Jia Li

Sheng Zhou, Dan Guo, Jia Li et al.

Text-based visual question answering (TextVQA) faces the significant challenge of avoiding redundant relational inference. To be specific, a large number of detected objects and optical character recognition (OCR) tokens result in rich visual relationships. Existing works take all visual relationships into account for answer prediction. However, there are three observations: (1) a single subject in the images can be easily detected as multiple objects with distinct bounding boxes (considered repetitive objects). The associations between these repetitive objects are superfluous for answer reasoning; (2) two spatially distant OCR tokens detected in the image frequently have weak semantic dependencies for answer reasoning; and (3) the co-existence of nearby objects and tokens may be indicative of important visual cues for predicting answers. Rather than utilizing all of them for answer prediction, we make an effort to identify the most important connections or eliminate redundant ones. We propose a sparse spatial graph network (SSGN) that introduces a spatially aware relation pruning technique to this task. As spatial factors for relation measurement, we employ spatial distance, geometric dimension, overlap area, and DIoU for spatially aware pruning. We consider three visual relationships for graph learning: object-object, OCR-OCR tokens, and object-OCR token relationships. SSGN is a progressive graph learning architecture that verifies the pivotal relations in the correlated object-token sparse graph, and then in the respective object-based sparse graph and token-based sparse graph. Experiment results on TextVQA and ST-VQA datasets demonstrate that SSGN achieves promising performances. And some visualization results further demonstrate the interpretability of our method.

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.

Jia Li, Jiantao Nie, Dan Guo et al.

Representation learning and feature disentanglement have garnered significant research interest in the field of facial expression recognition (FER). The inherent ambiguity of emotion labels poses challenges for conventional supervised representation learning methods. Moreover, directly learning the mapping from a facial expression image to an emotion label lacks explicit supervision signals for capturing fine-grained facial features. In this paper, we propose a novel FER model, named Poker Face Vision Transformer or PF-ViT, to address these challenges. PF-ViT aims to separate and recognize the disturbance-agnostic emotion from a static facial image via generating its corresponding poker face, without the need for paired images. Inspired by the Facial Action Coding System, we regard an expressive face as the combined result of a set of facial muscle movements on one's poker face (i.e., an emotionless face). PF-ViT utilizes vanilla Vision Transformers, and its components are firstly pre-trained as Masked Autoencoders on a large facial expression dataset without emotion labels, yielding excellent representations. Subsequently, we train PF-ViT using a GAN framework. During training, the auxiliary task of poke face generation promotes the disentanglement between emotional and emotion-irrelevant components, guiding the FER model to holistically capture discriminative facial details. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, surpassing the state-of-the-art methods on four popular FER datasets.

Kilichbek Haydarov, Xiaoqian Shen, Avinash Madasu et al.

We introduce Affective Visual Dialog, an emotion explanation and reasoning task as a testbed for research on understanding the formation of emotions in visually grounded conversations. The task involves three skills: (1) Dialog-based Question Answering (2) Dialog-based Emotion Prediction and (3) Affective emotion explanation generation based on the dialog. Our key contribution is the collection of a large-scale dataset, dubbed AffectVisDial, consisting of 50K 10-turn visually grounded dialogs as well as concluding emotion attributions and dialog-informed textual emotion explanations, resulting in a total of 27,180 working hours. We explain our design decisions in collecting the dataset and introduce the questioner and answerer tasks that are associated with the participants in the conversation. We train and demonstrate solid Affective Visual Dialog baselines adapted from state-of-the-art models. Remarkably, the responses generated by our models show promising emotional reasoning abilities in response to visually grounded conversations. Our project page is available at https://affective-visual-dialog.github.io.

Jia Li, Wei Qian, Kun Li et al.

In this paper, we present our solution to the MuSe-Personalisation sub-challenge in the MuSe 2023 Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Challenge. The task of MuSe-Personalisation aims to predict the continuous arousal and valence values of a participant based on their audio-visual, language, and physiological signal modalities data. Considering different people have personal characteristics, the main challenge of this task is how to build robustness feature presentation for sentiment prediction. To address this issue, we propose exploiting diverse features. Specifically, we proposed a series of feature extraction methods to build a robust representation and model ensemble. We empirically evaluate the performance of the utilized method on the officially provided dataset. \textbf{As a result, we achieved 3rd place in the MuSe-Personalisation sub-challenge.} Specifically, we achieve the results of 0.8492 and 0.8439 for MuSe-Personalisation in terms of arousal and valence CCC.

Aochuan Chen, Jiashun Cheng, Zijing Liu et al.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has gained popularity for fine-tuning large foundation models, leveraging low-rank matrices $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ to represent weight changes (i.e., $Δ\mathbf{W} = \mathbf{B} \mathbf{A}$). This method reduces trainable parameters and mitigates heavy memory consumption associated with full delta matrices by sequentially multiplying $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ with the activation. Despite its success, the intrinsic low-rank characteristic may limit its performance. Although several variants have been proposed to address this issue, they often overlook the crucial computational and memory efficiency brought by LoRA. In this paper, we propose Circular Convolution Adaptation (C$^3$A), which not only achieves high-rank adaptation with enhanced performance but also excels in both computational power and memory utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that C$^3$A consistently outperforms LoRA and its variants across various fine-tuning tasks.

Kai Cui, Jia Li, Yu Liu et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG) signals provide a promising and involuntary reflection of brain activity related to emotional states, offering significant advantages over behavioral cues like facial expressions. However, EEG signals are often noisy, affected by artifacts, and vary across individuals, complicating emotion recognition. While multimodal approaches have used Peripheral Physiological Signals (PPS) like GSR to complement EEG, they often overlook the dynamic synchronization and consistent semantics between the modalities. Additionally, the temporal dynamics of emotional fluctuations across different time resolutions in PPS remain underexplored. To address these challenges, we propose PhysioSync, a novel pre-training framework leveraging temporal and cross-modal contrastive learning, inspired by physiological synchronization phenomena. PhysioSync incorporates Cross-Modal Consistency Alignment (CM-CA) to model dynamic relationships between EEG and complementary PPS, enabling emotion-related synchronizations across modalities. Besides, it introduces Long- and Short-Term Temporal Contrastive Learning (LS-TCL) to capture emotional synchronization at different temporal resolutions within modalities. After pre-training, cross-resolution and cross-modal features are hierarchically fused and fine-tuned to enhance emotion recognition. Experiments on DEAP and DREAMER datasets demonstrate PhysioSync's advanced performance under uni-modal and cross-modal conditions, highlighting its effectiveness for EEG-centered emotion recognition.

Zijie Song, Zhenzhen Hu, Yixiao Ma et al.

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a complex video-language task that demands a sophisticated understanding of both visual content and temporal dynamics. Traditional Transformer-style architectures, while effective in integrating multimodal data, often simplify temporal dynamics through positional encoding and fail to capture non-linear interactions within video sequences. In this paper, we introduce the Temporal Trio Transformer (T3T), a novel architecture that models time consistency and time variability. The T3T integrates three key components: Temporal Smoothing (TS), Temporal Difference (TD), and Temporal Fusion (TF). The TS module employs Brownian Bridge for capturing smooth, continuous temporal transitions, while the TD module identifies and encodes significant temporal variations and abrupt changes within the video content. Subsequently, the TF module synthesizes these temporal features with textual cues, facilitating a deeper contextual understanding and response accuracy. The efficacy of the T3T is demonstrated through extensive testing on multiple VideoQA benchmark datasets. Our results underscore the importance of a nuanced approach to temporal modeling in improving the accuracy and depth of video-based question answering.

Jia Li, Linhua Xiang, Jiwei Chen et al.

We propose a simple yet reliable bottom-up approach with a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency for the problem of multi-person pose estimation. Given an image, we employ an Hourglass Network to infer all the keypoints from different persons indiscriminately as well as the guiding offsets connecting the adjacent keypoints belonging to the same persons. Then, we greedily group the candidate keypoints into multiple human poses (if any), utilizing the predicted guiding offsets. And we refer to this process as greedy offset-guided keypoint grouping (GOG). Moreover, we revisit the encoding-decoding method for the multi-person keypoint coordinates and reveal some important facts affecting accuracy. Experiments have demonstrated the obvious performance improvements brought by the introduced components. Our approach is comparable to the state of the art on the challenging COCO dataset under fair conditions. The source code and our pre-trained model are publicly available online.

Jia Li, Xiao Sun, Xing Wei et al.

In recent years, the generation of conversation content based on deep neural networks has attracted many researchers. However, traditional neural language models tend to generate general replies, lacking logical and emotional factors. This paper proposes a conversation content generation model that combines reinforcement learning with emotional editing constraints to generate more meaningful and customizable emotional replies. The model divides the replies into three clauses based on pre-generated keywords and uses the emotional editor to further optimize the final reply. The model combines multi-task learning with multiple indicator rewards to comprehensively optimize the quality of replies. Experiments shows that our model can not only improve the fluency of the replies, but also significantly enhance the logical relevance and emotional relevance of the replies.