Qi Feng

Qi Feng, Hubert P. H. Shum, Shigeo Morishima

Pre-captured immersive environments using omnidirectional cameras provide a wide range of virtual reality applications. Previous research has shown that manipulating the eye height in egocentric virtual environments can significantly affect distance perception and immersion. However, the influence of eye height in pre-captured real environments has received less attention due to the difficulty of altering the perspective after finishing the capture process. To explore this influence, we first propose a pilot study that captures real environments with multiple eye heights and asks participants to judge the egocentric distances and immersion. If a significant influence is confirmed, an effective image-based approach to adapt pre-captured real-world environments to the user's eye height would be desirable. Motivated by the study, we propose a learning-based approach for synthesizing novel views for omnidirectional images with altered eye heights. This approach employs a multitask architecture that learns depth and semantic segmentation in two formats, and generates high-quality depth and semantic segmentation to facilitate the inpainting stage. With the improved omnidirectional-aware layered depth image, our approach synthesizes natural and realistic visuals for eye height adaptation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows favorable results against state-of-the-art methods, and an extensive user study verifies improved perception and immersion for pre-captured real-world environments.

Ryosuke Oshima, Seitaro Shinagawa, Hideki Tsunashima et al.

Effective communication between humans and intelligent agents has promising applications for solving complex problems. One such approach is visual dialogue, which leverages multimodal context to assist humans. However, real-world scenarios occasionally involve human mistakes, which can cause intelligent agents to fail. While most prior research assumes perfect answers from human interlocutors, we focus on a setting where the agent points out unintentional mistakes for the interlocutor to review, better reflecting real-world situations. In this paper, we show that human answer mistakes depend on question type and QA turn in the visual dialogue by analyzing a previously unused data collection of human mistakes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of those factors for the model's accuracy in a pointing-human-mistake task through experiments using a simple MLP model and a Visual Language Model.

Taichi Higasa, Keitaro Tanaka, Qi Feng et al.

Language learners should regularly engage in reading challenging materials as part of their study routine. Nevertheless, constantly referring to dictionaries is time-consuming and distracting. This paper presents a novel gaze-driven sentence simplification system designed to enhance reading comprehension while maintaining their focus on the content. Our system incorporates machine learning models tailored to individual learners, combining eye gaze features and linguistic features to assess sentence comprehension. When the system identifies comprehension difficulties, it provides simplified versions by replacing complex vocabulary and grammar with simpler alternatives via GPT-3.5. We conducted an experiment with 19 English learners, collecting data on their eye movements while reading English text. The results demonstrated that our system is capable of accurately estimating sentence-level comprehension. Additionally, we found that GPT-3.5 simplification improved readability in terms of traditional readability metrics and individual word difficulty, paraphrasing across different linguistic levels.

Sara Kashiwagi, Keitaro Tanaka, Qi Feng et al.

This paper presents a novel metric learning approach to address the performance gap between normal and silent speech in visual speech recognition (VSR). The difference in lip movements between the two poses a challenge for existing VSR models, which exhibit degraded accuracy when applied to silent speech. To solve this issue and tackle the scarcity of training data for silent speech, we propose to leverage the shared literal content between normal and silent speech and present a metric learning approach based on visemes. Specifically, we aim to map the input of two speech types close to each other in a latent space if they have similar viseme representations. By minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence of the predicted viseme probability distributions between and within the two speech types, our model effectively learns and predicts viseme identities. Our evaluation demonstrates that our method improves the accuracy of silent VSR, even when limited training data is available.

Zhipeng Su, Yixiong Zhang, Xiao-Ping Zhang et al.

Rain streaks showing in images or videos would severely degrade the performance of computer vision applications. Thus, it is of vital importance to remove rain streaks and facilitate our vision systems. While recent convolutinal neural network based methods have shown promising results in single image rain removal (SIRR), they fail to effectively capture long-range location dependencies or aggregate convolutional channel information simultaneously. However, as SIRR is a highly illposed problem, these spatial and channel information are very important clues to solve SIRR. First, spatial information could help our model to understand the image context by gathering long-range dependency location information hidden in the image. Second, aggregating channels could help our model to concentrate on channels more related to image background instead of rain streaks. In this paper, we propose a non-local channel aggregation network (NCANet) to address the SIRR problem. NCANet models 2D rainy images as sequences of vectors in three directions, namely vertical direction, transverse direction and channel direction. Recurrently aggregating information from all three directions enables our model to capture the long-range dependencies in both channels and spaitials locations. Extensive experiments on both heavy and light rain image data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed NCANet model.

Feng Qi

Here we build a hierarchical modular network called Language guided machine action (LGMA), whose modules process information stream mimicking human cortical network that allows to achieve multiple general tasks such as language guided action, intention decomposition and mental simulation before action execution etc. LGMA contains 3 main systems: (1) primary sensory system that multimodal sensory information of vision, language and sensorimotor. (2) association system involves and Broca modules to comprehend and synthesize language, BA14/40 module to translate between sensorimotor and language, midTemporal module to convert between language and vision, and superior parietal lobe to integrate attended visual object and arm state into cognitive map for future spatial actions. Pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) can converts high level intention into sequential atomic actions, while SMA can integrate these atomic actions, current arm and attended object state into sensorimotor vector to apply corresponding torques on arm via pre-motor and primary motor of arm to achieve the intention. The high-level executive system contains PFC that does explicit inference and guide voluntary action based on language, while BG is the habitual action control center.

Feng Qi, Guanjun Jiang

Using language makes human beings surpass animals in wisdom. To let machines understand, learn, and use language flexibly, we propose a human-like general language processing (HGLP) architecture, which contains sensorimotor, association, and cognitive systems. The HGLP network learns from easy to hard like a child, understands word meaning by coactivating multimodal neurons, comprehends and generates sentences by real-time constructing a virtual world model, and can express the whole thinking process verbally. HGLP rapidly learned 10+ different tasks including object recognition, sentence comprehension, imagination, attention control, query, inference, motion judgement, mixed arithmetic operation, digit tracing and writing, and human-like iterative thinking process guided by language. Language in the HGLP framework is not matching nor correlation statistics, but a script that can describe and control the imagination.