Ifeoma Nwogu

Yuanhao Zhai, Mingzhen Huang, Tianyu Luan et al.

Language-guided human motion synthesis has been a challenging task due to the inherent complexity and diversity of human behaviors. Previous methods face limitations in generalization to novel actions, often resulting in unrealistic or incoherent motion sequences. In this paper, we propose ATOM (ATomic mOtion Modeling) to mitigate this problem, by decomposing actions into atomic actions, and employing a curriculum learning strategy to learn atomic action composition. First, we disentangle complex human motions into a set of atomic actions during learning, and then assemble novel actions using the learned atomic actions, which offers better adaptability to new actions. Moreover, we introduce a curriculum learning training strategy that leverages masked motion modeling with a gradual increase in the mask ratio, and thus facilitates atomic action assembly. This approach mitigates the overfitting problem commonly encountered in previous methods while enforcing the model to learn better motion representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ATOM through extensive experiments, including text-to-motion and action-to-motion synthesis tasks. We further illustrate its superiority in synthesizing plausible and coherent text-guided human motion sequences.

Lu Dong, Xiao Wang, Srirangaraj Setlur et al.

Reconstructing 3D faces with facial geometry from single images has allowed for major advances in animation, generative models, and virtual reality. However, this ability to represent faces with their 3D features is not as fully explored by the facial expression inference (FEI) community. This study therefore aims to investigate the impacts of integrating such 3D representations into the FEI task, specifically for facial expression classification and face-based valence-arousal (VA) estimation. To accomplish this, we first assess the performance of two 3D face representations (both based on the 3D morphable model, FLAME) for the FEI tasks. We further explore two fusion architectures, intermediate fusion and late fusion, for integrating the 3D face representations with existing 2D inference frameworks. To evaluate our proposed architecture, we extract the corresponding 3D representations and perform extensive tests on the AffectNet and RAF-DB datasets. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art AffectNet VA estimation and RAF-DB classification tasks. Moreover, our method can act as a complement to other existing methods to boost performance in many emotion inference tasks.

Timothy Zee, Alexander G. Ororbia, Ankur Mali et al.

While current deep learning algorithms have been successful for a wide variety of artificial intelligence (AI) tasks, including those involving structured image data, they present deep neurophysiological conceptual issues due to their reliance on the gradients that are computed by backpropagation of errors (backprop). Gradients are required to obtain synaptic weight adjustments but require knowledge of feed-forward activities in order to conduct backward propagation, a biologically implausible process. This is known as the "weight transport problem". Therefore, in this work, we present a more biologically plausible approach towards solving the weight transport problem for image data. This approach, which we name the error kernel driven activation alignment (EKDAA) algorithm, accomplishes through the introduction of locally derived error transmission kernels and error maps. Like standard deep learning networks, EKDAA performs the standard forward process via weights and activation functions; however, its backward error computation involves adaptive error kernels that propagate local error signals through the network. The efficacy of EKDAA is demonstrated by performing visual-recognition tasks on the Fashion MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN benchmarks, along with demonstrating its ability to extract visual features from natural color images. Furthermore, in order to demonstrate its non-reliance on gradient computations, results are presented for an EKDAA trained CNN that employs a non-differentiable activation function.

Lu Dong, Xiao Wang, Mark Frank et al.

Recognizing and localizing student confusion from video is an important yet challenging problem in educational AI. Existing confusion datasets suffer from noisy labels, coarse temporal annotations, and limited expert validation, which hinder reliable fine-grained recognition and temporally grounded analysis. To address these limitations, we propose a practical multi-stage filtering pipeline that integrates two stages of model-assisted screening, researcher curation, and expert validation to build a higher-quality benchmark for confusion understanding. Based on this pipeline, we introduce ConfusionBench, a new benchmark for educational videos consisting of a balanced confusion recognition dataset and a video localization dataset. We further provide zero-shot baseline evaluations of a representative open-source model and a proprietary model on clip-level confusion recognition, long-video confusion localization tasks. Experimental results show that the proprietary model performs better overall but tends to over-predict transitional segments, while the open-source model is more conservative and more prone to missed detections. In addition, the proposed student confusion report visualization can support educational experts in making intervention decisions and adapting learning plans accordingly. All datasets and related materials will be made publicly available on our project page.

Xiao Wang, Lu Dong, Ifeoma Nwogu et al.

Home-based interventions like parent-child shared reading provide a cost-effective approach for supporting children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, analyzing caregiver intervention strategies in naturalistic home interactions typically relies on expert annotation, which is costly, time-intensive, and difficult to scale. To address this challenge, we propose InterventionLens, an end-to-end multi-agent system for automatically detecting and temporally segmenting caregiver intervention strategies from shared reading videos. Without task-specific model training or fine-tuning, InterventionLens uses a collaborative multi-agent architecture to integrate multimodal interaction content and perform fine-grained strategy analysis. Experiments on the ASD-HI dataset show that InterventionLens achieves an overall F1 score of 79.44\%, outperforming the baseline by 19.72\%. These results suggest that InterventionLens is a promising system for analyzing caregiver intervention strategies in home-based ASD shared reading settings. Additional resources will be released on the project page.

Tejaswini Ananthanarayana, Lipisha Chaudhary, Ifeoma Nwogu

A true interpreting agent not only understands sign language and translates to text, but also understands text and translates to signs. Much of the AI work in sign language translation to date has focused mainly on translating from signs to text. Towards the latter goal, we propose a text-to-sign translation model, SignNet, which exploits the notion of similarity (and dissimilarity) of visual signs in translating. This module presented is only one part of a dual-learning two task process involving text-to-sign (T2S) as well as sign-to-text (S2T). We currently implement SignNet as a single channel architecture so that the output of the T2S task can be fed into S2T in a continuous dual learning framework. By single channel, we refer to a single modality, the body pose joints. In this work, we present SignNet, a T2S task using a novel metric embedding learning process, to preserve the distances between sign embeddings relative to their dissimilarity. We also describe how to choose positive and negative examples of signs for similarity testing. From our analysis, we observe that metric embedding learning-based model perform significantly better than the other models with traditional losses, when evaluated using BLEU scores. In the task of gloss to pose, SignNet performed as well as its state-of-the-art (SoTA) counterparts and outperformed them in the task of text to pose, by showing noteworthy enhancements in BLEU 1 - BLEU 4 scores (BLEU 1: 31->39; ~26% improvement and BLEU 4: 10.43->11.84; ~14\% improvement) when tested on the popular RWTH PHOENIX-Weather-2014T benchmark dataset

Lipisha Chaudhary, Fei Xu, Ifeoma Nwogu

Both manual (relating to the use of hands) and non-manual markers (NMM), such as facial expressions or mouthing cues, are important for providing the complete meaning of phrases in American Sign Language (ASL). Efforts have been made in advancing sign language to spoken/written language understanding, but most of these have primarily focused on manual features only. In this work, using advanced neural machine translation methods, we examine and report on the extent to which facial expressions contribute to understanding sign language phrases. We present a sign language translation architecture consisting of two-stream encoders, with one encoder handling the face and the other handling the upper body (with hands). We propose a new parallel cross-attention decoding mechanism that is useful for quantifying the influence of each input modality on the output. The two streams from the encoder are directed simultaneously to different attention stacks in the decoder. Examining the properties of the parallel cross-attention weights allows us to analyze the importance of facial markers compared to body and hand features during a translating task.

Lipisha Chaudhary, Trisha Mittal, Subhadra Gopalakrishnan et al.

Audio Descriptions (AD) are essential for making visual content accessible to individuals with visual impairments. Recent works have shown a promising step towards automating AD, but they have been limited to describing high-quality movie content using human-annotated ground truth AD in the process. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline, MCAD, that extends AD generation beyond movies to the domain of sports, with a focus on soccer games, without relying on ground truth AD. To address the absence of domain-specific AD datasets, we fine-tune a Video Large Language Model on publicly available movie AD datasets so that it learns the narrative structure and conventions of AD. During inference, MCAD incorporates multimodal contextual cues such as player identities, soccer events and actions, and commentary from the game. These cues, combined with input prompts to the fine-tuned VideoLLM, allow the system to produce complete AD text for each video segment. We further introduce a new evaluation metric, ARGE-AD, designed to accurately assess the quality of generated AD. ARGE-AD evaluates the generated AD for the presence of five characteristics: (i) usage of people's names, (ii) mention of actions and events, (iii) appropriate length of AD, (iv) absence of pronouns, and (v) overlap from commentary or subtitles. We present an in-depth analysis of our approach on both movie and soccer datasets. We also validate the use of this metric to quantitatively comment on the quality of generated AD using our metric across domains. Additionally, we contribute audio descriptions for 100 soccer game clips annotated by two AD experts.

Renke Wang, Ifeoma Nwogu

Natural conversations between humans often involve a large number of non-verbal nuanced expressions, displayed at key times throughout the conversation. Understanding and being able to model these complex interactions is essential for creating realistic human-agent communication, whether in the virtual or physical world. As social robots and intelligent avatars emerge in popularity and utility, being able to realistically model and generate these dynamic expressions throughout conversations is critical. We develop a probabilistic model to capture the interaction dynamics between pairs of participants in a face-to-face setting, allowing for the encoding of synchronous expressions between the interlocutors. This interaction encoding is then used to influence the generation when predicting one agent's future dynamics, conditioned on the other's current dynamics. FLAME features are extracted from videos containing natural conversations between subjects to train our interaction model. We successfully assess the efficacy of our proposed model via quantitative metrics and qualitative metrics, and show that it successfully captures the dynamics of a pair of interacting dyads. We also test the model with a never-before-seen parent-infant dataset comprising of two different modes of communication between the dyads, and show that our model successfully delineates between the modes, based on their interacting dynamics.

Divyesh Pratap Singh, Dakshesh Gusain, Federica Bulgarelli et al.

Manner and result verbs encode different aspects of event structure and have been discussed in developmental work as a potentially informative distinction for studying early verb learning. However, this distinction remains difficult to measure at scale because large annotated resources for manner and result classification are not currently available. We present a computational approach for identifying manner and result verbs in sentence context. Using linguistically informed prompts, we generate sentence-level annotations with large language models over data drawn from MASC and InterCorp, extending coverage from previously annotated portions of VerbNet to 436 classes. We then train a RoBERTa-based classifier on these annotations and evaluate it on three held-out gold-standard datasets, including previously annotated items and a new expert-annotated set. Across these evaluations, the model shows promising performance, with average accuracy up to 89.6%. We present this work as a scalable measurement tool that can support future research on verb semantics in developmental and other language datasets, while noting that further validation is needed for borderline cases, mixed manner/result verbs, and downstream developmental applications.

Lu Dong, Lipisha Chaudhary, Fei Xu et al.

Achieving expressive 3D motion reconstruction and automatic generation for isolated sign words can be challenging, due to the lack of real-world 3D sign-word data, the complex nuances of signing motions, and the cross-modal understanding of sign language semantics. To address these challenges, we introduce SignAvatar, a framework capable of both word-level sign language reconstruction and generation. SignAvatar employs a transformer-based conditional variational autoencoder architecture, effectively establishing relationships across different semantic modalities. Additionally, this approach incorporates a curriculum learning strategy to enhance the model's robustness and generalization, resulting in more realistic motions. Furthermore, we contribute the ASL3DWord dataset, composed of 3D joint rotation data for the body, hands, and face, for unique sign words. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SignAvatar through extensive experiments, showcasing its superior reconstruction and automatic generation capabilities. The code and dataset are available on the project page.

Xiao Wang, Lu Dong, Sahana Rangasrinivasan et al.

The social robot's open API allows users to customize open-domain interactions. However, it remains inaccessible to those without programming experience. In this work, we introduce AutoMisty, the first multi-agent collaboration framework powered by large language models (LLMs), to enable the seamless generation of executable Misty robot code from natural language instructions. AutoMisty incorporates four specialized agent modules to manage task decomposition, assignment, problem-solving, and result synthesis. Each agent incorporates a two-layer optimization mechanism, with self-reflection for iterative refinement and human-in-the-loop for better alignment with user preferences. AutoMisty ensures a transparent reasoning process, allowing users to iteratively refine tasks through natural language feedback for precise execution. To evaluate AutoMisty's effectiveness, we designed a benchmark task set spanning four levels of complexity and conducted experiments in a real Misty robot environment. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that AutoMisty not only consistently generates high-quality code but also enables precise code control, significantly outperforming direct reasoning with ChatGPT-4o and ChatGPT-o1. All code, optimized APIs, and experimental videos will be publicly released through the webpage: https://wangxiaoshawn.github.io/AutoMisty.html

Enjamamul Hoq, Ifeoma Nwogu

In this report, we focus on the unconditional generation of infant cry sounds using the DiffWave framework, which has shown great promise in generating high-quality audio from noise. We use two distinct datasets of infant cries: the Baby Chillanto and the deBarbaro cry dataset. These datasets are used to train the DiffWave model to generate new cry sounds that maintain high fidelity and diversity. The focus here is on DiffWave's capability to handle the unconditional generation task.

Tharindu Ranasinghe, Sarthak Gupte, Marcos Zampieri et al.

This paper describes the WLV-RIT entry to the Hate Speech and Offensive Content Identification in Indo-European Languages (HASOC) shared task 2020. The HASOC 2020 organizers provided participants with annotated datasets containing social media posts of code-mixed in Dravidian languages (Malayalam-English and Tamil-English). We participated in task 1: Offensive comment identification in Code-mixed Malayalam Youtube comments. In our methodology, we take advantage of available English data by applying cross-lingual contextual word embeddings and transfer learning to make predictions to Malayalam data. We further improve the results using various fine tuning strategies. Our system achieved 0.89 weighted average F1 score for the test set and it ranked 5th place out of 12 participants.

Nicholas Wilkins, Beck Cordes Galbraith, Ifeoma Nwogu

American Sign Language (ASL) is the fourth most commonly used language in the United States and is the language most commonly used by Deaf people in the United States and the English-speaking regions of Canada. Unfortunately, until recently, ASL received little research. This is due, in part, to its delayed recognition as a language until William C. Stokoe's publication in 1960. Limited data has been a long-standing obstacle to ASL research and computational modeling. The lack of large-scale datasets has prohibited many modern machine-learning techniques, such as Neural Machine Translation, from being applied to ASL. In addition, the modality required to capture sign language (i.e. video) is complex in natural settings (as one must deal with background noise, motion blur, and the curse of dimensionality). Finally, when compared with spoken languages, such as English, there has been limited research conducted into the linguistics of ASL. We realize a simplified version of Liddell and Johnson's Movement-Hold (MH) Model using a Probabilistic Graphical Model (PGM). We trained our model on ASLing, a dataset collected from three fluent ASL signers. We evaluate our PGM against other models to determine its ability to model ASL. Finally, we interpret various aspects of the PGM and draw conclusions about ASL phonetics. The main contributions of this paper are

Nicholas Wilkins, Michael Johnson, Ifeoma Nwogu

While several methods for predicting uncertainty on deep networks have been recently proposed, they do not readily translate to large and complex datasets. In this paper we utilize a simplified form of the Mixture Density Networks (MDNs) to produce a one-shot approach to quantify uncertainty in regression problems. We show that our uncertainty bounds are on-par or better than other reported existing methods. When applied to standard regression benchmark datasets, we show an improvement in predictive log-likelihood and root-mean-square-error when compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate this method's efficacy on stochastic, highly volatile time-series data where stock prices are predicted for the next time interval. The resulting uncertainty graph summarizes significant anomalies in the stock price chart. Furthermore, we apply this method to the task of age estimation from the challenging IMDb-Wiki dataset of half a million face images. We successfully predict the uncertainties associated with the prediction and empirically analyze the underlying causes of the uncertainties. This uncertainty quantification can be used to pre-process low quality datasets and further enable learning.

Devansh Arpit, Ifeoma Nwogu, Venu Govindaraju

Modeling data as being sampled from a union of independent subspaces has been widely applied to a number of real world applications. However, dimensionality reduction approaches that theoretically preserve this independence assumption have not been well studied. Our key contribution is to show that $2K$ projection vectors are sufficient for the independence preservation of any $K$ class data sampled from a union of independent subspaces. It is this non-trivial observation that we use for designing our dimensionality reduction technique. In this paper, we propose a novel dimensionality reduction algorithm that theoretically preserves this structure for a given dataset. We support our theoretical analysis with empirical results on both synthetic and real world data achieving \textit{state-of-the-art} results compared to popular dimensionality reduction techniques.

Ifeoma Nwogu, Goker Erdogan, Ilker Yildirim et al.

This paper presents a computational model of concept learning using Bayesian inference for a grammatically structured hypothesis space, and test the model on multisensory (visual and haptics) recognition of 3D objects. The study is performed on a set of artificially generated 3D objects known as fribbles, which are complex, multipart objects with categorical structures. The goal of this work is to develop a working multisensory representational model that integrates major themes on concepts and concepts learning from the cognitive science literature. The model combines the representational power of a probabilistic generative grammar with the inferential power of Bayesian induction.

Yingbo Zhou, Devansh Arpit, Ifeoma Nwogu et al.

Traditionally, when generative models of data are developed via deep architectures, greedy layer-wise pre-training is employed. In a well-trained model, the lower layer of the architecture models the data distribution conditional upon the hidden variables, while the higher layers model the hidden distribution prior. But due to the greedy scheme of the layerwise training technique, the parameters of lower layers are fixed when training higher layers. This makes it extremely challenging for the model to learn the hidden distribution prior, which in turn leads to a suboptimal model for the data distribution. We therefore investigate joint training of deep autoencoders, where the architecture is viewed as one stack of two or more single-layer autoencoders. A single global reconstruction objective is jointly optimized, such that the objective for the single autoencoders at each layer acts as a local, layer-level regularizer. We empirically evaluate the performance of this joint training scheme and observe that it not only learns a better data model, but also learns better higher layer representations, which highlights its potential for unsupervised feature learning. In addition, we find that the usage of regularizations in the joint training scheme is crucial in achieving good performance. In the supervised setting, joint training also shows superior performance when training deeper models. The joint training framework can thus provide a platform for investigating more efficient usage of different types of regularizers, especially in light of the growing volumes of available unlabeled data.

Devansh Arpit, Ifeoma Nwogu, Gaurav Srivastava et al.

With increasing concerns about security, the need for highly secure physical biometrics-based authentication systems utilizing \emph{cancelable biometric} technologies is on the rise. Because the problem of cancelable template generation deals with the trade-off between template security and matching performance, many state-of-the-art algorithms successful in generating high quality cancelable biometrics all have random projection as one of their early processing steps. This paper therefore presents a formal analysis of why random projections is an essential step in cancelable biometrics. By formally defining the notion of an \textit{Independent Subspace Structure} for datasets, it can be shown that random projection preserves the subspace structure of data vectors generated from a union of independent linear subspaces. The bound on the minimum number of random vectors required for this to hold is also derived and is shown to depend logarithmically on the number of data samples, not only in independent subspaces but in disjoint subspace settings as well. The theoretical analysis presented is supported in detail with empirical results on real-world face recognition datasets.