Jian Zhang

Ting Yu, Kunhao Fu, Jian Zhang et al.

Long-term Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a challenging vision-and-language bridging task focusing on semantic understanding of untrimmed long-term videos and diverse free-form questions, simultaneously emphasizing comprehensive cross-modal reasoning to yield precise answers. The canonical approaches often rely on off-the-shelf feature extractors to detour the expensive computation overhead, but often result in domain-independent modality-unrelated representations. Furthermore, the inherent gradient blocking between unimodal comprehension and cross-modal interaction hinders reliable answer generation. In contrast, recent emerging successful video-language pre-training models enable cost-effective end-to-end modeling but fall short in domain-specific ratiocination and exhibit disparities in task formulation. Toward this end, we present an entirely end-to-end solution for long-term VideoQA: Multi-granularity Contrastive cross-modal collaborative Generation (MCG) model. To derive discriminative representations possessing high visual concepts, we introduce Joint Unimodal Modeling (JUM) on a clip-bone architecture and leverage Multi-granularity Contrastive Learning (MCL) to harness the intrinsically or explicitly exhibited semantic correspondences. To alleviate the task formulation discrepancy problem, we propose a Cross-modal Collaborative Generation (CCG) module to reformulate VideoQA as a generative task instead of the conventional classification scheme, empowering the model with the capability for cross-modal high-semantic fusion and generation so as to rationalize and answer. Extensive experiments conducted on six publicly available VideoQA datasets underscore the superiority of our proposed method.

Bofeng Wu, Guocheng Niu, Jun Yu et al.

This paper proposes an approach to Dense Video Captioning (DVC) without pairwise event-sentence annotation. First, we adopt the knowledge distilled from relevant and well solved tasks to generate high-quality event proposals. Then we incorporate contrastive loss and cycle-consistency loss typically applied to cross-modal retrieval tasks to build semantic matching between the proposals and sentences, which are eventually used to train the caption generation module. In addition, the parameters of matching module are initialized via pre-training based on annotated images to improve the matching performance. Extensive experiments on ActivityNet-Caption dataset reveal the significance of distillation-based event proposal generation and cross-modal retrieval-based semantic matching to weakly supervised DVC, and demonstrate the superiority of our method to existing state-of-the-art methods.

Dongming Yang, YueXian Zou, Jian Zhang et al.

Since detecting and recognizing individual human or object are not adequate to understand the visual world, learning how humans interact with surrounding objects becomes a core technology. However, convolution operations are weak in depicting visual interactions between the instances since they only build blocks that process one local neighborhood at a time. To address this problem, we learn from human perception in observing HOIs to introduce a two-stage trainable reasoning mechanism, referred to as GID block. GID block breaks through the local neighborhoods and captures long-range dependency of pixels both in global-level and instance-level from the scene to help detecting interactions between instances. Furthermore, we conduct a multi-stream network called GID-Net, which is a human-object interaction detection framework consisting of a human branch, an object branch and an interaction branch. Semantic information in global-level and local-level are efficiently reasoned and aggregated in each of the branches. We have compared our proposed GID-Net with existing state-of-the-art methods on two public benchmarks, including V-COCO and HICO-DET. The results have showed that GID-Net outperforms the existing best-performing methods on both the above two benchmarks, validating its efficacy in detecting human-object interactions.