Visual question answering and visual dialogue tasks have been increasingly studied in the multimodal field towards more practical real-world scenarios. A more challenging task, audio visual scene-aware dialogue (AVSD), is proposed to further advance the technologies that connect audio, vision, and language, which introduces temporal video information and dialogue interactions between a questioner and an answerer. This paper proposes an intuitive mechanism that fuses features and attention in multiple stages in order to well integrate multimodal features, and the results demonstrate its capability in the experiments. Also, we apply several state-of-the-art models in other tasks to the AVSD task, and further analyze their generalization across different tasks.
Visual dialogue is a challenging task since it needs to answer a series of coherent questions on the basis of understanding the visual environment. Previous studies focus on the implicit exploration of multimodal co-reference by implicitly attending to spatial image features or object-level image features but neglect the importance of locating the objects explicitly in the visual content, which is associated with entities in the textual content. Therefore, in this paper we propose a {\bf M}ultimodal {\bf I}ncremental {\bf T}ransformer with {\bf V}isual {\bf G}rounding, named MITVG, which consi…
ZALM3: Zero-Shot Enhancement of Vision-Language Alignment via In-Context Information in Multi-Turn Multimodal Medical Dialogue
PAII Inc.（PAII公司）；Ping An Technology（平安科技）；Ping An Healthcare and Technology Company Limited（平安医疗健康科技有限公司）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
The Image Reconstruction Game: Drawing Common Ground Through Iterative Multimodal Dialogue
Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics University of Potsdam（波恩大学语言学系计算语言学部）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI）柏林）
Decoding strategies play a crucial role in natural language generation systems. They are usually designed and evaluated in open-ended text-only tasks, and it is not clear how different strategies handle the numerous challenges that goal-oriented multimodal systems face (such as grounding and informativeness). To answer this question, we compare a wide variety of different decoding strategies and hyper-parameter configurations in a Visual Dialogue referential game. Although none of them successfully balance lexical richness, accuracy in the task, and visual grounding, our in-depth analysis allo…
MM-Snowball: Evaluating and Mitigating Hallucination Snowballing in Multimodal Multi-Turn Dialogue
College of Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, Fudan University（复旦大学智能机器人与先进制造学院）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；TMLR Group, Hong Kong Baptist University（香港 Baptist 大学 TMLR 团体）；MM Lab, CUHK（CUHK 多模态实验室）；RAMS Lab, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.（华为技术有限公司 RAMS 实验室）
S2Dialog: Multimodal Dialogue Retrieval with Semantic and Acoustic-Style Modeling
College of Computer Science, Inner Mongolia University（内蒙古大学计算机学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Shenzhen Campus（电子科技大学深圳校区）
Center for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAiRE)（人工智能研究中心（CAiRE））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
The demand for multimodal dialogue systems has been rising in various domains, emphasizing the importance of interpreting multimodal inputs from conversational and situational contexts. We explore three methods to tackle this problem and evaluate them on the largest situated dialogue dataset, SIMMC 2.1. Our best method, scene-dialogue alignment, improves the performance by ~20% F1-score compared to the SIMMC 2.1 baselines. We provide analysis and discussion regarding the limitation of our methods and the potential directions for future works. Our code is publicly available at https://github.co…
In this paper, we present a multimodal dialogue system for Conversational Image Editing. We formulate our multimodal dialogue system as a Partially Observed Markov Decision Process (POMDP) and trained it with Deep Q-Network (DQN) and a user simulator. Our evaluation shows that the DQN policy outperforms a rule-based baseline policy, achieving 90\% success rate under high error rates. We also conducted a real user study and analyzed real user behavior.
In this work, we investigate the task of textual response generation in a multimodal task-oriented dialogue system. Our work is based on the recently released Multimodal Dialogue (MMD) dataset (Saha et al., 2017) in the fashion domain. We introduce a multimodal extension to the Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder (HRED) model and show that this extension outperforms strong baselines in terms of text-based similarity metrics. We also showcase the shortcomings of current vision and language models by performing an error analysis on our system's output.
Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)（新加坡科技研究局（A*STAR））
Designed for tracking user goals in dialogues, a dialogue state tracker is an essential component in a dialogue system. However, the research of dialogue state tracking has largely been limited to unimodality, in which slots and slot values are limited by knowledge domains (e.g. restaurant domain with slots of restaurant name and price range) and are defined by specific database schema. In this paper, we propose to extend the definition of dialogue state tracking to multimodality. Specifically, we introduce a novel dialogue state tracking task to track the information of visual objects that ar…
With the development of the Internet, more and more people get accustomed to online shopping. When communicating with customer service, users may express their requirements by means of text, images, and videos, which precipitates the need for understanding these multimodal information for automatic customer service systems. Images usually act as discriminators for product models, or indicators of product failures, which play important roles in the E-commerce scenario. On the other hand, detailed information provided by the images is limited, and typically, customer service systems cannot under…
Microsoft STC Asia（微软亚洲互联网工程院）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Responsing with image has been recognized as an important capability for an intelligent conversational agent. Yet existing works only focus on exploring the multimodal dialogue models which depend on retrieval-based methods, but neglecting generation methods. To fill in the gaps, we first present a multimodal dialogue generation model, which takes the dialogue history as input, then generates a textual sequence or an image as response. Learning such a model often requires multimodal dialogues containing both texts and images which are difficult to obtain. Motivated by the challenge in practice…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Pattern Recognition Center, WeChat AI, Tencent Inc（腾讯公司微信AI模式识别中心）
As a kind of new expression elements, Internet memes are popular and extensively used in online chatting scenarios since they manage to make dialogues vivid, moving, and interesting. However, most current dialogue researches focus on text-only dialogue tasks. In this paper, we propose a new task named as \textbf{M}eme incorporated \textbf{O}pen-domain \textbf{D}ialogue (MOD). Compared to previous dialogue tasks, MOD is much more challenging since it requires the model to understand the multimodal elements as well as the emotions behind them. To facilitate the MOD research, we construct a large…
MMWOZ: Building Multimodal Agent for Task-oriented Dialogue
School of Artificial Intelligence, Anhui University, Hefei, China（人工智能学院，安徽大学，合肥，中国）；School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China（计算机科学与技术学院，北京理工大学，北京，中国）
University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）
In visual instruction-following dialogue games, players can engage in repair mechanisms in face of an ambiguous or underspecified instruction that cannot be fully mapped to actions in the world. In this work, we annotate Instruction Clarification Requests (iCRs) in CoDraw, an existing dataset of interactions in a multimodal collaborative dialogue game. We show that it contains lexically and semantically diverse iCRs being produced self-motivatedly by players deciding to clarify in order to solve the task successfully. With 8.8k iCRs found in 9.9k dialogues, CoDraw-iCR (v1) is a large spontaneo…
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute（伦斯勒理工学院）；IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）
Recently, a more challenging state tracking task, Audio-Video Scene-Aware Dialogue (AVSD), is catching an increasing amount of attention among researchers. Different from purely text-based dialogue state tracking, the dialogue in AVSD contains a sequence of question-answer pairs about a video and the final answer to the given question requires additional understanding of the video. This paper interprets the AVSD task from an open-domain Question Answering (QA) point of view and proposes a multimodal open-domain QA system to deal with the problem. The proposed QA system uses common encoder-deco…
VSTAR: A Video-grounded Dialogue Dataset for Situated Semantic Understanding with Scene and Topic Transitions
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence（北京通用人工智能研究院）；National Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence（通用人工智能全国重点实验室）
Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；Institute of Inforcomm Research (I2R)（信息通信研究院）；Salesforce Research Asia（Salesforce亚洲研究院）
Developing Video-Grounded Dialogue Systems (VGDS), where a dialogue is conducted based on visual and audio aspects of a given video, is significantly more challenging than traditional image or text-grounded dialogue systems because (1) feature space of videos span across multiple picture frames, making it difficult to obtain semantic information; and (2) a dialogue agent must perceive and process information from different modalities (audio, video, caption, etc.) to obtain a comprehensive understanding. Most existing work is based on RNNs and sequence-to-sequence architectures, which are not v…
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Tencent Cloud Xiaowei（腾讯云小微）
Existing text- and image-based multimodal dialogue systems use the traditional Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder (HRED) framework, which has an utterance-level encoder to model utterance representation and a context-level encoder to model context representation. Although pioneer efforts have shown promising performances, they still suffer from the following challenges: (1) the interaction between textual features and visual features is not fine-grained enough. (2) the context representation can not provide a complete representation for the context. To address the issues mentioned above, w…
Multimodal machine translation and textual chat translation have received considerable attention in recent years. Although the conversation in its natural form is usually multimodal, there still lacks work on multimodal machine translation in conversations. In this work, we introduce a new task named Multimodal Chat Translation (MCT), aiming to generate more accurate translations with the help of the associated dialogue history and visual context. To this end, we firstly construct a Multimodal Sentiment Chat Translation Dataset (MSCTD) containing 142,871 English-Chinese utterance pairs in 14,7…
Human face-to-face conversation is an ideal model for human-computer dialogue. One of the major features of face-to-face communication is its multiplicity of communication channels that act on multiple modalities. To realize a natural multimodal dialogue, it is necessary to study how humans perceive information and determine the information to which humans are sensitive. A face is an independent communication channel that conveys emotional and conversational signals, encoded as facial expressions. We have developed an experimental system that integrates speech dialogue and facial animation, to…
Disambiguating Reference in Visually Grounded Dialogues through Joint Modeling of Textual and Multimodal Semantic Structures
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良科学技術研究所）；Guardian Robot Project（守護機器人計劃）；RIKEN（理化学研究所）；Kyoto University（京都大學）；Institute of Science Tokyo（東京科學研究院）
Distilling Implicit Multimodal Knowledge into Large Language Models for Zero-Resource Dialogue Generation
School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学计算机与信息工程学院）
DiaDem: Advancing Dialogue Descriptions in Audiovisual Video Captioning for Multimodal Large Language Models
New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所模式识别新实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Kling Team, Kuaishou Technology（快手科技 Kling 团队）；Peking University（北京大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
I see what you mean: Co-Speech Gestures for Reference Resolution in Multimodal Dialogue
Multimodal Language Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics（马克斯·普朗克心理语言学研究所多模态语言部门）；Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University（拉德堡德大学大脑、认知与行为研究所）；Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University（马斯特里赫特大学高级计算科学系）；Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学逻辑、语言与计算研究所）
Most popular goal-oriented dialogue agents are capable of understanding the conversational context. However, with the surge of virtual assistants with screen, the next generation of agents are required to also understand screen context in order to provide a proper interactive experience, and better understand users' goals. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal conversational framework, where the dialogue agent's next action and their arguments are derived jointly conditioned both on the conversational and the visual context. Specifically, we propose a new model, that can reason over the…
