Bin Liu

Ziyan Wang, Bin Liu, Ling Xiang

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently achieved significant success, with a key operation involving the aggregation of information from neighboring nodes. Substantial researchers have focused on defining neighbors for aggregation, predominantly based on observed adjacency matrices. However, in many scenarios, the explicitly given graphs contain noise, which can be amplified during the messages-passing process. Therefore, many researchers have turned their attention to latent graph inference, specifically learning a parametric graph. To mitigate fluctuations in latent graph structure learning, this paper proposes a novel Boolean product-based graph residual connection in GNNs to link the latent graph and the original graph. It computes the Boolean product between the latent graph and the original graph at each layer to correct the learning process. The Boolean product between two adjacency matrices is equivalent to triangle detection. Accordingly, the proposed Boolean product graph neural networks can be interpreted as discovering triangular cliques from the original and the latent graph. We validate the proposed method in benchmark datasets and demonstrate its ability to enhance the performance and robustness of GNNs.

Liu Bin, Yin Guosheng

In text generation, a large language model (LM) makes a choice of each new word based only on the former selection of its context using the softmax function. Nevertheless, the link statistics information of concurrent words based on a scene-specific corpus is valuable in choosing the next word, which can help to ensure the topic of the generated text to be aligned with the current task. To fully explore the co-occurrence information,we propose a graphmax function for task-specific text generation. Using the graph-based regularization, graphmax enables the final word choice to be determined by both the global knowledge from the LM and the local knowledge from the scene-specific corpus. The traditional softmax function is regularized with a graph total variation (GTV) term, which incorporates the local knowledge into the LM and encourages the model to consider the statistical relationships between words in a scene-specific corpus. The proposed graphmax is versatile and can be readily plugged into any large pre-trained LM for text generation and machine translation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the new GTV-based regularization can improve performances in various natural language processing tasks in comparison with existing methods. Moreover, through human experiments, we observe that participants can easily distinguish the text generated by graphmax or softmax.

Bin Liu, Guosheng Yin, Wenbin Du

We propose a novel framework to understand the text by converting sentences or articles into video-like 3-dimensional tensors. Each frame, corresponding to a slice of the tensor, is a word image that is rendered by the word's shape. The length of the tensor equals to the number of words in the sentence or article. The proposed transformation from the text to a 3-dimensional tensor makes it very convenient to implement an $n$-gram model with convolutional neural networks for text analysis. Concretely, we impose a 3-dimensional convolutional kernel on the 3-dimensional text tensor. The first two dimensions of the convolutional kernel size equal the size of the word image and the last dimension of the kernel size is $n$. That is, every time when we slide the 3-dimensional kernel over a word sequence, the convolution covers $n$ word images and outputs a scalar. By iterating this process continuously for each $n$-gram along with the sentence or article with multiple kernels, we obtain a 2-dimensional feature map. A subsequent 1-dimensional max-over-time pooling is applied to this feature map, and three fully-connected layers are used for conducting text classification finally. Experiments of several text classification datasets demonstrate surprisingly superior performances using the proposed model in comparison with existing methods.

Guojun Yin, Bin Liu, Lu Sheng et al.

Synthesizing photo-realistic images from text descriptions is a challenging problem. Previous studies have shown remarkable progresses on visual quality of the generated images. In this paper, we consider semantics from the input text descriptions in helping render photo-realistic images. However, diverse linguistic expressions pose challenges in extracting consistent semantics even they depict the same thing. To this end, we propose a novel photo-realistic text-to-image generation model that implicitly disentangles semantics to both fulfill the high-level semantic consistency and low-level semantic diversity. To be specific, we design (1) a Siamese mechanism in the discriminator to learn consistent high-level semantics, and (2) a visual-semantic embedding strategy by semantic-conditioned batch normalization to find diverse low-level semantics. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on CUB and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in comparison to state-of-the-art methods.

Guojun Yin, Lu Sheng, Bin Liu et al.

Dense captioning aims at simultaneously localizing semantic regions and describing these regions-of-interest (ROIs) with short phrases or sentences in natural language. Previous studies have shown remarkable progresses, but they are often vulnerable to the aperture problem that a caption generated by the features inside one ROI lacks contextual coherence with its surrounding context in the input image. In this work, we investigate contextual reasoning based on multi-scale message propagations from the neighboring contents to the target ROIs. To this end, we design a novel end-to-end context and attribute grounded dense captioning framework consisting of 1) a contextual visual mining module and 2) a multi-level attribute grounded description generation module. Knowing that captions often co-occur with the linguistic attributes (such as who, what and where), we also incorporate an auxiliary supervision from hierarchical linguistic attributes to augment the distinctiveness of the learned captions. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on Visual Genome dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in comparison to state-of-the-art methods.