Ying Zhang

Haiwen Diao, Ying Zhang, Wei Liu et al.

Exploiting fine-grained correspondence and visual-semantic alignments has shown great potential in image-text matching. Generally, recent approaches first employ a cross-modal attention unit to capture latent region-word interactions, and then integrate all the alignments to obtain the final similarity. However, most of them adopt one-time forward association or aggregation strategies with complex architectures or additional information, while ignoring the regulation ability of network feedback. In this paper, we develop two simple but quite effective regulators which efficiently encode the message output to automatically contextualize and aggregate cross-modal representations. Specifically, we propose (i) a Recurrent Correspondence Regulator (RCR) which facilitates the cross-modal attention unit progressively with adaptive attention factors to capture more flexible correspondence, and (ii) a Recurrent Aggregation Regulator (RAR) which adjusts the aggregation weights repeatedly to increasingly emphasize important alignments and dilute unimportant ones. Besides, it is interesting that RCR and RAR are plug-and-play: both of them can be incorporated into many frameworks based on cross-modal interaction to obtain significant benefits, and their cooperation achieves further improvements. Extensive experiments on MSCOCO and Flickr30K datasets validate that they can bring an impressive and consistent R@1 gain on multiple models, confirming the general effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed methods. Code and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/RCAR.

Yike Wu, Yu Zhao, Shiwan Zhao et al.

Despite the great progress of Visual Question Answering (VQA), current VQA models heavily rely on the superficial correlation between the question type and its corresponding frequent answers (i.e., language priors) to make predictions, without really understanding the input. In this work, we define the training instances with the same question type but different answers as \textit{superficially similar instances}, and attribute the language priors to the confusion of VQA model on such instances. To solve this problem, we propose a novel training framework that explicitly encourages the VQA model to distinguish between the superficially similar instances. Specifically, for each training instance, we first construct a set that contains its superficially similar counterparts. Then we exploit the proposed distinguishing module to increase the distance between the instance and its counterparts in the answer space. In this way, the VQA model is forced to further focus on the other parts of the input beyond the question type, which helps to overcome the language priors. Experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on VQA-CP v2. Codes are available at \href{https://github.com/wyk-nku/Distinguishing-VQA.git}{Distinguishing-VQA}.

Jing Li, Di Kang, Wenjie Pei et al.

People may perform diverse gestures affected by various mental and physical factors when speaking the same sentences. This inherent one-to-many relationship makes co-speech gesture generation from audio particularly challenging. Conventional CNNs/RNNs assume one-to-one mapping, and thus tend to predict the average of all possible target motions, easily resulting in plain/boring motions during inference. So we propose to explicitly model the one-to-many audio-to-motion mapping by splitting the cross-modal latent code into shared code and motion-specific code. The shared code is expected to be responsible for the motion component that is more correlated to the audio while the motion-specific code is expected to capture diverse motion information that is more independent of the audio. However, splitting the latent code into two parts poses extra training difficulties. Several crucial training losses/strategies, including relaxed motion loss, bicycle constraint, and diversity loss, are designed to better train the VAE. Experiments on both 3D and 2D motion datasets verify that our method generates more realistic and diverse motions than previous state-of-the-art methods, quantitatively and qualitatively. Besides, our formulation is compatible with discrete cosine transformation (DCT) modeling and other popular backbones (\textit{i.e.} RNN, Transformer). As for motion losses and quantitative motion evaluation, we find structured losses/metrics (\textit{e.g.} STFT) that consider temporal and/or spatial context complement the most commonly used point-wise losses (\textit{e.g.} PCK), resulting in better motion dynamics and more nuanced motion details. Finally, we demonstrate that our method can be readily used to generate motion sequences with user-specified motion clips on the timeline.

Hao Wang, Bin Guo, Yating Zeng et al.

The intelligent dialogue system, aiming at communicating with humans harmoniously with natural language, is brilliant for promoting the advancement of human-machine interaction in the era of artificial intelligence. With the gradually complex human-computer interaction requirements (e.g., multimodal inputs, time sensitivity), it is difficult for traditional text-based dialogue system to meet the demands for more vivid and convenient interaction. Consequently, Visual Context Augmented Dialogue System (VAD), which has the potential to communicate with humans by perceiving and understanding multimodal information (i.e., visual context in images or videos, textual dialogue history), has become a predominant research paradigm. Benefiting from the consistency and complementarity between visual and textual context, VAD possesses the potential to generate engaging and context-aware responses. For depicting the development of VAD, we first characterize the concepts and unique features of VAD, and then present its generic system architecture to illustrate the system workflow. Subsequently, several research challenges and representative works are detailed investigated, followed by the summary of authoritative benchmarks. We conclude this paper by putting forward some open issues and promising research trends for VAD, e.g., the cognitive mechanisms of human-machine dialogue under cross-modal dialogue context, and knowledge-enhanced cross-modal semantic interaction.

Haiwen Diao, Ying Zhang, Shang Gao et al.

Cross-modal metric learning is a prominent research topic that bridges the semantic heterogeneity between vision and language. Existing methods frequently utilize simple cosine or complex distance metrics to transform the pairwise features into a similarity score, which suffers from an inadequate or inefficient capability for distance measurements. Consequently, we propose a Generalized Structural Sparse Function to dynamically capture thorough and powerful relationships across modalities for pair-wise similarity learning while remaining concise but efficient. Specifically, the distance metric delicately encapsulates two formats of diagonal and block-diagonal terms, automatically distinguishing and highlighting the cross-channel relevancy and dependency inside a structured and organized topology. Hence, it thereby empowers itself to adapt to the optimal matching patterns between the paired features and reaches a sweet spot between model complexity and capability. Extensive experiments on cross-modal and two extra uni-modal retrieval tasks (image-text retrieval, person re-identification, fine-grained image retrieval) have validated its superiority and flexibility over various popular retrieval frameworks. More importantly, we further discover that it can be seamlessly incorporated into multiple application scenarios, and demonstrates promising prospects from Attention Mechanism to Knowledge Distillation in a plug-and-play manner. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Paranioar/GSSF.

Yue Zhu, Haiwen Diao, Shang Gao et al.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants have delivered strong capability in Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) by minimizing trainable parameters and benefiting from reparameterization. However, their projection matrices remain unrestricted during training, causing high representation redundancy and diminishing the effectiveness of feature adaptation in the resulting subspaces. While existing methods mitigate this by manually adjusting the rank or implicitly applying channel-wise masks, they lack flexibility and generalize poorly across various datasets and architectures. Hence, we propose ReSoRA, a method that explicitly models redundancy between mapping subspaces and adaptively Regularizes Subspace redundancy of Low-Rank Adaptation. Specifically, it theoretically decomposes the low-rank submatrices into multiple equivalent subspaces and systematically applies de-redundancy constraints to the feature distributions across different projections. Extensive experiments validate that our proposed method consistently facilitates existing state-of-the-art PETL methods across various backbones and datasets in vision-language retrieval and standard visual classification benchmarks. Besides, as a training supervision, ReSoRA can be seamlessly integrated into existing approaches in a plug-and-play manner, with no additional inference costs. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Lucenova/ReSoRA.

Haoran Wang, Ying Zhang, Zhong Ji et al.

Image-text matching plays a central role in bridging vision and language. Most existing approaches only rely on the image-text instance pair to learn their representations, thereby exploiting their matching relationships and making the corresponding alignments. Such approaches only exploit the superficial associations contained in the instance pairwise data, with no consideration of any external commonsense knowledge, which may hinder their capabilities to reason the higher-level relationships between image and text. In this paper, we propose a Consensus-aware Visual-Semantic Embedding (CVSE) model to incorporate the consensus information, namely the commonsense knowledge shared between both modalities, into image-text matching. Specifically, the consensus information is exploited by computing the statistical co-occurrence correlations between the semantic concepts from the image captioning corpus and deploying the constructed concept correlation graph to yield the consensus-aware concept (CAC) representations. Afterwards, CVSE learns the associations and alignments between image and text based on the exploited consensus as well as the instance-level representations for both modalities. Extensive experiments conducted on two public datasets verify that the exploited consensus makes significant contributions to constructing more meaningful visual-semantic embeddings, with the superior performances over the state-of-the-art approaches on the bidirectional image and text retrieval task. Our code of this paper is available at: https://github.com/BruceW91/CVSE.

Ying Zhang, Shuai Guo, Chenxi Sun et al.

In recent years, deformable medical image registration techniques have made significant progress. However, existing models still lack efficiency in parallel extraction of coarse and fine-grained features. To address this, we construct a new pyramid registration network based on feature and deformation field (FF-PNet). For coarse-grained feature extraction, we design a Residual Feature Fusion Module (RFFM), for fine-grained image deformation, we propose a Residual Deformation Field Fusion Module (RDFFM). Through the parallel operation of these two modules, the model can effectively handle complex image deformations. It is worth emphasizing that the encoding stage of FF-PNet only employs traditional convolutional neural networks without any attention mechanisms or multilayer perceptrons, yet it still achieves remarkable improvements in registration accuracy, fully demonstrating the superior feature decoding capabilities of RFFM and RDFFM. We conducted extensive experiments on the LPBA and OASIS datasets. The results show our network consistently outperforms popular methods in metrics like the Dice Similarity Coefficient.

Jing Li, Di Kang, Wenjie Pei et al.

Generating conversational gestures from speech audio is challenging due to the inherent one-to-many mapping between audio and body motions. Conventional CNNs/RNNs assume one-to-one mapping, and thus tend to predict the average of all possible target motions, resulting in plain/boring motions during inference. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a novel conditional variational autoencoder (VAE) that explicitly models one-to-many audio-to-motion mapping by splitting the cross-modal latent code into shared code and motion-specific code. The shared code mainly models the strong correlation between audio and motion (such as the synchronized audio and motion beats), while the motion-specific code captures diverse motion information independent of the audio. However, splitting the latent code into two parts poses training difficulties for the VAE model. A mapping network facilitating random sampling along with other techniques including relaxed motion loss, bicycle constraint, and diversity loss are designed to better train the VAE. Experiments on both 3D and 2D motion datasets verify that our method generates more realistic and diverse motions than state-of-the-art methods, quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we demonstrate that our method can be readily used to generate motion sequences with user-specified motion clips on the timeline. Code and more results are at https://jingli513.github.io/audio2gestures.

Haiwen Diao, Ying Zhang, Lin Ma et al.

Image-text matching plays a critical role in bridging the vision and language, and great progress has been made by exploiting the global alignment between image and sentence, or local alignments between regions and words. However, how to make the most of these alignments to infer more accurate matching scores is still underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel Similarity Graph Reasoning and Attention Filtration (SGRAF) network for image-text matching. Specifically, the vector-based similarity representations are firstly learned to characterize the local and global alignments in a more comprehensive manner, and then the Similarity Graph Reasoning (SGR) module relying on one graph convolutional neural network is introduced to infer relation-aware similarities with both the local and global alignments. The Similarity Attention Filtration (SAF) module is further developed to integrate these alignments effectively by selectively attending on the significant and representative alignments and meanwhile casting aside the interferences of non-meaningful alignments. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method with achieving state-of-the-art performances on the Flickr30K and MSCOCO datasets, and the good interpretability of SGR and SAF modules with extensive qualitative experiments and analyses.

Yike Wu, Shiwan Zhao, Jia Chen et al.

Improving the captioning performance on low-resource languages by leveraging English caption datasets has received increasing research interest in recent years. Existing works mainly fall into two categories: translation-based and alignment-based approaches. In this paper, we propose to combine the merits of both approaches in one unified architecture. Specifically, we use a pre-trained English caption model to generate high-quality English captions, and then take both the image and generated English captions to generate low-resource language captions. We improve the captioning performance by adding the cycle consistency constraint on the cycle of image regions, English words, and low-resource language words. Moreover, our architecture has a flexible design which enables it to benefit from large monolingual English caption datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on common evaluation metrics. The attention visualization also shows that the proposed approach really improves the fine-grained alignment between words and image regions.