With the proliferation of short video applications, the significance of short video recommendations has vastly increased. Unlike other recommendation scenarios, short video recommendation systems heavily rely on feedback from watch time. Existing approaches simply treat watch time as a direct label, failing to effectively harness its extensive semantics and introduce bias, thereby limiting the potential for modeling user interests based on watch time. To overcome this challenge, we propose a framework named Debiased Multiple-semantics-extracting Labeling(DML). DML constructs labels that encompass various semantics by utilizing quantiles derived from the distribution of watch time, prioritizing relative order rather than absolute label values. This approach facilitates easier model learning while aligning with the ranking objective of recommendations. Furthermore, we introduce a method inspired by causal adjustment to refine label definitions, thereby directly mitigating bias at the label level. We substantiate the effectiveness of our DML framework through both online and offline experiments. Extensive results demonstrate that our DML could effectively leverage watch time to discover users' real interests, enhancing their engagement in our application.
Text-based visual question answering (TextVQA) faces the significant challenge of avoiding redundant relational inference. To be specific, a large number of detected objects and optical character recognition (OCR) tokens result in rich visual relationships. Existing works take all visual relationships into account for answer prediction. However, there are three observations: (1) a single subject in the images can be easily detected as multiple objects with distinct bounding boxes (considered repetitive objects). The associations between these repetitive objects are superfluous for answer reasoning; (2) two spatially distant OCR tokens detected in the image frequently have weak semantic dependencies for answer reasoning; and (3) the co-existence of nearby objects and tokens may be indicative of important visual cues for predicting answers. Rather than utilizing all of them for answer prediction, we make an effort to identify the most important connections or eliminate redundant ones. We propose a sparse spatial graph network (SSGN) that introduces a spatially aware relation pruning technique to this task. As spatial factors for relation measurement, we employ spatial distance, geometric dimension, overlap area, and DIoU for spatially aware pruning. We consider three visual relationships for graph learning: object-object, OCR-OCR tokens, and object-OCR token relationships. SSGN is a progressive graph learning architecture that verifies the pivotal relations in the correlated object-token sparse graph, and then in the respective object-based sparse graph and token-based sparse graph. Experiment results on TextVQA and ST-VQA datasets demonstrate that SSGN achieves promising performances. And some visualization results further demonstrate the interpretability of our method.
Salient object detection (SOD) in panoramic video is still in the initial exploration stage. The indirect application of 2D video SOD method to the detection of salient objects in panoramic video has many unmet challenges, such as low detection accuracy, high model complexity, and poor generalization performance. To overcome these hurdles, we design an Inter-Layer Attention (ILA) module, an Inter-Layer weight (ILW) module, and a Bi-Modal Attention (BMA) module. Based on these modules, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Dual-Mode Mixed Flow Network (STDMMF-Net) that exploits the spatial flow of panoramic video and the corresponding optical flow for SOD. First, the ILA module calculates the attention between adjacent level features of consecutive frames of panoramic video to improve the accuracy of extracting salient object features from the spatial flow. Then, the ILW module quantifies the salient object information contained in the features of each level to improve the fusion efficiency of the features of each level in the mixed flow. Finally, the BMA module improves the detection accuracy of STDMMF-Net. A large number of subjective and objective experimental results testify that the proposed method demonstrates better detection accuracy than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Moreover, the comprehensive performance of the proposed method is better in terms of memory required for model inference, testing time, complexity, and generalization performance.
Recent advancements in diffusion models have significantly enhanced the data synthesis with 2D control. Yet, precise 3D control in street view generation, crucial for 3D perception tasks, remains elusive. Specifically, utilizing Bird's-Eye View (BEV) as the primary condition often leads to challenges in geometry control (e.g., height), affecting the representation of object shapes, occlusion patterns, and road surface elevations, all of which are essential to perception data synthesis, especially for 3D object detection tasks. In this paper, we introduce MagicDrive, a novel street view generation framework offering diverse 3D geometry controls, including camera poses, road maps, and 3D bounding boxes, together with textual descriptions, achieved through tailored encoding strategies. Besides, our design incorporates a cross-view attention module, ensuring consistency across multiple camera views. With MagicDrive, we achieve high-fidelity street-view synthesis that captures nuanced 3D geometry and various scene descriptions, enhancing tasks like BEV segmentation and 3D object detection.
Anomaly detection in multivariate time series has emerged as a crucial challenge in time series research, with significant research implications in various fields such as fraud detection, fault diagnosis, and system state estimation. Reconstruction-based models have shown promising potential in recent years for detecting anomalies in time series data. However, due to the rapid increase in data scale and dimensionality, the issues of noise and Weak Identity Mapping (WIM) during time series reconstruction have become increasingly pronounced. To address this, we introduce a novel Adaptive Dynamic Neighbor Mask (ADNM) mechanism and integrate it with the Transformer and Denoising Diffusion Model, creating a new framework for multivariate time series anomaly detection, named Denoising Diffusion Mask Transformer (DDMT). The ADNM module is introduced to mitigate information leakage between input and output features during data reconstruction, thereby alleviating the problem of WIM during reconstruction. The Denoising Diffusion Transformer (DDT) employs the Transformer as an internal neural network structure for Denoising Diffusion Model. It learns the stepwise generation process of time series data to model the probability distribution of the data, capturing normal data patterns and progressively restoring time series data by removing noise, resulting in a clear recovery of anomalies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model that combines Denoising Diffusion Model and the Transformer for multivariate time series anomaly detection. Experimental evaluations were conducted on five publicly available multivariate time series anomaly detection datasets. The results demonstrate that the model effectively identifies anomalies in time series data, achieving state-of-the-art performance in anomaly detection.
Humans can easily imagine a scene from auditory information based on their prior knowledge of audio-visual events. In this paper, we mimic this innate human ability in deep learning models to improve the quality of video inpainting. To implement the prior knowledge, we first train the audio-visual network, which learns the correspondence between auditory and visual information. Then, the audio-visual network is employed as a guider that conveys the prior knowledge of audio-visual correspondence to the video inpainting network. This prior knowledge is transferred through our proposed two novel losses: audio-visual attention loss and audio-visual pseudo-class consistency loss. These two losses further improve the performance of the video inpainting by encouraging the inpainting result to have a high correspondence to its synchronized audio. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can restore a wider domain of video scenes and is particularly effective when the sounding object in the scene is partially blinded.
Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have enabled the photorealistic generation of images from text prompts. Despite the great progress, existing models still struggle to generate compositional multi-concept images naturally, limiting their ability to visualize human imagination. While several recent works have attempted to address this issue, they either introduce additional training or adopt guidance at inference time. In this work, we consider a more ambitious goal: natural multi-concept generation using a pre-trained diffusion model, and with almost no extra cost. To achieve this goal, we identify the limitations in the text embeddings used for the pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models. Specifically, we observe concept dominance and non-localized contribution that severely degrade multi-concept generation performance. We further design a minimal low-cost solution that overcomes the above issues by tweaking (not re-training) the text embeddings for more realistic multi-concept text-to-image generation. Our Correction by Similarities method tweaks the embedding of concepts by collecting semantic features from most similar tokens to localize the contribution. To avoid mixing features of concepts, we also apply Cross-Token Non-Maximum Suppression, which excludes the overlap of contributions from different concepts. Experiments show that our approach outperforms previous methods in text-to-image, image manipulation, and personalization tasks, despite not introducing additional training or inference costs to the diffusion steps.
Generative AI has made significant strides in computer vision, particularly in text-driven image/video synthesis (T2I/T2V). Despite the notable advancements, it remains challenging in human-centric content synthesis such as realistic dance generation. Current methodologies, primarily tailored for human motion transfer, encounter difficulties when confronted with real-world dance scenarios (e.g., social media dance) which require to generalize across a wide spectrum of poses and intricate human details. In this paper, we depart from the traditional paradigm of human motion transfer and emphasize two additional critical attributes for the synthesis of human dance content in social media contexts: (i) Generalizability: the model should be able to generalize beyond generic human viewpoints as well as unseen human subjects, backgrounds, and poses; (ii) Compositionality: it should allow for composition of seen/unseen subjects, backgrounds, and poses from different sources seamlessly. To address these challenges, we introduce DisCo, which includes a novel model architecture with disentangled control to improve the compositionality of dance synthesis, and an effective human attribute pre-training for better generalizability to unseen humans. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that DisCo can generate high-quality human dance images and videos with diverse appearances and flexible motions. Code, demo, video and visualization are available at: //disco-dance.github.io/.
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.
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA approach, Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN). It first represents an image as a graph consisting of three sub-graphs, depicting visual, semantic, and numeric modalities respectively. Then, we introduce three aggregators which guide the message passing from one graph to another to utilize the contexts in various modalities, so as to refine the features of nodes. The updated nodes have better features for the downstream question answering module. Experimental evaluations show that our MM-GNN represents the scene texts better and obviously facilitates the performances on two VQA tasks that require reading scene texts.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.