Human intention prediction is a growing area of research where an activity in a video has to be anticipated by a vision-based system. To this end, the model creates a representation of the past, and subsequently, it produces future hypotheses about upcoming scenarios. In this work, we focus on pedestrians' early intention prediction in which, from a current observation of an urban scene, the model predicts the future activity of pedestrians that approach the street. Our method is based on a multi-modal transformer that encodes past observations and produces multiple predictions at different anticipation times. Moreover, we propose to learn the attention masks of our transformer-based model (Temporal Adaptive Mask Transformer) in order to weigh differently present and past temporal dependencies. We investigate our method on several public benchmarks for early intention prediction, improving the prediction performances at different anticipation times compared to the previous works.
Intensive Care in-hospital mortality prediction has various clinical applications. Neural prediction models, especially when capitalising on clinical notes, have been put forward as improvement on currently existing models. However, to be acceptable these models should be performant and transparent. This work studies different attention mechanisms for clinical neural prediction models in terms of their discrimination and calibration. Specifically, we investigate sparse attention as an alternative to dense attention weights in the task of in-hospital mortality prediction from clinical notes. We evaluate the attention mechanisms based on: i) local self-attention over words in a sentence, and ii) global self-attention with a transformer architecture across sentences. We demonstrate that the sparse mechanism approach outperforms the dense one for the local self-attention in terms of predictive performance with a publicly available dataset, and puts higher attention to prespecified relevant directive words. The performance at the sentence level, however, deteriorates as sentences including the influential directive words tend to be dropped all together.
Pretrained Transformers achieve state-of-the-art performance in various code-processing tasks but may be too large to be deployed. As software development tools often incorporate modules for various purposes which may potentially use a single instance of the pretrained model, it appears relevant to utilize parameter-efficient fine-tuning for the pretrained models of code. In this work, we test two widely used approaches, adapters and LoRA, which were initially tested on NLP tasks, on four code-processing tasks. We find that though the efficient fine-tuning approaches may achieve comparable or higher performance than the standard, full, fine-tuning in code understanding tasks, they underperform full fine-tuning in code-generative tasks. These results underline the importance of testing efficient fine-tuning approaches on other domains than NLP and motivate future research in efficient fine-tuning for source code.
Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional inputs. However, there is an ongoing debate about how and when transformers can acquire highly structured behavior and achieve systematic generalization. Here, we explore how well a causal transformer can perform a set of algorithmic tasks, including copying, sorting, and hierarchical compositions of these operations. We demonstrate strong generalization to sequences longer than those used in training by replacing the standard positional encoding typically used in transformers with labels arbitrarily paired with items in the sequence. We search for the layer and head configuration sufficient to solve these tasks, then probe for signs of systematic processing in latent representations and attention patterns. We show that two-layer transformers learn reliable solutions to multi-level problems, develop signs of task decomposition, and encode input items in a way that encourages the exploitation of shared computation across related tasks. These results provide key insights into how attention layers support structured computation both within a task and across multiple tasks.
Previous studies have explored generating accurately lip-synced talking faces for arbitrary targets given audio conditions. However, most of them deform or generate the whole facial area, leading to non-realistic results. In this work, we delve into the formulation of altering only the mouth shapes of the target person. This requires masking a large percentage of the original image and seamlessly inpainting it with the aid of audio and reference frames. To this end, we propose the Audio-Visual Context-Aware Transformer (AV-CAT) framework, which produces accurate lip-sync with photo-realistic quality by predicting the masked mouth shapes. Our key insight is to exploit desired contextual information provided in audio and visual modalities thoroughly with delicately designed Transformers. Specifically, we propose a convolution-Transformer hybrid backbone and design an attention-based fusion strategy for filling the masked parts. It uniformly attends to the textural information on the unmasked regions and the reference frame. Then the semantic audio information is involved in enhancing the self-attention computation. Additionally, a refinement network with audio injection improves both image and lip-sync quality. Extensive experiments validate that our model can generate high-fidelity lip-synced results for arbitrary subjects.
The transformer architecture and variants presented remarkable success across many machine learning tasks in recent years. This success is intrinsically related to the capability of handling long sequences and the presence of context-dependent weights from the attention mechanism. We argue that these capabilities suit the central role of a Meta-Reinforcement Learning algorithm. Indeed, a meta-RL agent needs to infer the task from a sequence of trajectories. Furthermore, it requires a fast adaptation strategy to adapt its policy for a new task -- which can be achieved using the self-attention mechanism. In this work, we present TrMRL (Transformers for Meta-Reinforcement Learning), a meta-RL agent that mimics the memory reinstatement mechanism using the transformer architecture. It associates the recent past of working memories to build an episodic memory recursively through the transformer layers. We show that the self-attention computes a consensus representation that minimizes the Bayes Risk at each layer and provides meaningful features to compute the best actions. We conducted experiments in high-dimensional continuous control environments for locomotion and dexterous manipulation. Results show that TrMRL presents comparable or superior asymptotic performance, sample efficiency, and out-of-distribution generalization compared to the baselines in these environments.
Spatio-temporal representation learning is critical for video self-supervised representation. Recent approaches mainly use contrastive learning and pretext tasks. However, these approaches learn representation by discriminating sampled instances via feature similarity in the latent space while ignoring the intermediate state of the learned representations, which limits the overall performance. In this work, taking into account the degree of similarity of sampled instances as the intermediate state, we propose a novel pretext task - spatio-temporal overlap rate (STOR) prediction. It stems from the observation that humans are capable of discriminating the overlap rates of videos in space and time. This task encourages the model to discriminate the STOR of two generated samples to learn the representations. Moreover, we employ a joint optimization combining pretext tasks with contrastive learning to further enhance the spatio-temporal representation learning. We also study the mutual influence of each component in the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed STOR task can favor both contrastive learning and pretext tasks. The joint optimization scheme can significantly improve the spatio-temporal representation in video understanding. The code is available at //github.com/Katou2/CSTP.
For better user experience and business effectiveness, Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction has been one of the most important tasks in E-commerce. Although extensive CTR prediction models have been proposed, learning good representation of items from multimodal features is still less investigated, considering an item in E-commerce usually contains multiple heterogeneous modalities. Previous works either concatenate the multiple modality features, that is equivalent to giving a fixed importance weight to each modality; or learn dynamic weights of different modalities for different items through technique like attention mechanism. However, a problem is that there usually exists common redundant information across multiple modalities. The dynamic weights of different modalities computed by using the redundant information may not correctly reflect the different importance of each modality. To address this, we explore the complementarity and redundancy of modalities by considering modality-specific and modality-invariant features differently. We propose a novel Multimodal Adversarial Representation Network (MARN) for the CTR prediction task. A multimodal attention network first calculates the weights of multiple modalities for each item according to its modality-specific features. Then a multimodal adversarial network learns modality-invariant representations where a double-discriminators strategy is introduced. Finally, we achieve the multimodal item representations by combining both modality-specific and modality-invariant representations. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, and the proposed method consistently achieves remarkable improvements to the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the approach has been deployed in an operational E-commerce system and online A/B testing further demonstrates the effectiveness.
The potential of graph convolutional neural networks for the task of zero-shot learning has been demonstrated recently. These models are highly sample efficient as related concepts in the graph structure share statistical strength allowing generalization to new classes when faced with a lack of data. However, knowledge from distant nodes can get diluted when propagating through intermediate nodes, because current approaches to zero-shot learning use graph propagation schemes that perform Laplacian smoothing at each layer. We show that extensive smoothing does not help the task of regressing classifier weights in zero-shot learning. In order to still incorporate information from distant nodes and utilize the graph structure, we propose an Attentive Dense Graph Propagation Module (ADGPM). ADGPM allows us to exploit the hierarchical graph structure of the knowledge graph through additional connections. These connections are added based on a node's relationship to its ancestors and descendants and an attention scheme is further used to weigh their contribution depending on the distance to the node. Finally, we illustrate that finetuning of the feature representation after training the ADGPM leads to considerable improvements. Our method achieves competitive results, outperforming previous zero-shot learning approaches.
Dense video captioning aims to generate text descriptions for all events in an untrimmed video. This involves both detecting and describing events. Therefore, all previous methods on dense video captioning tackle this problem by building two models, i.e. an event proposal and a captioning model, for these two sub-problems. The models are either trained separately or in alternation. This prevents direct influence of the language description to the event proposal, which is important for generating accurate descriptions. To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end transformer model for dense video captioning. The encoder encodes the video into appropriate representations. The proposal decoder decodes from the encoding with different anchors to form video event proposals. The captioning decoder employs a masking network to restrict its attention to the proposal event over the encoding feature. This masking network converts the event proposal to a differentiable mask, which ensures the consistency between the proposal and captioning during training. In addition, our model employs a self-attention mechanism, which enables the use of efficient non-recurrent structure during encoding and leads to performance improvements. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this end-to-end model on ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII datasets, where we achieved 10.12 and 6.58 METEOR score, respectively.
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which incorporates recent advances in attention mechanisms. Our approach, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with task-specific soft-attention modules, which are trainable in an end-to-end manner. These attention modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global pool, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. Experiments on the CityScapes dataset show that our method outperforms several baselines in both single-task and multi-task learning, and is also more robust to the various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. We further explore the effectiveness of our method through experiments over a range of task complexities, and show how our method scales well with task complexity compared to baselines.