Recent real-time semantic segmentation methods usually adopt an additional semantic branch to pursue rich long-range context. However, the additional branch incurs undesirable computational overhead and slows inference speed. To eliminate this dilemma, we propose SCTNet, a single branch CNN with transformer semantic information for real-time segmentation. SCTNet enjoys the rich semantic representations of an inference-free semantic branch while retaining the high efficiency of lightweight single branch CNN. SCTNet utilizes a transformer as the training-only semantic branch considering its superb ability to extract long-range context. With the help of the proposed transformer-like CNN block CFBlock and the semantic information alignment module, SCTNet could capture the rich semantic information from the transformer branch in training. During the inference, only the single branch CNN needs to be deployed. We conduct extensive experiments on Cityscapes, ADE20K, and COCO-Stuff-10K, and the results show that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. The code and model is available at //github.com/xzz777/SCTNet
Hypergraphs are marked by complex topology, expressing higher-order interactions among multiple entities with hyperedges. Lately, hypergraph-based deep learning methods to learn informative data representations for the problem of node classification on text-attributed hypergraphs have garnered increasing research attention. However, existing methods struggle to simultaneously capture the full extent of hypergraph structural information and the rich linguistic attributes inherent in the nodes attributes, which largely hampers their effectiveness and generalizability. To overcome these challenges, we explore ways to further augment a pretrained BERT model with specialized hypergraph-aware layers for the task of node classification. Such layers introduce higher-order structural inductive bias into the language model, thus improving the model's capacity to harness both higher-order context information from the hypergraph structure and semantic information present in text. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, HyperBERT, a mixed text-hypergraph model which simultaneously models hypergraph relational structure while maintaining the high-quality text encoding capabilities of a pre-trained BERT. Notably, HyperBERT presents results that achieve a new state-of-the-art on five challenging text-attributed hypergraph node classification benchmarks.
We apply causal mediation analysis to explain the decision-making process of neural models for rumour detection on Twitter. Interventions at the input and network level reveal the causal impacts of tweets and words in the model output. We find that our approach CMA-R -- Causal Mediation Analysis for Rumour detection -- identifies salient tweets that explain model predictions and show strong agreement with human judgements for critical tweets determining the truthfulness of stories. CMA-R can further highlight causally impactful words in the salient tweets, providing another layer of interpretability and transparency into these blackbox rumour detection systems. Code is available at: //github.com/ltian678/cma-r.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable success in long-form context comprehension tasks. However, their capacity to generate long contents, such as reports and articles, remains insufficiently explored. Current benchmarks do not adequately assess LLMs' ability to produce informative and comprehensive content, necessitating a more rigorous evaluation approach. In this study, we introduce \textsc{ProxyQA}, a framework for evaluating long-form text generation, comprising in-depth human-curated \textit{meta-questions} spanning various domains. Each meta-question contains corresponding \textit{proxy-questions} with annotated answers. LLMs are prompted to generate extensive content in response to these meta-questions. Utilizing an evaluator and incorporating generated content as background context, \textsc{ProxyQA} evaluates the quality of generated content based on the evaluator's performance in answering the \textit{proxy-questions}. We examine multiple LLMs, emphasizing \textsc{ProxyQA}'s demanding nature as a high-quality assessment tool. Human evaluation demonstrates that evaluating through \textit{proxy-questions} is a highly self-consistent and human-criteria-correlated validation method. The dataset and leaderboard will be available at \url{//github.com/Namco0816/ProxyQA}.
Modeling hand-object interactions is a fundamentally challenging task in 3D computer vision. Despite remarkable progress that has been achieved in this field, existing methods still fail to synthesize the hand-object interaction photo-realistically, suffering from degraded rendering quality caused by the heavy mutual occlusions between the hand and the object, and inaccurate hand-object pose estimation. To tackle these challenges, we present a novel free-viewpoint rendering framework, Neural Contact Radiance Field (NCRF), to reconstruct hand-object interactions from a sparse set of videos. In particular, the proposed NCRF framework consists of two key components: (a) A contact optimization field that predicts an accurate contact field from 3D query points for achieving desirable contact between the hand and the object. (b) A hand-object neural radiance field to learn an implicit hand-object representation in a static canonical space, in concert with the specifically designed hand-object motion field to produce observation-to-canonical correspondences. We jointly learn these key components where they mutually help and regularize each other with visual and geometric constraints, producing a high-quality hand-object reconstruction that achieves photo-realistic novel view synthesis. Extensive experiments on HO3D and DexYCB datasets show that our approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art in terms of both rendering quality and pose estimation accuracy.
Creating digital avatars from textual prompts has long been a desirable yet challenging task. Despite the promising outcomes obtained through 2D diffusion priors in recent works, current methods face challenges in achieving high-quality and animated avatars effectively. In this paper, we present $\textbf{HeadStudio}$, a novel framework that utilizes 3D Gaussian splatting to generate realistic and animated avatars from text prompts. Our method drives 3D Gaussians semantically to create a flexible and achievable appearance through the intermediate FLAME representation. Specifically, we incorporate the FLAME into both 3D representation and score distillation: 1) FLAME-based 3D Gaussian splatting, driving 3D Gaussian points by rigging each point to a FLAME mesh. 2) FLAME-based score distillation sampling, utilizing FLAME-based fine-grained control signal to guide score distillation from the text prompt. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of HeadStudio in generating animatable avatars from textual prompts, exhibiting visually appealing appearances. The avatars are capable of rendering high-quality real-time ($\geq 40$ fps) novel views at a resolution of 1024. They can be smoothly controlled by real-world speech and video. We hope that HeadStudio can advance digital avatar creation and that the present method can widely be applied across various domains.
We propose a novel nonparametric sequential test for composite hypotheses for means of multiple data streams. Our proposed method, \emph{peeking with expectation-based averaged capital} (PEAK), builds upon the testing-as-betting framework and provides a non-asymptotic $\alpha$-level test across any stopping time. PEAK is computationally tractable and efficiently rejects hypotheses that are incorrect across all potential distributions that satisfy our nonparametric assumption, enabling joint composite hypothesis testing on multiple streams of data. We numerically validate our theoretical findings under the best arm identification and threshold identification in the bandit setting, illustrating the computational efficiency of our method against state-of-the-art testing methods.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms exiting models with state-of-the-art results.
Video captioning is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of visual scenes. State-of-the-art methods generate captions using either scene-level or object-level information but without explicitly modeling object interactions. Thus, they often fail to make visually grounded predictions, and are sensitive to spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal graph model for video captioning that exploits object interactions in space and time. Our model builds interpretable links and is able to provide explicit visual grounding. To avoid unstable performance caused by the variable number of objects, we further propose an object-aware knowledge distillation mechanism, in which local object information is used to regularize global scene features. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through extensive experiments on two benchmarks, showing our approach yields competitive performance with interpretable predictions.
Most existing event extraction (EE) methods merely extract event arguments within the sentence scope. However, such sentence-level EE methods struggle to handle soaring amounts of documents from emerging applications, such as finance, legislation, health, etc., where event arguments always scatter across different sentences, and even multiple such event mentions frequently co-exist in the same document. To address these challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end model, Doc2EDAG, which can generate an entity-based directed acyclic graph to fulfill the document-level EE (DEE) effectively. Moreover, we reformalize a DEE task with the no-trigger-words design to ease the document-level event labeling. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Doc2EDAG, we build a large-scale real-world dataset consisting of Chinese financial announcements with the challenges mentioned above. Extensive experiments with comprehensive analyses illustrate the superiority of Doc2EDAG over state-of-the-art methods. Data and codes can be found at //github.com/dolphin-zs/Doc2EDAG.
Aspect level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment expressed towards an aspect given a context sentence. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the syntax structure in one sentence. In this paper, we propose a novel target-dependent graph attention network (TD-GAT) for aspect level sentiment classification, which explicitly utilizes the dependency relationship among words. Using the dependency graph, it propagates sentiment features directly from the syntactic context of an aspect target. In our experiments, we show our method outperforms multiple baselines with GloVe embeddings. We also demonstrate that using BERT representations further substantially boosts the performance.