Zijie Song

Zijie Song, Zhenzhen Hu, Yuanen Zhou et al.

Cross-lingual image captioning is a challenging task that requires addressing both cross-lingual and cross-modal obstacles in multimedia analysis. The crucial issue in this task is to model the global and the local matching between the image and different languages. Existing cross-modal embedding methods based on the transformer architecture oversee the local matching between the image region and monolingual words, especially when dealing with diverse languages. To overcome these limitations, we propose an Embedded Heterogeneous Attention Transformer (EHAT) to establish cross-domain relationships and local correspondences between images and different languages by using a heterogeneous network. EHAT comprises Masked Heterogeneous Cross-attention (MHCA), Heterogeneous Attention Reasoning Network (HARN), and Heterogeneous Co-attention (HCA). The HARN serves as the core network and it captures cross-domain relationships by leveraging visual bounding box representation features to connect word features from two languages and to learn heterogeneous maps. MHCA and HCA facilitate cross-domain integration in the encoder through specialized heterogeneous attention mechanisms, enabling a single model to generate captions in two languages. We evaluate our approach on the MSCOCO dataset to generate captions in English and Chinese, two languages that exhibit significant differences in their language families. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing advanced monolingual methods. Our proposed EHAT framework effectively addresses the challenges of cross-lingual image captioning, paving the way for improved multilingual image analysis and understanding.

Zijie Song, Zhenzhen Hu, Richang Hong

Unsupervised representation learning for image clustering is essential in computer vision. Although the advancement of visual models has improved image clustering with efficient visual representations, challenges still remain. Firstly, existing features often lack the ability to represent the internal structure of images, hindering the accurate clustering of visually similar images. Secondly, finer-grained semantic labels are often missing, limiting the ability to capture nuanced differences and similarities between images. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on image clustering, the pretrain-based Grid Jigsaw Representation (pGJR). Inspired by human jigsaw puzzle processing, we modify the traditional jigsaw learning to gain a more sequential and incremental understanding of image structure. We also leverage the pretrained CLIP to extract the prior features which can benefit from the enhanced cross-modal representation for richer and more nuanced semantic information and label level differentiation. Our experiments demonstrate that using the pretrained model as a feature extractor can accelerate the convergence of clustering. We append the GJR module to pGJR and observe significant improvements on common-use benchmark datasets. The experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in the clustering task, as evidenced by improvements in the ACC, NMI, and ARI metrics, as well as the super-fast convergence speed.

Jian Xiao, Zijie Song, Jialong Hu et al.

Recent progress in text-video retrieval has been largely driven by contrastive learning. However, existing methods often overlook the effect of the modality gap, which causes anchor representations to undergo in-place optimization (i.e., optimization tension) that limits their alignment capacity. Moreover, noisy hard negatives further distort the semantics of anchors. To address these issues, we propose GARE, a Gap-Aware Retrieval framework that introduces a learnable, pair-specific increment $Δ_{ij}$ between text $t_i$ and video $v_j$, redistributing gradients to relieve optimization tension and absorb noise. We derive $Δ_{ij}$ via a multivariate first-order Taylor expansion of the InfoNCE loss under a trust-region constraint, showing that it guides updates along locally consistent descent directions. A lightweight neural module conditioned on the semantic gap couples increments across batches for structure-aware correction. Furthermore, we regularize $Δ$ through a variational information bottleneck with relaxed compression, enhancing stability and semantic consistency. Experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that GARE consistently improves alignment accuracy and robustness, validating the effectiveness of gap-aware tension mitigation. Code is available at https://github.com/musicman217/GARE-text-video-retrieval.

Zijie Song, Zhenzhen Hu, Yixiao Ma et al.

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a complex video-language task that demands a sophisticated understanding of both visual content and temporal dynamics. Traditional Transformer-style architectures, while effective in integrating multimodal data, often simplify temporal dynamics through positional encoding and fail to capture non-linear interactions within video sequences. In this paper, we introduce the Temporal Trio Transformer (T3T), a novel architecture that models time consistency and time variability. The T3T integrates three key components: Temporal Smoothing (TS), Temporal Difference (TD), and Temporal Fusion (TF). The TS module employs Brownian Bridge for capturing smooth, continuous temporal transitions, while the TD module identifies and encodes significant temporal variations and abrupt changes within the video content. Subsequently, the TF module synthesizes these temporal features with textual cues, facilitating a deeper contextual understanding and response accuracy. The efficacy of the T3T is demonstrated through extensive testing on multiple VideoQA benchmark datasets. Our results underscore the importance of a nuanced approach to temporal modeling in improving the accuracy and depth of video-based question answering.