Tao Shi

Tao Shi, Xiao Liang, Yaoyuan Liang et al.

Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a rapidly evolving task within the natural language processing community, which aims to detect the emotions expressed by speakers during a conversation. Recently, a growing number of ERC methods have focused on leveraging supervised contrastive learning (SCL) to enhance the robustness and generalizability of learned features. However, current SCL-based approaches in ERC are impeded by the constraint of large batch sizes and the lack of compatibility with most existing ERC models. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient and model-agnostic SCL framework named Supervised Sample-Label Contrastive Learning with Soft-HGR Maximal Correlation (SSLCL), which eliminates the need for a large batch size and can be seamlessly integrated with existing ERC models without introducing any model-specific assumptions. Specifically, we introduce a novel perspective on utilizing label representations by projecting discrete labels into dense embeddings through a shallow multilayer perceptron, and formulate the training objective to maximize the similarity between sample features and their corresponding ground-truth label embeddings, while minimizing the similarity between sample features and label embeddings of disparate classes. Moreover, we innovatively adopt the Soft-HGR maximal correlation as a measure of similarity between sample features and label embeddings, leading to significant performance improvements over conventional similarity measures. Additionally, multimodal cues of utterances are effectively leveraged by SSLCL as data augmentations to boost model performances. Extensive experiments on two ERC benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD, demonstrate the compatibility and superiority of our proposed SSLCL framework compared to existing state-of-the-art SCL methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/TaoShi1998/SSLCL}.

Xiao Liang, Tao Shi, Yaoyuan Liang et al.

Video grounding aims to localize the target moment in an untrimmed video corresponding to a given sentence query. Existing methods typically select the best prediction from a set of predefined proposals or directly regress the target span in a single-shot manner, resulting in the absence of a systematical prediction refinement process. In this paper, we propose DiffusionVG, a novel framework with diffusion models that formulates video grounding as a conditional generation task, where the target span is generated from Gaussian noise inputs and interatively refined in the reverse diffusion process. During training, DiffusionVG progressively adds noise to the target span with a fixed forward diffusion process and learns to recover the target span in the reverse diffusion process. In inference, DiffusionVG can generate the target span from Gaussian noise inputs by the learned reverse diffusion process conditioned on the video-sentence representations. Without bells and whistles, our DiffusionVG demonstrates superior performance compared to existing well-crafted models on mainstream Charades-STA, ActivityNet Captions and TACoS benchmarks.