Ho‐Joong Kim

Yeong-Joon Ju, Ho-Joong Kim, Seong-Whan Lee

Recent multimodal retrieval methods have endowed text-based retrievers with multimodal capabilities by utilizing pre-training strategies for visual-text alignment. They often directly fuse the two modalities for cross-reference during the alignment to understand multimodal queries. However, existing methods often overlook crucial visual information due to a text-dominant issue, which overly depends on text-driven signals. In this paper, we introduce MIRe, a retrieval framework that achieves modality interaction without fusing textual features during the alignment. Our method allows the textual query to attend to visual embeddings while not feeding text-driven signals back into the visual representations. Additionally, we construct a pre-training dataset for multimodal query retrieval by transforming concise question-answer pairs into extended passages. Our experiments demonstrate that our pre-training strategy significantly enhances the understanding of multimodal queries, resulting in strong performance across four multimodal retrieval benchmarks under zero-shot settings. Moreover, our ablation studies and analyses explicitly verify the effectiveness of our framework in mitigating the text-dominant issue. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/yeongjoonJu/MIRe

Jung-Ho Hong, Ho-Joong Kim, Kyu-Sung Jeon et al.

The feature attribution method reveals the contribution of input variables to the decision-making process to provide an attribution map for explanation. Existing methods grounded on the information bottleneck principle compute information in a specific layer to obtain attributions, compressing the features by injecting noise via a parametric damping ratio. However, the attribution obtained in a specific layer neglects evidence of the decision-making process distributed across layers. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive information bottleneck (CoIBA), which discovers the relevant information in each targeted layer to explain the decision-making process. Our core idea is applying information bottleneck in multiple targeted layers to estimate the comprehensive information by sharing a parametric damping ratio across the layers. Leveraging this shared ratio complements the over-compressed information to discover the omitted clues of the decision by sharing the relevant information across the targeted layers. We suggest the variational approach to fairly reflect the relevant information of each layer by upper bounding layer-wise information. Therefore, CoIBA guarantees that the discarded activation is unnecessary in every targeted layer to make a decision. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the enhancement in faithfulness of the feature attributions provided by CoIBA.

Ju-Young Oh, Ho-Joong Kim, Seong-Whan Lee

Video question answering (VQA) is a multimodal task that requires the interpretation of a video to answer a given question. Existing VQA methods primarily utilize question and answer (Q&A) pairs to learn the spatio-temporal characteristics of video content. However, these annotations are typically event-centric, which is not enough to capture the broader context of each video. The absence of essential details such as object types, spatial layouts, and descriptive attributes restricts the model to learning only a fragmented scene representation. This issue limits the model's capacity for generalization and higher-level reasoning. In this paper, we propose a fundamental question generation with the integration of question embeddings for video question answering (FIQ), a novel approach designed to strengthen the reasoning ability of the model by enhancing the fundamental understanding of videos. FIQ generates Q&A pairs based on descriptions extracted from videos, enriching the training data with fundamental scene information. Generated Q&A pairs enable the model to understand the primary context, leading to enhanced generalizability and reasoning ability. Furthermore, we incorporate a VQ-CAlign module that assists task-specific question embeddings with visual features, ensuring that essential domain-specific details are preserved to increase the adaptability of downstream tasks. Experiments on SUTD-TrafficQA demonstrate that our FIQ achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing baseline methods.