Athanasia Zlatintsi

Andrey Moskalenko, Alexey Bryncev, Ivan Kosmynin et al.

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Video Saliency Prediction. The goal of the challenge participants was to develop automatic saliency map prediction methods for the provided video sequences. The novel dataset of 2,000 diverse videos with an open license was prepared for this challenge. The fixations and corresponding saliency maps were collected using crowdsourced mouse tracking and contain viewing data from over 5,000 assessors. Evaluation was performed on a subset of 800 test videos using generally accepted quality metrics. The challenge attracted over 20 teams making submissions, and 7 teams passed the final phase with code review. All data used in this challenge is made publicly available - https://github.com/msu-video-group/NTIRE26_Saliency_Prediction.

Kleanthis Avramidis, Christos Garoufis, Athanasia Zlatintsi et al.

The study of Music Cognition and neural responses to music has been invaluable in understanding human emotions. Brain signals, though, manifest a highly complex structure that makes processing and retrieving meaningful features challenging, particularly of abstract constructs like affect. Moreover, the performance of learning models is undermined by the limited amount of available neuronal data and their severe inter-subject variability. In this paper we extract efficient, personalized affective representations from EEG signals during music listening. To this end, we employ music signals as a supervisory modality to EEG, aiming to project their semantic correspondence onto a common representation space. We utilize a bi-modal framework by combining an LSTM-based attention model to process EEG and a pre-trained model for music tagging, along with a reverse domain discriminator to align the distributions of the two modalities, further constraining the learning process with emotion tags. The resulting framework can be utilized for emotion recognition both directly, by performing supervised predictions from either modality, and indirectly, by providing relevant music samples to EEG input queries. The experimental findings show the potential of enhancing neuronal data through stimulus information for recognition purposes and yield insights into the distribution and temporal variance of music-induced affective features.

Christos Garoufis, Athanasia Zlatintsi, Petros Maragos

The advent of deep learning has led to the prevalence of deep neural network architectures for monaural music source separation, with end-to-end approaches that operate directly on the waveform level increasingly receiving research attention. Among these approaches, transformation of the input mixture to a learned latent space, and multiplicative application of a soft mask to the latent mixture, achieves the best performance, but is prone to the introduction of artifacts to the source estimate. To alleviate this problem, in this paper we propose a hybrid time-domain approach, termed the HTMD-Net, combining a lightweight masking component and a denoising module, based on skip connections, in order to refine the source estimated by the masking procedure. Evaluation of our approach in the task of monaural singing voice separation in the musdb18 dataset indicates that our proposed method achieves competitive performance compared to methods based purely on masking when trained under the same conditions, especially regarding the behavior during silent segments, while achieving higher computational efficiency.

Kleanthis Avramidis, Agelos Kratimenos, Christos Garoufis et al.

Sound Event Detection and Audio Classification tasks are traditionally addressed through time-frequency representations of audio signals such as spectrograms. However, the emergence of deep neural networks as efficient feature extractors has enabled the direct use of audio signals for classification purposes. In this paper, we attempt to recognize musical instruments in polyphonic audio by only feeding their raw waveforms into deep learning models. Various recurrent and convolutional architectures incorporating residual connections are examined and parameterized in order to build end-to-end classi-fiers with low computational cost and only minimal preprocessing. We obtain competitive classification scores and useful instrument-wise insight through the IRMAS test set, utilizing a parallel CNN-BiGRU model with multiple residual connections, while maintaining a significantly reduced number of trainable parameters.

Kleanthis Avramidis, Athanasia Zlatintsi, Christos Garoufis et al.

Emotion Recognition from EEG signals has long been researched as it can assist numerous medical and rehabilitative applications. However, their complex and noisy structure has proven to be a serious barrier for traditional modeling methods. In this paper, we employ multifractal analysis to examine the behavior of EEG signals in terms of presence of fluctuations and the degree of fragmentation along their major frequency bands, for the task of emotion recognition. In order to extract emotion-related features we utilize two novel algorithms for EEG analysis, based on Multiscale Fractal Dimension and Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis. The proposed feature extraction methods perform efficiently, surpassing some widely used baseline features on the competitive DEAP dataset, indicating that multifractal analysis could serve as basis for the development of robust models for affective state recognition.

Agelos Kratimenos, Kleanthis Avramidis, Christos Garoufis et al.

Instrument classification is one of the fields in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) that has attracted a lot of research interest. However, the majority of that is dealing with monophonic music, while efforts on polyphonic material mainly focus on predominant instrument recognition. In this paper, we propose an approach for instrument classification in polyphonic music from purely monophonic data, that involves performing data augmentation by mixing different audio segments. A variety of data augmentation techniques focusing on different sonic aspects, such as overlaying audio segments of the same genre, as well as pitch and tempo-based synchronization, are explored. We utilize Convolutional Neural Networks for the classification task, comparing shallow to deep network architectures. We further investigate the usage of a combination of the above classifiers, each trained on a single augmented dataset. An ensemble of VGG-like classifiers, trained on non-augmented, pitch-synchronized, tempo-synchronized and genre-similar excerpts, respectively, yields the best results, achieving slightly above 80% in terms of label ranking average precision (LRAP) in the IRMAS test set.ruments in over 2300 testing tracks.

Nikolaos Gkanatsios, Vassilis Pitsikalis, Petros Koutras et al.

Detecting visual relationships, i.e. <Subject, Predicate, Object> triplets, is a challenging Scene Understanding task approached in the past via linguistic priors or spatial information in a single feature branch. We introduce a new deeply supervised two-branch architecture, the Multimodal Attentional Translation Embeddings, where the visual features of each branch are driven by a multimodal attentional mechanism that exploits spatio-linguistic similarities in a low-dimensional space. We present a variety of experiments comparing against all related approaches in the literature, as well as by re-implementing and fine-tuning several of them. Results on the commonly employed VRD dataset [1] show that the proposed method clearly outperforms all others, while we also justify our claims both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Giorgos Bouritsas, Petros Koutras, Athanasia Zlatintsi et al.

Despite the availability of a huge amount of video data accompanied by descriptive texts, it is not always easy to exploit the information contained in natural language in order to automatically recognize video concepts. Towards this goal, in this paper we use textual cues as means of supervision, introducing two weakly supervised techniques that extend the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) framework: the Fuzzy Sets Multiple Instance Learning (FSMIL) and the Probabilistic Labels Multiple Instance Learning (PLMIL). The former encodes the spatio-temporal imprecision of the linguistic descriptions with Fuzzy Sets, while the latter models different interpretations of each description's semantics with Probabilistic Labels, both formulated through a convex optimization algorithm. In addition, we provide a novel technique to extract weak labels in the presence of complex semantics, that consists of semantic similarity computations. We evaluate our methods on two distinct problems, namely face and action recognition, in the challenging and realistic setting of movies accompanied by their screenplays, contained in the COGNIMUSE database. We show that, on both tasks, our method considerably outperforms a state-of-the-art weakly supervised approach, as well as other baselines.

Giannis Karamanolakis, Elias Iosif, Athanasia Zlatintsi et al.

The recent development of Audio-based Distributional Semantic Models (ADSMs) enables the computation of audio and lexical vector representations in a joint acoustic-semantic space. In this work, these joint representations are applied to the problem of automatic tag generation. The predicted tags together with their corresponding acoustic representation are exploited for the construction of acoustic-semantic clip embeddings. The proposed algorithms are evaluated on the task of similarity measurement between music clips. Acoustic-semantic models are shown to outperform the state-of-the-art for this task and produce high quality tags for audio/music clips.