Jiuniu Wang

Xiang Wang, Hangjie Yuan, Shiwei Zhang et al.

The pursuit of controllability as a higher standard of visual content creation has yielded remarkable progress in customizable image synthesis. However, achieving controllable video synthesis remains challenging due to the large variation of temporal dynamics and the requirement of cross-frame temporal consistency. Based on the paradigm of compositional generation, this work presents VideoComposer that allows users to flexibly compose a video with textual conditions, spatial conditions, and more importantly temporal conditions. Specifically, considering the characteristic of video data, we introduce the motion vector from compressed videos as an explicit control signal to provide guidance regarding temporal dynamics. In addition, we develop a Spatio-Temporal Condition encoder (STC-encoder) that serves as a unified interface to effectively incorporate the spatial and temporal relations of sequential inputs, with which the model could make better use of temporal conditions and hence achieve higher inter-frame consistency. Extensive experimental results suggest that VideoComposer is able to control the spatial and temporal patterns simultaneously within a synthesized video in various forms, such as text description, sketch sequence, reference video, or even simply hand-crafted motions. The code and models will be publicly available at https://videocomposer.github.io.

Wenjia Xu, Yongqin Xian, Jiuniu Wang et al.

Human-annotated attributes serve as powerful semantic embeddings in zero-shot learning. However, their annotation process is labor-intensive and needs expert supervision. Current unsupervised semantic embeddings, i.e., word embeddings, enable knowledge transfer between classes. However, word embeddings do not always reflect visual similarities and result in inferior zero-shot performance. We propose to discover semantic embeddings containing discriminative visual properties for zero-shot learning, without requiring any human annotation. Our model visually divides a set of images from seen classes into clusters of local image regions according to their visual similarity, and further imposes their class discrimination and semantic relatedness. To associate these clusters with previously unseen classes, we use external knowledge, e.g., word embeddings and propose a novel class relation discovery module. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we demonstrate that our model discovers semantic embeddings that model the visual properties of both seen and unseen classes. Furthermore, we demonstrate on three benchmarks that our visually-grounded semantic embeddings further improve performance over word embeddings across various ZSL models by a large margin.

Wenjia Xu, Yongqin Xian, Jiuniu Wang et al.

Any-shot image classification allows to recognize novel classes with only a few or even zero samples. For the task of zero-shot learning, visual attributes have been shown to play an important role, while in the few-shot regime, the effect of attributes is under-explored. To better transfer attribute-based knowledge from seen to unseen classes, we argue that an image representation with integrated attribute localization ability would be beneficial for any-shot, i.e. zero-shot and few-shot, image classification tasks. To this end, we propose a novel representation learning framework that jointly learns discriminative global and local features using only class-level attributes. While a visual-semantic embedding layer learns global features, local features are learned through an attribute prototype network that simultaneously regresses and decorrelates attributes from intermediate features. Furthermore, we introduce a zoom-in module that localizes and crops the informative regions to encourage the network to learn informative features explicitly. We show that our locality augmented image representations achieve a new state-of-the-art on challenging benchmarks, i.e. CUB, AWA2, and SUN. As an additional benefit, our model points to the visual evidence of the attributes in an image, confirming the improved attribute localization ability of our image representation. The attribute localization is evaluated quantitatively with ground truth part annotations, qualitatively with visualizations, and through well-designed user studies.

Jiuniu Wang, Hangjie Yuan, Dayou Chen et al.

This paper introduces ModelScopeT2V, a text-to-video synthesis model that evolves from a text-to-image synthesis model (i.e., Stable Diffusion). ModelScopeT2V incorporates spatio-temporal blocks to ensure consistent frame generation and smooth movement transitions. The model could adapt to varying frame numbers during training and inference, rendering it suitable for both image-text and video-text datasets. ModelScopeT2V brings together three components (i.e., VQGAN, a text encoder, and a denoising UNet), totally comprising 1.7 billion parameters, in which 0.5 billion parameters are dedicated to temporal capabilities. The model demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art methods across three evaluation metrics. The code and an online demo are available at \url{https://modelscope.cn/models/damo/text-to-video-synthesis/summary}.

Jiuniu Wang, Wenjia Xu, Qingzhong Wang et al.

Recent image captioning models are achieving impressive results based on popular metrics, i.e., BLEU, CIDEr, and SPICE. However, focusing on the most popular metrics that only consider the overlap between the generated captions and human annotation could result in using common words and phrases, which lacks distinctiveness, i.e., many similar images have the same caption. In this paper, we aim to improve the distinctiveness of image captions via comparing and reweighting with a set of similar images. First, we propose a distinctiveness metric -- between-set CIDEr (CIDErBtw) to evaluate the distinctiveness of a caption with respect to those of similar images. Our metric reveals that the human annotations of each image in the MSCOCO dataset are not equivalent based on distinctiveness; however, previous works normally treat the human annotations equally during training, which could be a reason for generating less distinctive captions. In contrast, we reweight each ground-truth caption according to its distinctiveness during training. We further integrate a long-tailed weight strategy to highlight the rare words that contain more information, and captions from the similar image set are sampled as negative examples to encourage the generated sentence to be unique. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted, showing that our proposed approach significantly improves both distinctiveness (as measured by CIDErBtw and retrieval metrics) and accuracy (e.g., as measured by CIDEr) for a wide variety of image captioning baselines. These results are further confirmed through a user study.

Yujie Li, Jiuniu Wang, Mugen Peng et al.

Long-horizon Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling~(FJSP) presents a formidable combinatorial challenge due to complex, interdependent decisions spanning extended time horizons. While learning-based Rolling Horizon Optimization~(RHO) has emerged as a promising paradigm to accelerate solving by identifying and fixing invariant operations, its effectiveness is hindered by the structural complexity of FJSP. Existing methods often fail to capture intricate graph-structured dependencies and ignore the asymmetric costs of prediction errors, in which misclassifying critical-path operations is significantly more detrimental than misclassifying non-critical ones. Furthermore, dynamic shifts in predictive confidence during the rolling process make static pruning thresholds inadequate. To address these limitations, we propose Graph-RHO, a novel critical-path-aware graph-based RHO framework. First, we introduce a topology-aware heterogeneous graph network that encodes subproblems as operation-machine graphs with multi-relational edges, leveraging edge-feature-aware message passing to predict operation stability. Second, we incorporate a critical-path-aware mechanism that injects inductive biases during training to distinguish highly sensitive bottleneck operations from robust ones. Third, we devise an adaptive thresholding strategy that dynamically calibrates decision boundaries based on online uncertainty estimation to align model predictions with the solver's search space. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that \mbox{Graph-RHO} establishes a new state of the art in solution quality and computational efficiency. Remarkably, it exhibits exceptional zero-shot generalization, reducing solve time by over 30\% on large-scale instances (2000 operations) while achieving superior solution quality. Our code is available \href{https://github.com/IntelliSensing/Graph-RHO}{here}.

Youyuan Zhang, Jiuniu Wang, Hao Wu et al.

Image captioning models are usually trained according to human annotated ground-truth captions, which could generate accurate but generic captions. In this paper, we focus on generating distinctive captions that can distinguish the target image from other similar images. To evaluate the distinctiveness of captions, we introduce a series of metrics that use large-scale vision-language pre-training model CLIP to quantify the distinctiveness. To further improve the distinctiveness of captioning models, we propose a simple and effective training strategy that trains the model by comparing target image with similar image group and optimizing the group embedding gap. Extensive experiments are conducted on various baseline models to demonstrate the wide applicability of our strategy and the consistency of metric results with human evaluation. By comparing the performance of our best model with existing state-of-the-art models, we claim that our model achieves new state-of-the-art towards distinctiveness objective.

Haoling Li, Jiuniu Wang, Zhiwei Wei et al.

Navigation and localization of UAVs present a challenge when global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are disrupted and unreliable. Traditional techniques, such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and visual odometry (VO), exhibit certain limitations in furnishing absolute coordinates and mitigating error accumulation. Existing visual localization methods achieve autonomous visual localization without error accumulation by matching with ortho satellite images. However, doing so cannot guarantee real-time performance due to the complex matching process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Global-Local Visual Localization (GLVL) network. Our GLVL network is a two-stage visual localization approach, combining a large-scale retrieval module that finds similar regions with the UAV flight scene, and a fine-grained matching module that localizes the precise UAV coordinate, enabling real-time and precise localization. The training process is jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner to further enhance the model capability. Experiments on six UAV flight scenes encompassing both texture-rich and texture-sparse regions demonstrate the ability of our model to achieve the real-time precise localization requirements of UAVs. Particularly, our method achieves a localization error of only 2.39 meters in 0.48 seconds in a village scene with sparse texture features.

Wenjia Xu, Jiuniu Wang, Yirong Wu

Urban region function recognition plays a vital character in monitoring and managing the limited urban areas. Since urban functions are complex and full of social-economic properties, simply using remote sensing~(RS) images equipped with physical and optical information cannot completely solve the classification task. On the other hand, with the development of mobile communication and the internet, the acquisition of geospatial big data~(GBD) becomes possible. In this paper, we propose a Multi-dimension Feature Learning Model~(MDFL) using high-dimensional GBD data in conjunction with RS images for urban region function recognition. When extracting multi-dimension features, our model considers the user-related information modeled by their activity, as well as the region-based information abstracted from the region graph. Furthermore, we propose a decision fusion network that integrates the decisions from several neural networks and machine learning classifiers, and the final decision is made considering both the visual cue from the RS images and the social information from the GBD data. Through quantitative evaluation, we demonstrate that our model achieves overall accuracy at 92.75, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 10 percent.

Yujie Li, Wenjia Xu, Guangzuo Li et al.

The domain gap between remote sensing imagery and natural images has recently received widespread attention and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated excellent generalization performance in remote sensing multimodal tasks. However, current research is still limited in exploring how remote sensing VLMs handle different types of visual inputs. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{UniRS}, the first vision-language model \textbf{uni}fying multi-temporal \textbf{r}emote \textbf{s}ensing tasks across various types of visual input. UniRS supports single images, dual-time image pairs, and videos as input, enabling comprehensive remote sensing temporal analysis within a unified framework. We adopt a unified visual representation approach, enabling the model to accept various visual inputs. For dual-time image pair tasks, we customize a change extraction module to further enhance the extraction of spatiotemporal features. Additionally, we design a prompt augmentation mechanism tailored to the model's reasoning process, utilizing the prior knowledge of the general-purpose VLM to provide clues for UniRS. To promote multi-task knowledge sharing, the model is jointly fine-tuned on a mixed dataset. Experimental results show that UniRS achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse tasks, including visual question answering, change captioning, and video scene classification, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness in unifying these multi-temporal remote sensing tasks. Our code and dataset will be released soon.

Wenjia Xu, Zijian Yu, Boyang Mu et al.

The unprecedented advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong potential in interacting with humans through both language and visual inputs to perform downstream tasks such as visual question answering and scene understanding. However, these models are constrained to basic instruction-following or descriptive tasks, facing challenges in complex real-world remote sensing applications that require specialized tools and knowledge. To address these limitations, we propose RS-Agent, an AI agent designed to interact with human users and autonomously leverage specialized models to address the demands of real-world remote sensing applications. RS-Agent integrates four key components: a Central Controller based on large language models, a dynamic toolkit for tool execution, a Solution Space for task-specific expert guidance, and a Knowledge Space for domain-level reasoning, enabling it to interpret user queries and orchestrate tools for accurate remote sensing task. We introduce two novel mechanisms: Task-Aware Retrieval, which improves tool selection accuracy through expert-guided planning, and DualRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation method that enhances knowledge relevance through weighted, dual-path retrieval. RS-Agent supports flexible integration of new tools and is compatible with both open-source and proprietary LLMs. Extensive experiments across 9 datasets and 18 remote sensing tasks demonstrate that RS-Agent significantly outperforms state-of-the-art MLLMs, achieving over 95% task planning accuracy and delivering superior performance in tasks such as scene classification, object counting, and remote sensing visual question answering. Our work presents RS-Agent as a robust and extensible framework for advancing intelligent automation in remote sensing analysis.

Wenjia Xu, Yaxuan Yao, Jiaqi Cao et al.

The application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) has been widely extended recently. It is crucial to ensure accurate latitude and longitude coordinates for UAVs, especially when the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are disrupted and unreliable. Existing visual localization methods achieve autonomous visual localization without error accumulation by matching the ground-down view image of UAV with the ortho satellite maps. However, collecting UAV ground-down view images across diverse locations is costly, leading to a scarcity of large-scale datasets for real-world scenarios. Existing datasets for UAV visual localization are often limited to small geographic areas or are focused only on urban regions with distinct textures. To address this, we define the UAV visual localization task by determining the UAV's real position coordinates on a large-scale satellite map based on the captured ground-down view. In this paper, we present a large-scale dataset, UAV-VisLoc, to facilitate the UAV visual localization task. This dataset comprises images from diverse drones across 11 locations in China, capturing a range of topographical features. The dataset features images from fixed-wing drones and multi-terrain drones, captured at different altitudes and orientations. Our dataset includes 6,742 drone images and 11 satellite maps, with metadata such as latitude, longitude, altitude, and capture date. Our dataset is tailored to support both the training and testing of models by providing a diverse and extensive data.

Wenjia Xu, Jiuniu Wang, Zhiwei Wei et al.

Deep neural networks have achieved promising progress in remote sensing (RS) image classification, for which the training process requires abundant samples for each class. However, it is time-consuming and unrealistic to annotate labels for each RS category, given the fact that the RS target database is increasing dynamically. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) allows for identifying novel classes that are not seen during training, which provides a promising solution for the aforementioned problem. However, previous ZSL models mainly depend on manually-labeled attributes or word embeddings extracted from language models to transfer knowledge from seen classes to novel classes. Besides, pioneer ZSL models use convolutional neural networks pre-trained on ImageNet, which focus on the main objects appearing in each image, neglecting the background context that also matters in RS scene classification. To address the above problems, we propose to collect visually detectable attributes automatically. We predict attributes for each class by depicting the semantic-visual similarity between attributes and images. In this way, the attribute annotation process is accomplished by machine instead of human as in other methods. Moreover, we propose a Deep Semantic-Visual Alignment (DSVA) that take advantage of the self-attention mechanism in the transformer to associate local image regions together, integrating the background context information for prediction. The DSVA model further utilizes the attribute attention maps to focus on the informative image regions that are essential for knowledge transfer in ZSL, and maps the visual images into attribute space to perform ZSL classification. With extensive experiments, we show that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art models by a large margin on a challenging large-scale RS scene classification benchmark.

Jiuniu Wang, Zehua Du, Yuyuan Zhao et al.

The Agent and AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content) technologies have recently made significant progress. We propose AesopAgent, an Agent-driven Evolutionary System on Story-to-Video Production. AesopAgent is a practical application of agent technology for multimodal content generation. The system integrates multiple generative capabilities within a unified framework, so that individual users can leverage these modules easily. This innovative system would convert user story proposals into scripts, images, and audio, and then integrate these multimodal contents into videos. Additionally, the animating units (e.g., Gen-2 and Sora) could make the videos more infectious. The AesopAgent system could orchestrate task workflow for video generation, ensuring that the generated video is both rich in content and coherent. This system mainly contains two layers, i.e., the Horizontal Layer and the Utility Layer. In the Horizontal Layer, we introduce a novel RAG-based evolutionary system that optimizes the whole video generation workflow and the steps within the workflow. It continuously evolves and iteratively optimizes workflow by accumulating expert experience and professional knowledge, including optimizing the LLM prompts and utilities usage. The Utility Layer provides multiple utilities, leading to consistent image generation that is visually coherent in terms of composition, characters, and style. Meanwhile, it provides audio and special effects, integrating them into expressive and logically arranged videos. Overall, our AesopAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with many previous works in visual storytelling. Our AesopAgent is designed for convenient service for individual users, which is available on the following page: https://aesopai.github.io/.

Xingyu Miao, Haoran Duan, Quanhao Qian et al.

Spatial intelligence is emerging as a transformative frontier in AI, yet it remains constrained by the scarcity of large-scale 3D datasets. Unlike the abundant 2D imagery, acquiring 3D data typically requires specialized sensors and laborious annotation. In this work, we present a scalable pipeline that converts single-view images into comprehensive, scale- and appearance-realistic 3D representations - including point clouds, camera poses, depth maps, and pseudo-RGBD - via integrated depth estimation, camera calibration, and scale calibration. Our method bridges the gap between the vast repository of imagery and the increasing demand for spatial scene understanding. By automatically generating authentic, scale-aware 3D data from images, we significantly reduce data collection costs and open new avenues for advancing spatial intelligence. We release two generated spatial datasets, i.e., COCO-3D and Objects365-v2-3D, and demonstrate through extensive experiments that our generated data can benefit various 3D tasks, ranging from fundamental perception to MLLM-based reasoning. These results validate our pipeline as an effective solution for developing AI systems capable of perceiving, understanding, and interacting with physical environments.

Jiuniu Wang, Gongjie Zhang, Quanhao Qian et al.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are fundamental to digital design and robot control, encoding not only visual structure but also motion paths in interactive drawings. In this work, we introduce RoboSVG, a unified multimodal framework for generating interactive SVGs guided by textual, visual, and numerical signals. Given an input query, the RoboSVG model first produces multimodal guidance, then synthesizes candidate SVGs through dedicated generation modules, and finally refines them under numerical guidance to yield high-quality outputs. To support this framework, we construct RoboDraw, a large-scale dataset of one million examples, each pairing an SVG generation condition (e.g., text, image, and partial SVG) with its corresponding ground-truth SVG code. RoboDraw dataset enables systematic study of four tasks, including basic generation (Text-to-SVG, Image-to-SVG) and interactive generation (PartialSVG-to-SVG, PartialImage-to-SVG). Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboSVG achieves superior query compliance and visual fidelity across tasks, establishing a new state of the art in versatile SVG generation. The dataset and source code of this project will be publicly available soon.

Quanhao Qian, Guoyang Zhao, Gongjie Zhang et al.

Effective robotic manipulation relies on a precise understanding of 3D scene geometry, and one of the most straightforward ways to acquire such geometry is through multi-view observations. Motivated by this, we present GP3 -- a 3D geometry-aware robotic manipulation policy that leverages multi-view input. GP3 employs a spatial encoder to infer dense spatial features from RGB observations, which enable the estimation of depth and camera parameters, leading to a compact yet expressive 3D scene representation tailored for manipulation. This representation is fused with language instructions and translated into continuous actions via a lightweight policy head. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that GP3 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on simulated benchmarks. Furthermore, GP3 transfers effectively to real-world robots without depth sensors or pre-mapped environments, requiring only minimal fine-tuning. These results highlight GP3 as a practical, sensor-agnostic solution for geometry-aware robotic manipulation.

Jiuniu Wang, Wenjia Xu, Qingzhong Wang et al.

Recent advances in image captioning have focused on enhancing accuracy by substantially increasing the dataset and model size. While conventional captioning models exhibit high performance on established metrics such as BLEU, CIDEr, and SPICE, the capability of captions to distinguish the target image from other similar images is under-explored. To generate distinctive captions, a few pioneers employed contrastive learning or re-weighted the ground-truth captions. However, these approaches often overlook the relationships among objects in a similar image group (e.g., items or properties within the same album or fine-grained events). In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to enhance the distinctiveness of image captions, namely Group-based Differential Distinctive Captioning Method, which visually compares each image with other images in one similar group and highlights the uniqueness of each image. In particular, we introduce a Group-based Differential Memory Attention (GDMA) module, designed to identify and emphasize object features in an image that are uniquely distinguishable within its image group, i.e., those exhibiting low similarity with objects in other images. This mechanism ensures that such unique object features are prioritized during caption generation for the image, thereby enhancing the distinctiveness of the resulting captions. To further refine this process, we select distinctive words from the ground-truth captions to guide both the language decoder and the GDMA module. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation metric, the Distinctive Word Rate (DisWordRate), to quantitatively assess caption distinctiveness. Quantitative results indicate that the proposed method significantly improves the distinctiveness of several baseline models, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on distinctiveness while not excessively sacrificing accuracy...

Jiuniu Wang, Wenjia Xu, Qingzhong Wang et al.

Describing images using natural language is widely known as image captioning, which has made consistent progress due to the development of computer vision and natural language generation techniques. Though conventional captioning models achieve high accuracy based on popular metrics, i.e., BLEU, CIDEr, and SPICE, the ability of captions to distinguish the target image from other similar images is under-explored. To generate distinctive captions, a few pioneers employ contrastive learning or re-weighted the ground-truth captions, which focuses on one single input image. However, the relationships between objects in a similar image group (e.g., items or properties within the same album or fine-grained events) are neglected. In this paper, we improve the distinctiveness of image captions using a Group-based Distinctive Captioning Model (GdisCap), which compares each image with other images in one similar group and highlights the uniqueness of each image. In particular, we propose a group-based memory attention (GMA) module, which stores object features that are unique among the image group (i.e., with low similarity to objects in other images). These unique object features are highlighted when generating captions, resulting in more distinctive captions. Furthermore, the distinctive words in the ground-truth captions are selected to supervise the language decoder and GMA. Finally, we propose a new evaluation metric, distinctive word rate (DisWordRate) to measure the distinctiveness of captions. Quantitative results indicate that the proposed method significantly improves the distinctiveness of several baseline models, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both accuracy and distinctiveness. Results of a user study agree with the quantitative evaluation and demonstrate the rationality of the new metric DisWordRate.

Wenjia Xu, Jiuniu Wang, Yang Wang et al.

Image classification models have achieved satisfactory performance on many datasets, sometimes even better than human. However, The model attention is unclear since the lack of interpretability. This paper investigates the fidelity and interpretability of model attention. We propose an Explainable Attribute-based Multi-task (EAT) framework to concentrate the model attention on the discriminative image area and make the attention interpretable. We introduce attributes prediction to the multi-task learning network, helping the network to concentrate attention on the foreground objects. We generate attribute-based textual explanations for the network and ground the attributes on the image to show visual explanations. The multi-model explanation can not only improve user trust but also help to find the weakness of network and dataset. Our framework can be generalized to any basic model. We perform experiments on three datasets and five basic models. Results indicate that the EAT framework can give multi-modal explanations that interpret the network decision. The performance of several recognition approaches is improved by guiding network attention.

Jiuniu Wang, Wenjia Xu, Xingyu Fu et al.

The question answering system can answer questions from various fields and forms with deep neural networks, but it still lacks effective ways when facing multiple evidences. We introduce a new model called SRQA, which means Synthetic Reader for Factoid Question Answering. This model enhances the question answering system in the multi-document scenario from three aspects: model structure, optimization goal, and training method, corresponding to Multilayer Attention (MA), Cross Evidence (CE), and Adversarial Training (AT) respectively. First, we propose a multilayer attention network to obtain a better representation of the evidences. The multilayer attention mechanism conducts interaction between the question and the passage within each layer, making the token representation of evidences in each layer takes the requirement of the question into account. Second, we design a cross evidence strategy to choose the answer span within more evidences. We improve the optimization goal, considering all the answers' locations in multiple evidences as training targets, which leads the model to reason among multiple evidences. Third, adversarial training is employed to high-level variables besides the word embedding in our model. A new normalization method is also proposed for adversarial perturbations so that we can jointly add perturbations to several target variables. As an effective regularization method, adversarial training enhances the model's ability to process noisy data. Combining these three strategies, we enhance the contextual representation and locating ability of our model, which could synthetically extract the answer span from several evidences. We perform SRQA on the WebQA dataset, and experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models (the best fuzzy score of our model is up to 78.56%, with an improvement of about 2%).

Jiuniu Wang, Wenjia Xu, Xingyu Fu et al.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a challenging task that extracts named entities from unstructured text data, including news, articles, social comments, etc. The NER system has been studied for decades. Recently, the development of Deep Neural Networks and the progress of pre-trained word embedding have become a driving force for NER. Under such circumstances, how to make full use of the information extracted by word embedding requires more in-depth research. In this paper, we propose an Adversarial Trained LSTM-CNN (ASTRAL) system to improve the current NER method from both the model structure and the training process. In order to make use of the spatial information between adjacent words, Gated-CNN is introduced to fuse the information of adjacent words. Besides, a specific Adversarial training method is proposed to deal with the overfitting problem in NER. We add perturbation to variables in the network during the training process, making the variables more diverse, improving the generalization and robustness of the model. Our model is evaluated on three benchmarks, CoNLL-03, OntoNotes 5.0, and WNUT-17, achieving state-of-the-art results. Ablation study and case study also show that our system can converge faster and is less prone to overfitting.

Wenjia Xu, Yongqin Xian, Jiuniu Wang et al.

From the beginning of zero-shot learning research, visual attributes have been shown to play an important role. In order to better transfer attribute-based knowledge from known to unknown classes, we argue that an image representation with integrated attribute localization ability would be beneficial for zero-shot learning. To this end, we propose a novel zero-shot representation learning framework that jointly learns discriminative global and local features using only class-level attributes. While a visual-semantic embedding layer learns global features, local features are learned through an attribute prototype network that simultaneously regresses and decorrelates attributes from intermediate features. We show that our locality augmented image representations achieve a new state-of-the-art on three zero-shot learning benchmarks. As an additional benefit, our model points to the visual evidence of the attributes in an image, e.g. for the CUB dataset, confirming the improved attribute localization ability of our image representation.

Jiuniu Wang, Wenjia Xu, Qingzhong Wang et al.

A wide range of image captioning models has been developed, achieving significant improvement based on popular metrics, such as BLEU, CIDEr, and SPICE. However, although the generated captions can accurately describe the image, they are generic for similar images and lack distinctiveness, i.e., cannot properly describe the uniqueness of each image. In this paper, we aim to improve the distinctiveness of image captions through training with sets of similar images. First, we propose a distinctiveness metric -- between-set CIDEr (CIDErBtw) to evaluate the distinctiveness of a caption with respect to those of similar images. Our metric shows that the human annotations of each image are not equivalent based on distinctiveness. Thus we propose several new training strategies to encourage the distinctiveness of the generated caption for each image, which are based on using CIDErBtw in a weighted loss function or as a reinforcement learning reward. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted, showing that our proposed approach significantly improves both distinctiveness (as measured by CIDErBtw and retrieval metrics) and accuracy (e.g., as measured by CIDEr) for a wide variety of image captioning baselines. These results are further confirmed through a user study.

Jiuniu Wang, Xingyu Fu, Guangluan Xu et al.

In this paper, we introduce Adversarial-and-attention Network (A3Net) for Machine Reading Comprehension. This model extends existing approaches from two perspectives. First, adversarial training is applied to several target variables within the model, rather than only to the inputs or embeddings. We control the norm of adversarial perturbations according to the norm of original target variables, so that we can jointly add perturbations to several target variables during training. As an effective regularization method, adversarial training improves robustness and generalization of our model. Second, we propose a multi-layer attention network utilizing three kinds of high-efficiency attention mechanisms. Multi-layer attention conducts interaction between question and passage within each layer, which contributes to reasonable representation and understanding of the model. Combining these two contributions, we enhance the diversity of dataset and the information extracting ability of the model at the same time. Meanwhile, we construct A3Net for the WebQA dataset. Results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models (improving Fuzzy Score from 73.50% to 77.0%).