Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to achieve pixel-level localization of sound sources in videos, while Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation (AVSS), as an extension of AVS, further pursues semantic understanding of audio-visual scenes. However, since the AVSS task requires the establishment of audio-visual correspondence and semantic understanding simultaneously, we observe that previous methods have struggled to handle this mashup of objectives in end-to-end training, resulting in insufficient learning and sub-optimization. Therefore, we propose a two-stage training strategy called \textit{Stepping Stones}, which decomposes the AVSS task into two simple subtasks from localization to semantic understanding, which are fully optimized in each stage to achieve step-by-step global optimization. This training strategy has also proved its generalization and effectiveness on existing methods. To further improve the performance of AVS tasks, we propose a novel framework Adaptive Audio Visual Segmentation, in which we incorporate an adaptive audio query generator and integrate masked attention into the transformer decoder, facilitating the adaptive fusion of visual and audio features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art results on all three AVS benchmarks. The project homepage can be accessed at //gewu-lab.github.io/stepping_stones/.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, a powerful AI Chatbot developed by OpenAI, large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in both academia and industry, bringing about a fundamental engineering paradigm shift in many areas. While LLMs are powerful, it is also crucial to best use their power where "prompt'' plays a core role. However, the booming LLMs themselves, including excellent APIs like ChatGPT, have several inherent limitations: 1) temporal lag of training data, and 2) the lack of physical capabilities to perform external actions. Recently, we have observed the trend of utilizing prompt-based tools to better utilize the power of LLMs for downstream tasks, but a lack of systematic literature and standardized terminology, partly due to the rapid evolution of this field. Therefore, in this work, we survey related prompting tools and promote the concept of the "Prompting Framework" (PF), i.e. the framework for managing, simplifying, and facilitating interaction with large language models. We define the lifecycle of the PF as a hierarchical structure, from bottom to top, namely: Data Level, Base Level, Execute Level, and Service Level. We also systematically depict the overall landscape of the emerging PF field and discuss potential future research and challenges. To continuously track the developments in this area, we maintain a repository at //github.com/lxx0628/Prompting-Framework-Survey, which can be a useful resource sharing platform for both academic and industry in this field.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
Collecting supporting evidence from large corpora of text (e.g., Wikipedia) is of great challenge for open-domain Question Answering (QA). Especially, for multi-hop open-domain QA, scattered evidence pieces are required to be gathered together to support the answer extraction. In this paper, we propose a new retrieval target, hop, to collect the hidden reasoning evidence from Wikipedia for complex question answering. Specifically, the hop in this paper is defined as the combination of a hyperlink and the corresponding outbound link document. The hyperlink is encoded as the mention embedding which models the structured knowledge of how the outbound link entity is mentioned in the textual context, and the corresponding outbound link document is encoded as the document embedding representing the unstructured knowledge within it. Accordingly, we build HopRetriever which retrieves hops over Wikipedia to answer complex questions. Experiments on the HotpotQA dataset demonstrate that HopRetriever outperforms previously published evidence retrieval methods by large margins. Moreover, our approach also yields quantifiable interpretations of the evidence collection process.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Deep Learning (DL) is vulnerable to out-of-distribution and adversarial examples resulting in incorrect outputs. To make DL more robust, several posthoc anomaly detection techniques to detect (and discard) these anomalous samples have been proposed in the recent past. This survey tries to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on anomaly detection for DL based applications. We provide a taxonomy for existing techniques based on their underlying assumptions and adopted approaches. We discuss various techniques in each of the categories and provide the relative strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. Our goal in this survey is to provide an easier yet better understanding of the techniques belonging to different categories in which research has been done on this topic. Finally, we highlight the unsolved research challenges while applying anomaly detection techniques in DL systems and present some high-impact future research directions.
Joint image-text embedding is the bedrock for most Vision-and-Language (V+L) tasks, where multimodality inputs are jointly processed for visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we introduce UNITER, a UNiversal Image-TExt Representation, learned through large-scale pre-training over four image-text datasets (COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions), which can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. We design three pre-training tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants). Different from concurrent work on multimodal pre-training that apply joint random masking to both modalities, we use conditioned masking on pre-training tasks (i.e., masked language/region modeling is conditioned on full observation of image/text). Comprehensive analysis shows that conditioned masking yields better performance than unconditioned masking. We also conduct a thorough ablation study to find an optimal setting for the combination of pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments show that UNITER achieves new state of the art across six V+L tasks (over nine datasets), including Visual Question Answering, Image-Text Retrieval, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Entailment, and NLVR2.
Named entity recognition (NER) in Chinese is essential but difficult because of the lack of natural delimiters. Therefore, Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) is usually considered as the first step for Chinese NER. However, models based on word-level embeddings and lexicon features often suffer from segmentation errors and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we investigate a Convolutional Attention Network called CAN for Chinese NER, which consists of a character-based convolutional neural network (CNN) with local-attention layer and a gated recurrent unit (GRU) with global self-attention layer to capture the information from adjacent characters and sentence contexts. Also, compared to other models, not depending on any external resources like lexicons and employing small size of char embeddings make our model more practical. Extensive experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods without word embedding and external lexicon resources on different domain datasets including Weibo, MSRA and Chinese Resume NER dataset.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently achieved impressive results for many real-world applications, and many GAN variants have emerged with improvements in sample quality and training stability. However, they have not been well visualized or understood. How does a GAN represent our visual world internally? What causes the artifacts in GAN results? How do architectural choices affect GAN learning? Answering such questions could enable us to develop new insights and better models. In this work, we present an analytic framework to visualize and understand GANs at the unit-, object-, and scene-level. We first identify a group of interpretable units that are closely related to object concepts using a segmentation-based network dissection method. Then, we quantify the causal effect of interpretable units by measuring the ability of interventions to control objects in the output. We examine the contextual relationship between these units and their surroundings by inserting the discovered object concepts into new images. We show several practical applications enabled by our framework, from comparing internal representations across different layers, models, and datasets, to improving GANs by locating and removing artifact-causing units, to interactively manipulating objects in a scene. We provide open source interpretation tools to help researchers and practitioners better understand their GAN models.
We propose a novel single shot object detection network named Detection with Enriched Semantics (DES). Our motivation is to enrich the semantics of object detection features within a typical deep detector, by a semantic segmentation branch and a global activation module. The segmentation branch is supervised by weak segmentation ground-truth, i.e., no extra annotation is required. In conjunction with that, we employ a global activation module which learns relationship between channels and object classes in a self-supervised manner. Comprehensive experimental results on both PASCAL VOC and MS COCO detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In particular, with a VGG16 based DES, we achieve an mAP of 81.7 on VOC2007 test and an mAP of 32.8 on COCO test-dev with an inference speed of 31.5 milliseconds per image on a Titan Xp GPU. With a lower resolution version, we achieve an mAP of 79.7 on VOC2007 with an inference speed of 13.0 milliseconds per image.