Yuan Zhao

Patrick Lee, Alain Chirino Trujillo, Diana Cuevas Plancarte et al.

This study investigates the computational processing of euphemisms, a universal linguistic phenomenon, across multiple languages. We train a multilingual transformer model (XLM-RoBERTa) to disambiguate potentially euphemistic terms (PETs) in multilingual and cross-lingual settings. In line with current trends, we demonstrate that zero-shot learning across languages takes place. We also show cases where multilingual models perform better on the task compared to monolingual models by a statistically significant margin, indicating that multilingual data presents additional opportunities for models to learn about cross-lingual, computational properties of euphemisms. In a follow-up analysis, we focus on universal euphemistic "categories" such as death and bodily functions among others. We test to see whether cross-lingual data of the same domain is more important than within-language data of other domains to further understand the nature of the cross-lingual transfer.

Patrick Lee, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Alain Chirino Trujillo et al.

Transformers have been shown to work well for the task of English euphemism disambiguation, in which a potentially euphemistic term (PET) is classified as euphemistic or non-euphemistic in a particular context. In this study, we expand on the task in two ways. First, we annotate PETs for vagueness, a linguistic property associated with euphemisms, and find that transformers are generally better at classifying vague PETs, suggesting linguistic differences in the data that impact performance. Second, we present novel euphemism corpora in three different languages: Yoruba, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. We perform euphemism disambiguation experiments in each language using multilingual transformer models mBERT and XLM-RoBERTa, establishing preliminary results from which to launch future work.

Luanxuan Hou, Jie Cao, Yuan Zhao et al.

We propose an augmented Parallel-Pyramid Net ($P^2~Net$) with feature refinement by dilated bottleneck and attention module. During data preprocessing, we proposed a differentiable auto data augmentation ($DA^2$) method. We formulate the problem of searching data augmentaion policy in a differentiable form, so that the optimal policy setting can be easily updated by back propagation during training. $DA^2$ improves the training efficiency. A parallel-pyramid structure is followed to compensate the information loss introduced by the network. We innovate two fusion structures, i.e. Parallel Fusion and Progressive Fusion, to process pyramid features from backbone network. Both fusion structures leverage the advantages of spatial information affluence at high resolution and semantic comprehension at low resolution effectively. We propose a refinement stage for the pyramid features to further boost the accuracy of our network. By introducing dilated bottleneck and attention module, we increase the receptive field for the features with limited complexity and tune the importance to different feature channels. To further refine the feature maps after completion of feature extraction stage, an Attention Module ($AM$) is defined to extract weighted features from different scale feature maps generated by the parallel-pyramid structure. Compared with the traditional up-sampling refining, $AM$ can better capture the relationship between channels. Experiments corroborate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Notably, our method achieves the best performance on the challenging MSCOCO and MPII datasets.

Luanxuan Hou, Jie Cao, Yuan Zhao et al.

The target of human pose estimation is to determine body part or joint locations of each person from an image. This is a challenging problems with wide applications. To address this issue, this paper proposes an augmented parallel-pyramid net with attention partial module and differentiable auto-data augmentation. Technically, a parallel pyramid structure is proposed to compensate the loss of information. We take the design of parallel structure for reverse compensation. Meanwhile, the overall computational complexity does not increase. We further define an Attention Partial Module (APM) operator to extract weighted features from different scale feature maps generated by the parallel pyramid structure. Compared with refining through upsampling operator, APM can better capture the relationship between channels. At last, we proposed a differentiable auto data augmentation method to further improve estimation accuracy. We define a new pose search space where the sequences of data augmentations are formulated as a trainable and operational CNN component. Experiments corroborate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Notably, our method achieves the top-1 accuracy on the challenging COCO keypoint benchmark and the state-of-the-art results on the MPII datasets.

Wanxin Tian, Zixuan Wang, Haifeng Shen et al.

The performance of face detectors has been largely improved with the development of convolutional neural network. However, it remains challenging for face detectors to detect tiny, occluded or blurry faces. Besides, most face detectors can't locate face's position precisely and can't achieve high Intersection-over-Union (IoU) scores. We assume that problems inside are inadequate use of supervision information and imbalance between semantics and details at all level feature maps in CNN even with Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN). In this paper, we present a novel single-shot face detection network, named DF$^2$S$^2$ (Detection with Feature Fusion and Segmentation Supervision), which introduces a more effective feature fusion pyramid and a more efficient segmentation branch on ResNet-50 to handle mentioned problems. Specifically, inspired by FPN and SENet, we apply semantic information from higher-level feature maps as contextual cues to augment low-level feature maps via a spatial and channel-wise attention style, preventing details from being covered by too much semantics and making semantics and details complement each other. We further propose a semantic segmentation branch to best utilize detection supervision information meanwhile applying attention mechanism in a self-supervised manner. The segmentation branch is supervised by weak segmentation ground-truth (no extra annotation is required) in a hierarchical manner, deprecated in the inference time so it wouldn't compromise the inference speed. We evaluate our model on WIDER FACE dataset and achieved state-of-art results.