Jianguo Wei

Zhizhi Yu, Di Jin, Jianguo Wei et al. · mit

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained great popularity in tackling various analytical tasks on graph-structured data (i.e., networks). Typical GNNs and their variants follow a message-passing manner that obtains network representations by the feature propagation process along network topology, which however ignore the rich textual semantics (e.g., local word-sequence) that exist in many real-world networks. Existing methods for text-rich networks integrate textual semantics by mainly utilizing internal information such as topics or phrases/words, which often suffer from an inability to comprehensively mine the text semantics, limiting the reciprocal guidance between network structure and text semantics. To address these problems, we propose a novel text-rich graph neural network with external knowledge (TeKo), in order to take full advantage of both structural and textual information within text-rich networks. Specifically, we first present a flexible heterogeneous semantic network that incorporates high-quality entities and interactions among documents and entities. We then introduce two types of external knowledge, that is, structured triplets and unstructured entity description, to gain a deeper insight into textual semantics. We further design a reciprocal convolutional mechanism for the constructed heterogeneous semantic network, enabling network structure and textual semantics to collaboratively enhance each other and learn high-level network representations. Extensive experimental results on four public text-rich networks as well as a large-scale e-commerce searching dataset illustrate the superior performance of TeKo over state-of-the-art baselines.

Yu Zhao, Hao Fei, Yixin Cao et al.

Video Semantic Role Labeling (VidSRL) aims to detect the salient events from given videos, by recognizing the predict-argument event structures and the interrelationships between events. While recent endeavors have put forth methods for VidSRL, they can be mostly subject to two key drawbacks, including the lack of fine-grained spatial scene perception and the insufficiently modeling of video temporality. Towards this end, this work explores a novel holistic spatio-temporal scene graph (namely HostSG) representation based on the existing dynamic scene graph structures, which well model both the fine-grained spatial semantics and temporal dynamics of videos for VidSRL. Built upon the HostSG, we present a nichetargeting VidSRL framework. A scene-event mapping mechanism is first designed to bridge the gap between the underlying scene structure and the high-level event semantic structure, resulting in an overall hierarchical scene-event (termed ICE) graph structure. We further perform iterative structure refinement to optimize the ICE graph, such that the overall structure representation can best coincide with end task demand. Finally, three subtask predictions of VidSRL are jointly decoded, where the end-to-end paradigm effectively avoids error propagation. On the benchmark dataset, our framework boosts significantly over the current best-performing model. Further analyses are shown for a better understanding of the advances of our methods.

Yu Zhao, Jianguo Wei, Zhichao Lin et al.

Image-to-text tasks, such as open-ended image captioning and controllable image description, have received extensive attention for decades. Here, we further advance this line of work by presenting Visual Spatial Description (VSD), a new perspective for image-to-text toward spatial semantics. Given an image and two objects inside it, VSD aims to produce one description focusing on the spatial perspective between the two objects. Accordingly, we manually annotate a dataset to facilitate the investigation of the newly-introduced task and build several benchmark encoder-decoder models by using VL-BART and VL-T5 as backbones. In addition, we investigate pipeline and joint end-to-end architectures for incorporating visual spatial relationship classification (VSRC) information into our model. Finally, we conduct experiments on our benchmark dataset to evaluate all our models. Results show that our models are impressive, providing accurate and human-like spatial-oriented text descriptions. Meanwhile, VSRC has great potential for VSD, and the joint end-to-end architecture is the better choice for their integration. We make the dataset and codes public for research purposes.

Ruiteng Zhang, Jianguo Wei, Xugang Lu et al.

Speaker embedding is an important front-end module to explore discriminative speaker features for many speech applications where speaker information is needed. Current SOTA backbone networks for speaker embedding are designed to aggregate multi-scale features from an utterance with multi-branch network architectures for speaker representation. However, naively adding many branches of multi-scale features with the simple fully convolutional operation could not efficiently improve the performance due to the rapid increase of model parameters and computational complexity. Therefore, in the most current state-of-the-art network architectures, only a few branches corresponding to a limited number of temporal scales could be designed for speaker embeddings. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an effective temporal multi-scale (TMS) model where multi-scale branches could be efficiently designed in a speaker embedding network almost without increasing computational costs. The new model is based on the conventional TDNN, where the network architecture is smartly separated into two modeling operators: a channel-modeling operator and a temporal multi-branch modeling operator. Adding temporal multi-scale in the temporal multi-branch operator needs only a little bit increase of the number of parameters, and thus save more computational budget for adding more branches with large temporal scales. Moreover, in the inference stage, we further developed a systemic re-parameterization method to convert the TMS-based model into a single-path-based topology in order to increase inference speed. We investigated the performance of the new TMS method for automatic speaker verification (ASV) on in-domain and out-of-domain conditions. Results show that the TMS-based model obtained a significant increase in the performance over the SOTA ASV models, meanwhile, had a faster inference speed.

Yu Zhao, Hao Fei, Wei Ji et al.

Visual spatial description (VSD) aims to generate texts that describe the spatial relations of the given objects within images. Existing VSD work merely models the 2D geometrical vision features, thus inevitably falling prey to the problem of skewed spatial understanding of target objects. In this work, we investigate the incorporation of 3D scene features for VSD. With an external 3D scene extractor, we obtain the 3D objects and scene features for input images, based on which we construct a target object-centered 3D spatial scene graph (Go3D-S2G), such that we model the spatial semantics of target objects within the holistic 3D scenes. Besides, we propose a scene subgraph selecting mechanism, sampling topologically-diverse subgraphs from Go3D-S2G, where the diverse local structure features are navigated to yield spatially-diversified text generation. Experimental results on two VSD datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baselines significantly, especially improving on the cases with complex visual spatial relations. Meanwhile, our method can produce more spatially-diversified generation. Code is available at https://github.com/zhaoyucs/VSD.

Yu Zhao, Hao Fei, Xiangtai Li et al.

In the visual spatial understanding (VSU) area, spatial image-to-text (SI2T) and spatial text-to-image (ST2I) are two fundamental tasks that appear in dual form. Existing methods for standalone SI2T or ST2I perform imperfectly in spatial understanding, due to the difficulty of 3D-wise spatial feature modeling. In this work, we consider modeling the SI2T and ST2I together under a dual learning framework. During the dual framework, we then propose to represent the 3D spatial scene features with a novel 3D scene graph (3DSG) representation that can be shared and beneficial to both tasks. Further, inspired by the intuition that the easier 3D$\to$image and 3D$\to$text processes also exist symmetrically in the ST2I and SI2T, respectively, we propose the Spatial Dual Discrete Diffusion (SD$^3$) framework, which utilizes the intermediate features of the 3D$\to$X processes to guide the hard X$\to$3D processes, such that the overall ST2I and SI2T will benefit each other. On the visual spatial understanding dataset VSD, our system outperforms the mainstream T2I and I2T methods significantly. Further in-depth analysis reveals how our dual learning strategy advances.

Junyu Hao, Jianheng Liu, Yongjia Zhao et al.

When presented with one or a few photos of a previously unseen object, humans can instantly recognize it in different scenes. Although the human brain mechanism behind this phenomenon is still not fully understood, this work introduces a novel technical realization of this task. It consists of two phases: (1) generating a Similarity Density Map (SDM) by convolving the scene image with the given object image patch(es) so that the highlight areas in the SDM indicate the possible locations; (2) obtaining the object occupied areas in the scene through a Region Alignment Network (RAN). The RAN is constructed on a backbone of Deep Siamese Network (DSN), and different from the traditional DSNs, it aims to obtain the object accurate regions by regressing the location and area differences between the ground truths and the predicted ones indicated by the highlight areas in SDM. By pre-learning from labels annotated in traditional datasets, the SDM-RAN can detect previously unknown objects without fine-tuning. Experiments were conducted on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC datasets. The results indicate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the same task.

Yutian Liu, Wenjun Ke, Jianguo Wei

Handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) is challenging in image-to-text tasks due to the complex layouts of mathematical expressions and suffers from problems including over-parsing and under-parsing. To solve these, previous HMER methods improve the attention mechanism by utilizing historical alignment information. However, this approach has limitations in addressing under-parsing since it cannot correct the erroneous attention on image areas that should be parsed at subsequent decoding steps. This faulty attention causes the attention module to incorporate future context into the current decoding step, thereby confusing the alignment process. To address this issue, we propose an attention guidance mechanism to explicitly suppress attention weights in irrelevant areas and enhance the appropriate ones, thereby inhibiting access to information outside the intended context. Depending on the type of attention guidance, we devise two complementary approaches to refine attention weights: self-guidance that coordinates attention of multiple heads and neighbor-guidance that integrates attention from adjacent time steps. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving expression recognition rates of 60.75% / 61.81% / 63.30% on the CROHME 2014/ 2016/ 2019 datasets.

Wenhao Yang, Jianguo Wei, Wenhuan Lu et al.

Recent research in speaker verification has increasingly focused on achieving robust and reliable recognition under challenging channel conditions and noisy environments. Identifying speakers in radio communications is particularly difficult due to inherent limitations such as constrained bandwidth and pervasive noise interference. To address this issue, we present a Channel Robust Speaker Learning (CRSL) framework that enhances the robustness of the current speaker verification pipeline, considering data source, data augmentation, and the efficiency of model transfer processes. Our framework introduces an augmentation module that mitigates bandwidth variations in radio speech datasets by manipulating the bandwidth of training inputs. It also addresses unknown noise by introducing noise within the manifold space. Additionally, we propose an efficient fine-tuning method that reduces the need for extensive additional training time and large amounts of data. Moreover, we develop a toolkit for assembling a large-scale radio speech corpus and establish a benchmark specifically tailored for radio scenario speaker verification studies. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed methodology effectively enhances performance and mitigates degradation caused by radio transmission in speaker verification tasks. The code will be available on Github.

Ruiteng Zhang, Jianguo Wei, Wenhuan Lu et al.

Automatic speaker verification (ASV) systems, which determine whether two speeches are from the same speaker, mainly focus on verification accuracy while ignoring inference speed. However, in real applications, both inference speed and verification accuracy are essential. This study proposes cross-sequential re-parameterization (CS-Rep), a novel topology re-parameterization strategy for multi-type networks, to increase the inference speed and verification accuracy of models. CS-Rep solves the problem that existing re-parameterization methods are unsuitable for typical ASV backbones. When a model applies CS-Rep, the training-period network utilizes a multi-branch topology to capture speaker information, whereas the inference-period model converts to a time-delay neural network (TDNN)-like plain backbone with stacked TDNN layers to achieve the fast inference speed. Based on CS-Rep, an improved TDNN with friendly test and deployment called Rep-TDNN is proposed. Compared with the state-of-the-art model ECAPA-TDNN, which is highly recognized in the industry, Rep-TDNN increases the actual inference speed by about 50% and reduces the EER by 10%. The code will be released.

Yangxia Hu, Maode Ma, Wenhuan Lu et al.

This work studied embedding positions of digital audio watermarking in wavelet domain, to make beginners understand the nature of watermarking in a short time. Based on the theory of wavelet transform, this paper analyzed statistical distributions of each level after transformation and the features of watermark embedded in different transform levels. Through comparison and analysis, we found that watermark was suitable for embedding into the coefficients of the first four levels of wavelet transform. In current state-of-art approaches, the embedding algorithms were always to replace the coefficient values of the embedded positions. In contrast this paper proposed an embedding algorithm of selfadaptive interpolation to achieve a better imperceptibility. In order to reduce the computational complexity, we took a pseudo random sequence with a length of 31 bits as the watermark. In the experiments, watermark was embedded in different locations, including different transform levels, high-frequency coefficients and low-frequency coefficients, high-energy regions and low-frequency regions. Results showed that the imperceptibility was better than traditional embedding algorithms. The bit error rates of the extracted watermark were calculated and we analyzed the robustness and fragility of each embedded signal. At last we concluded the best embedding positions of watermark for different applications and our future work.