Xuesong Zhang

Jia Li, Yin Chen, Xuesong Zhang et al.

In this paper, we present our advanced solutions to the two sub-challenges of Affective Behavior Analysis in the wild (ABAW) 2023: the Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation Challenge and Expression (Expr) Classification Challenge. ABAW 2023 aims to tackle the challenge of affective behavior analysis in natural contexts, with the ultimate goal of creating intelligent machines and robots that possess the ability to comprehend human emotions, feelings, and behaviors. For the Expression Classification Challenge, we propose a streamlined approach that handles the challenges of classification effectively. However, our main contribution lies in our use of diverse models and tools to extract multimodal features such as audio and video cues from the Hume-Reaction dataset. By studying, analyzing, and combining these features, we significantly enhance the model's accuracy for sentiment prediction in a multimodal context. Furthermore, our method achieves outstanding results on the Emotional Reaction Intensity (ERI) Estimation Challenge, surpassing the baseline method by an impressive 84\% increase, as measured by the Pearson Coefficient, on the validation dataset.

Xuesong Zhang, Jia Li, Yunbo Xu et al.

Autonomous navigation guided by natural language instructions in embodied environments remains a challenge for vision-language navigation (VLN) agents. Although recent advancements in learning diverse and fine-grained visual environmental representations have shown promise, the fragile performance improvements may not conclusively attribute to enhanced visual grounding,a limitation also observed in related vision-language tasks. In this work, we preliminarily investigate whether advanced VLN models genuinely comprehend the visual content of their environments by introducing varying levels of visual perturbations. These perturbations include ground-truth depth images, perturbed views and random noise. Surprisingly, we experimentally find that simple branch expansion, even with noisy visual inputs, paradoxically improves the navigational efficacy. Inspired by these insights, we further present a versatile Multi-Branch Architecture (MBA) designed to delve into the impact of both the branch quantity and visual quality. The proposed MBA extends a base agent into a multi-branch variant, where each branch processes a different visual input. This approach is embarrassingly simple yet agnostic to topology-based VLN agents. Extensive experiments on three VLN benchmarks (R2R, REVERIE, SOON) demonstrate that our method with optimal visual permutations matches or even surpasses state-of-the-art results. The source code is available at here.

Yunbo Xu, Xuesong Zhang, Jia Li et al.

Following language instructions, vision-language navigation (VLN) agents are tasked with navigating unseen environments. While augmenting multifaceted visual representations has propelled advancements in VLN, the significance of foreground and background in visual observations remains underexplored. Intuitively, foreground regions provide semantic cues, whereas the background encompasses spatial connectivity information. Inspired on this insight, we propose a Consensus-driven Online Feature Augmentation strategy (COFA) with alternative foreground and background features to facilitate the navigable generalization. Specifically, we first leverage semantically-enhanced landmark identification to disentangle foreground and background as candidate augmented features. Subsequently, a consensus-driven online augmentation strategy encourages the agent to consolidate two-stage voting results on feature preferences according to diverse instructions and navigational locations. Experiments on REVERIE and R2R demonstrate that our online foreground-background augmentation boosts the generalization of baseline and attains state-of-the-art performance.