In scene understanding, robotics benefit from not only detecting individual scene instances but also from learning their possible interactions. Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Detection infers the action predicate on a <human, predicate, object> triplet. Contextual information has been found critical in inferring interactions. However, most works only use local features from single human-object pair for inference. Few works have studied the disambiguating contribution of subsidiary relations made available via graph networks. Similarly, few have learned to effectively leverage visual cues along with the intrinsic semantic regularities contained in HOIs. We contribute a dual-graph attention network that effectively aggregates contextual visual, spatial, and semantic information dynamically from primary human-object relations as well as subsidiary relations through attention mechanisms for strong disambiguating power. We achieve comparable results on two benchmarks: V-COCO and HICO-DET. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/birlrobotics/vs-gats}.
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Institute of Computing Technology, CAS（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）
Recently, Visual Question Answering (VQA) has emerged as one of the most significant tasks in multimodal learning as it requires understanding both visual and textual modalities. Existing methods mainly rely on extracting image and question features to learn their joint feature embedding via multimodal fusion or attention mechanism. Some recent studies utilize external VQA-independent models to detect candidate entities or attributes in images, which serve as semantic knowledge complementary to the VQA task. However, these candidate entities or attributes might be unrelated to the VQA task and…
Attention mechanism has demonstrated great potential in fine-grained visual recognition tasks. In this paper, we present a counterfactual attention learning method to learn more effective attention based on causal inference. Unlike most existing methods that learn visual attention based on conventional likelihood, we propose to learn the attention with counterfactual causality, which provides a tool to measure the attention quality and a powerful supervisory signal to guide the learning process. Specifically, we analyze the effect of the learned visual attention on network prediction through c…
This paper focuses on two key problems for audio-visual emotion recognition in the video. One is the audio and visual streams temporal alignment for feature level fusion. The other one is locating and re-weighting the perception attentions in the whole audio-visual stream for better recognition. The Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Network (LSTM-RNN) is employed as the main classification architecture. Firstly, soft attention mechanism aligns the audio and visual streams. Secondly, seven emotion embedding vectors, which are corresponding to each classification emotion type, are added to…
In this paper, we propose a novel deep multi-level attention model to address inverse visual question answering. The proposed model generates regional visual and semantic features at the object level and then enhances them with the answer cue by using attention mechanisms. Two levels of multiple attentions are employed in the model, including the dual attention at the partial question encoding step and the dynamic attention at the next question word generation step. We evaluate the proposed model on the VQA V1 dataset. It demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in terms of multiple commonly …
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）；University of Lincoln（林肯大学）
Zero-shot learning uses semantic attributes to connect the search space of unseen objects. In recent years, although the deep convolutional network brings powerful visual modeling capabilities to the ZSL task, its visual features have severe pattern inertia and lack of representation of semantic relationships, which leads to severe bias and ambiguity. In response to this, we propose the Graph-based Visual-Semantic Entanglement Network to conduct graph modeling of visual features, which is mapped to semantic attributes by using a knowledge graph, it contains several novel designs: 1. it establi…
Progressive Semantic-Guided Vision Transformer for Zero-Shot Learning
Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）
This paper proposes a novel deep learning architecture for semantic segmentation. The proposed Global and Selective Attention Network (GSANet) features Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) with a novel sparsemax global attention and a novel selective attention that deploys a condensation and diffusion mechanism to aggregate the multi-scale contextual information from the extracted deep features. A selective attention decoder is also proposed to process the GSA-ASPP outputs for optimizing the softmax volume. We are the first to benchmark the performance of semantic segmentation networks with t…
Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST)（华中科技大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence (IIAI)（创景人工智能研究所）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) tackles the unseen class recognition problem, transferring semantic knowledge from seen classes to unseen ones. Typically, to guarantee desirable knowledge transfer, a common (latent) space is adopted for associating the visual and semantic domains in ZSL. However, existing common space learning methods align the semantic and visual domains by merely mitigating distribution disagreement through one-step adaptation. This strategy is usually ineffective due to the heterogeneous nature of the feature representations in the two domains, which intrinsically contain both dis…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Bytedance AI Lab（字节跳动人工智能实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
We propose Unified Visual-Semantic Embeddings (UniVSE) for learning a joint space of visual and textual concepts. The space unifies the concepts at different levels, including objects, attributes, relations, and full scenes. A contrastive learning approach is proposed for the fine-grained alignment from only image-caption pairs. Moreover, we present an effective approach for enforcing the coverage of semantic components that appear in the sentence. We demonstrate the robustness of Unified VSE in defending text-domain adversarial attacks on cross-modal retrieval tasks. Such robustness also empo…
We consider the problem of naming objects in complex, natural scenes containing widely varying object appearance and subtly different names. Informed by cognitive research, we propose an approach based on sharing context based object hypotheses between visual and lexical spaces. To this end, we present the Visual Semantic Integration Model (VSIM) that represents object labels as entities shared between semantic and visual contexts and infers a new image by updating labels through context switching. At the core of VSIM is a semantic Pachinko Allocation Model and a visual nearest neighbor Latent…
University of California Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
We address the key question of how object part representations can be found from the internal states of CNNs that are trained for high-level tasks, such as object classification. This work provides a new unsupervised method to learn semantic parts and gives new understanding of the internal representations of CNNs. Our technique is based on the hypothesis that semantic parts are represented by populations of neurons rather than by single filters. We propose a clustering technique to extract part representations, which we call Visual Concepts. We show that visual concepts are semantically coher…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国高等科学技术研究院（KAIST））；Lunit Inc.（Lunit公司）
Visual-semantic embedding enables various tasks such as image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering. The key to successful visual-semantic embedding is to express visual and textual data properly by accounting for their intricate relationship. While previous studies have achieved much advance by encoding the visual and textual data into a joint space where similar concepts are closely located, they often represent data by a single vector ignoring the presence of multiple important components in an image or text. Thus, in addition to the joint embedding space, we propo…
Semantic embeddings have advanced the state of the art for countless natural language processing tasks, and various extensions to multimodal domains, such as visual-semantic embeddings, have been proposed. While the power of visual-semantic embeddings comes from the distillation and enrichment of information through machine learning, their inner workings are poorly understood and there is a shortage of analysis tools. To address this problem, we generalize the notion of probing tasks to the visual-semantic case. To this end, we (i) discuss the formalization of probing tasks for embeddings of i…
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Huawei Devices（华为终端）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Image captioning attempts to generate a sentence composed of several linguistic words, which are used to describe objects, attributes, and interactions in an image, denoted as visual semantic units in this paper. Based on this view, we propose to explicitly model the object interactions in semantics and geometry based on Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), and fully exploit the alignment between linguistic words and visual semantic units for image captioning. Particularly, we construct a semantic graph and a geometry graph, where each node corresponds to a visual semantic unit, i.e., an objec…
UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
Recent work on audio-visual navigation assumes a constantly-sounding target and restricts the role of audio to signaling the target's position. We introduce semantic audio-visual navigation, where objects in the environment make sounds consistent with their semantic meaning (e.g., toilet flushing, door creaking) and acoustic events are sporadic or short in duration. We propose a transformer-based model to tackle this new semantic AudioGoal task, incorporating an inferred goal descriptor that captures both spatial and semantic properties of the target. Our model's persistent multimodal memory e…
There has been an increasing interest in the area of emergent communication between agents which learn to play referential signalling games with realistic images. In this work, we consider the signalling game setting of Havrylov and Titov and investigate the effect of the feature extractor's weights and of the task being solved on the visual semantics learned or captured by the models. We impose various augmentation to the input images and additional tasks in the game with the aim to induce visual representations which capture conceptual properties of images. Through our set of experiments, we…
LIGM, Ecole des Ponts, Univ Gustave Eiffel, CNRS（古斯塔夫·埃菲尔大学 桥路学院 信息学、图形与材料实验室 法国国家科学研究中心）；LIX, CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, IP Paris（巴黎理工学院 巴黎综合理工学院 计算机科学实验室 法国国家科学研究中心）
A large body of recent work targets semantically conditioned image generation. Most such methods focus on the narrower task of pose transfer and ignore the more challenging task of subject transfer that consists in not only transferring the pose but also the appearance and background. In this work, we introduce SCAM (Semantic Cross Attention Modulation), a system that encodes rich and diverse information in each semantic region of the image (including foreground and background), thus achieving precise generation with emphasis on fine details. This is enabled by the Semantic Attention Transform…
The emergence of communication systems between agents which learn to play referential signalling games with realistic images has attracted a lot of attention recently. The majority of work has focused on using fixed, pretrained image feature extraction networks which potentially bias the information the agents learn to communicate. In this work, we consider a signalling game setting in which a `sender' agent must communicate the information about an image to a `receiver' who must select the correct image from many distractors. We investigate the effect of the feature extractor's weights and of…
Several works have proposed to learn a two-path neural network that maps images and texts, respectively, to a same shared Euclidean space where geometry captures useful semantic relationships. Such a multi-modal embedding can be trained and used for various tasks, notably image captioning. In the present work, we introduce a new architecture of this type, with a visual path that leverages recent space-aware pooling mechanisms. Combined with a textual path which is jointly trained from scratch, our semantic-visual embedding offers a versatile model. Once trained under the supervision of caption…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Visual attention serves as a means of feature selection mechanism in the perceptual system. Motivated by Broadbent's leaky filter model of selective attention, we evaluate how such mechanism could be implemented and affect the learning process of deep reinforcement learning. We visualize and analyze the feature maps of DQN on a toy problem Catch, and propose an approach to combine visual selective attention with deep reinforcement learning. We experiment with optical flow-based attention and A2C on Atari games. Experiment results show that visual selective attention could lead to improvements …
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
Vision and language tasks have benefited from attention. There have been a number of different attention models proposed. However, the scale at which attention needs to be applied has not been well examined. Particularly, in this work, we propose a new method Granular Multi-modal Attention, where we aim to particularly address the question of the right granularity at which one needs to attend while solving the Visual Dialog task. The proposed method shows improvement in both image and text attention networks. We then propose a granular Multi-modal Attention network that jointly attends on the …
University of Trento（特伦托大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Huawei Research Ireland（华为爱尔兰研究院）
In this paper, we focus on the semantic image synthesis task that aims at transferring semantic label maps to photo-realistic images. Existing methods lack effective semantic constraints to preserve the semantic information and ignore the structural correlations in both spatial and channel dimensions, leading to unsatisfactory blurry and artifact-prone results. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Dual Attention GAN (DAGAN) to synthesize photo-realistic and semantically-consistent images with fine details from the input layouts without imposing extra training overhead or modifying …
Visual Question Answering (VQA) concerns providing answers to Natural Language questions about images. Several deep neural network approaches have been proposed to model the task in an end-to-end fashion. Whereas the task is grounded in visual processing, if the question focuses on events described by verbs, the language understanding component becomes crucial. Our hypothesis is that models should be aware of verb semantics, as expressed via semantic role labels, argument types, and/or frame elements. Unfortunately, no VQA dataset exists that includes verb semantic information. Our first contr…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Amazon Alexa AI（亚马逊Alexa人工智能部门）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
Physically rearranging objects is an important capability for embodied agents. Visual room rearrangement evaluates an agent's ability to rearrange objects in a room to a desired goal based solely on visual input. We propose a simple yet effective method for this problem: (1) search for and map which objects need to be rearranged, and (2) rearrange each object until the task is complete. Our approach consists of an off-the-shelf semantic segmentation model, voxel-based semantic map, and semantic search policy to efficiently find objects that need to be rearranged. On the AI2-THOR Rearrangement …
Ever since neural models were adopted in data-to-text language generation, they have invariably been reliant on extrinsic components to improve their semantic accuracy, because the models normally do not exhibit the ability to generate text that reliably mentions all of the information provided in the input. In this paper, we propose a novel decoding method that extracts interpretable information from encoder-decoder models' cross-attention, and uses it to infer which attributes are mentioned in the generated text, which is subsequently used to rescore beam hypotheses. Using this decoding meth…
Visual world studies show that upon hearing a word in a target-absent visual context containing related and unrelated items, toddlers and adults briefly direct their gaze towards phonologically related items, before shifting towards semantically and visually related ones. We present a neural network model that processes dynamic unfolding phonological representations and maps them to static internal semantic and visual representations. The model, trained on representations derived from real corpora, simulates this early phonological over semantic/visual preference. Our results support the hypot…
In this work, we propose to use linguistic annotations as a basis for a \textit{Discourse-Aware Semantic Self-Attention} encoder that we employ for reading comprehension on long narrative texts. We extract relations between discourse units, events and their arguments as well as coreferring mentions, using available annotation tools. Our empirical evaluation shows that the investigated structures improve the overall performance, especially intra-sentential and cross-sentential discourse relations, sentence-internal semantic role relations, and long-distance coreference relations. We show that d…
We examine the effects of contrastive visual semantic pretraining by comparing the geometry and semantic properties of contextualized English language representations formed by GPT-2 and CLIP, a zero-shot multimodal image classifier which adapts the GPT-2 architecture to encode image captions. We find that contrastive visual semantic pretraining significantly mitigates the anisotropy found in contextualized word embeddings from GPT-2, such that the intra-layer self-similarity (mean pairwise cosine similarity) of CLIP word embeddings is under .25 in all layers, compared to greater than .95 in t…
AI Lab, SoftBank Robotics Europe（AI实验室，软银机器人欧洲公司（SoftBank Robotics Europe）AI实验室（注：此处“AI Lab”作为机构内部部门，整体机构为“SoftBank Robotics Europe”，按要求提取到公司级别））
In Machine Learning and Robotics, the semantic content of visual features is usually provided to the system by a human who interprets its content. On the contrary, strictly unsupervised approaches have difficulties relating the statistics of sensory inputs to their semantic content without also relying on prior knowledge introduced in the system. We proposed in this paper to tackle this problem from a sensorimotor perspective. In line with the Sensorimotor Contingencies Theory, we make the fundamental assumption that the semantic content of sensory inputs at least partially stems from the way …
