonomously build a high-quality video-text dataset with large language models (LLM), thereby showcasing its efficacy in learning video-language representation at scale. Specifically, we utilize a multi-scale approach to generate video-related descriptions. Furthermore, we introduce ViCLIP, a video-text representation learning model based on ViT-L. Learned on InternVid via contrastive learning, this model demonstrates leading zero-shot action recognition and competitive video retrieval performance. Beyond basic video understanding tasks like recognition and retrieval, our dataset and model have broad applications. They are particularly beneficial for generating interleaved video-text data for learning a video-centric dialogue system, advancing video-to-text and text-to-video generation research. These proposed resources provide a tool for researchers and practitioners interested in multimodal video understanding and generation.
Generating videos for visual storytelling can be a tedious and complex process that typically requires either live-action filming or graphics animation rendering. To bypass these challenges, our key idea is to utilize the abundance of existing video clips and synthesize a coherent storytelling video by customizing their appearances. We achieve this by developing a framework comprised of two functional modules: (i) Motion Structure Retrieval, which provides video candidates with desired scene or motion context described by query texts, and (ii) Structure-Guided Text-to-Video Synthesis, which generates plot-aligned videos under the guidance of motion structure and text prompts. For the first module, we leverage an off-the-shelf video retrieval system and extract video depths as motion structure. For the second module, we propose a controllable video generation model that offers flexible controls over structure and characters. The videos are synthesized by following the structural guidance and appearance instruction. To ensure visual consistency across clips, we propose an effective concept personalization approach, which allows the specification of the desired character identities through text prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach exhibits significant advantages over various existing baselines.
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) has become one of the leading research topics of the last decade. As sensing technologies have matured and their economic costs have declined, a host of novel applications, e.g., in healthcare, industry, sports, and daily life activities have become popular. The design of HAR systems requires different time-consuming processing steps, such as data collection, annotation, and model training and optimization. In particular, data annotation represents the most labor-intensive and cumbersome step in HAR, since it requires extensive and detailed manual work from human annotators. Therefore, different methodologies concerning the automation of the annotation procedure in HAR have been proposed. The annotation problem occurs in different notions and scenarios, which all require individual solutions. In this paper, we provide the first systematic review on data annotation techniques for HAR. By grouping existing approaches into classes and providing a taxonomy, our goal is to support the decision on which techniques can be beneficially used in a given scenario.
Semantic image synthesis (SIS) refers to the problem of generating realistic imagery given a semantic segmentation mask that defines the spatial layout of object classes. Most of the approaches in the literature, other than the quality of the generated images, put effort in finding solutions to increase the generation diversity in terms of style i.e. texture. However, they all neglect a different feature, which is the possibility of manipulating the layout provided by the mask. Currently, the only way to do so is manually by means of graphical users interfaces. In this paper, we describe a network architecture to address the problem of automatically manipulating or generating the shape of object classes in semantic segmentation masks, with specific focus on human faces. Our proposed model allows embedding the mask class-wise into a latent space where each class embedding can be independently edited. Then, a bi-directional LSTM block and a convolutional decoder output a new, locally manipulated mask. We report quantitative and qualitative results on the CelebMask-HQ dataset, which show our model can both faithfully reconstruct and modify a segmentation mask at the class level. Also, we show our model can be put before a SIS generator, opening the way to a fully automatic generation control of both shape and texture. Code available at //github.com/TFonta/Semantic-VAE.
Multimodality Representation Learning, as a technique of learning to embed information from different modalities and their correlations, has achieved remarkable success on a variety of applications, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA), Natural Language for Visual Reasoning (NLVR), and Vision Language Retrieval (VLR). Among these applications, cross-modal interaction and complementary information from different modalities are crucial for advanced models to perform any multimodal task, e.g., understand, recognize, retrieve, or generate optimally. Researchers have proposed diverse methods to address these tasks. The different variants of transformer-based architectures performed extraordinarily on multiple modalities. This survey presents the comprehensive literature on the evolution and enhancement of deep learning multimodal architectures to deal with textual, visual and audio features for diverse cross-modal and modern multimodal tasks. This study summarizes the (i) recent task-specific deep learning methodologies, (ii) the pretraining types and multimodal pretraining objectives, (iii) from state-of-the-art pretrained multimodal approaches to unifying architectures, and (iv) multimodal task categories and possible future improvements that can be devised for better multimodal learning. Moreover, we prepare a dataset section for new researchers that covers most of the benchmarks for pretraining and finetuning. Finally, major challenges, gaps, and potential research topics are explored. A constantly-updated paperlist related to our survey is maintained at //github.com/marslanm/multimodality-representation-learning.
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.
We present CoDEx, a set of knowledge graph completion datasets extracted from Wikidata and Wikipedia that improve upon existing knowledge graph completion benchmarks in scope and level of difficulty. In terms of scope, CoDEx comprises three knowledge graphs varying in size and structure, multilingual descriptions of entities and relations, and tens of thousands of hard negative triples that are plausible but verified to be false. To characterize CoDEx, we contribute thorough empirical analyses and benchmarking experiments. First, we analyze each CoDEx dataset in terms of logical relation patterns. Next, we report baseline link prediction and triple classification results on CoDEx for five extensively tuned embedding models. Finally, we differentiate CoDEx from the popular FB15K-237 knowledge graph completion dataset by showing that CoDEx covers more diverse and interpretable content, and is a more difficult link prediction benchmark. Data, code, and pretrained models are available at //bit.ly/2EPbrJs.
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.
Most of the internet today is composed of digital media that includes videos and images. With pixels becoming the currency in which most transactions happen on the internet, it is becoming increasingly important to have a way of browsing through this ocean of information with relative ease. YouTube has 400 hours of video uploaded every minute and many million images are browsed on Instagram, Facebook, etc. Inspired by recent advances in the field of deep learning and success that it has gained on various problems like image captioning and, machine translation , word2vec , skip thoughts, etc, we present DeepSeek a natural language processing based deep learning model that allows users to enter a description of the kind of images that they want to search, and in response the system retrieves all the images that semantically and contextually relate to the query. Two approaches are described in the following sections.
We introduce the first system towards the novel task of answering complex multisentence recommendation questions in the tourism domain. Our solution uses a pipeline of two modules: question understanding and answering. For question understanding, we define an SQL-like query language that captures the semantic intent of a question; it supports operators like subset, negation, preference and similarity, which are often found in recommendation questions. We train and compare traditional CRFs as well as bidirectional LSTM-based models for converting a question to its semantic representation. We extend these models to a semisupervised setting with partially labeled sequences gathered through crowdsourcing. We find that our best model performs semi-supervised training of BiDiLSTM+CRF with hand-designed features and CCM(Chang et al., 2007) constraints. Finally, in an end to end QA system, our answering component converts our question representation into queries fired on underlying knowledge sources. Our experiments on two different answer corpora demonstrate that our system can significantly outperform baselines with up to 20 pt higher accuracy and 17 pt higher recall.