Ling Yan

Yan Ling, Jianfei Yu, Rui Xia

As an important task in sentiment analysis, Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, previous approaches either (i) use separately pre-trained visual and textual models, which ignore the crossmodal alignment or (ii) use vision-language models pre-trained with general pre-training tasks, which are inadequate to identify finegrained aspects, opinions, and their alignments across modalities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a task-specific Vision-Language Pre-training framework for MABSA (VLPMABSA), which is a unified multimodal encoder-decoder architecture for all the pretraining and downstream tasks. We further design three types of task-specific pre-training tasks from the language, vision, and multimodal modalities, respectively. Experimental results show that our approach generally outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on three MABSA subtasks. Further analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of each pretraining task. The source code is publicly released at https://github.com/NUSTM/VLP-MABSA.

Xinyi Yu, Ling Yan, Yang Yang et al.

Knowledge distillation has made remarkable achievements in model compression. However, most existing methods require the original training data, which is usually unavailable due to privacy and security issues. In this paper, we propose a conditional generative data-free knowledge distillation (CGDD) framework for training lightweight networks without any training data. This method realizes efficient knowledge distillation based on conditional image generation. Specifically, we treat the preset labels as ground truth to train a conditional generator in a semi-supervised manner. The trained generator can produce specified classes of training images. For training the student network, we force it to extract the knowledge hidden in teacher feature maps, which provide crucial cues for the learning process. Moreover, an adversarial training framework for promoting distillation performance is constructed by designing several loss functions. This framework helps the student model to explore larger data space. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on different datasets. Compared with other data-free works, our work obtains state-of-the-art results on CIFAR100, Caltech101, and different versions of ImageNet datasets. The codes will be released.