Faster Video Moment Retrieval with Point-Level Supervision

Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims at retrieving the most relevant events from an untrimmed video with natural language queries. Existing VMR methods suffer from two defects: (1) massive expensive temporal annotations are required to obtain satisfying performance; (2) complicated cross-modal interaction modules are deployed, which lead to high computational cost and low efficiency for the retrieval process. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed Cheaper and Faster Moment Retrieval (CFMR), which well balances the retrieval accuracy, efficiency, and annotation cost for VMR. Specifically, our proposed CFMR method learns from point-level supervision where each annotation is a single frame randomly located within the target moment. It is 6 times cheaper than the conventional annotations of event boundaries. Furthermore, we also design a concept-based multimodal alignment mechanism to bypass the usage of cross-modal interaction modules during the inference process, remarkably improving retrieval efficiency. The experimental results on three widely used VMR benchmarks demonstrate the proposed CFMR method establishes new state-of-the-art with point-level supervision. Moreover, it significantly accelerates the retrieval speed with more than 100 times FLOPs compared to existing approaches with point-level supervision.

T-SciQ: Teaching Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Large Language Model Signals for Science Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have also shown the ability to perform chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex problems. Recent studies have explored CoT reasoning in complex multimodal scenarios, such as the science question answering task, by fine-tuning multimodal models with high-quality human-annotated CoT rationales. However, collecting high-quality COT rationales is usually time-consuming and costly. Besides, the annotated rationales are hardly accurate due to the redundant information involved or the essential information missed. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed \emph{T-SciQ} that aims at teaching science question answering with LLM signals. The T-SciQ approach generates high-quality CoT rationales as teaching signals and is advanced to train much smaller models to perform CoT reasoning in complex modalities. Additionally, we introduce a novel data mixing strategy to produce more effective teaching data samples for simple and complex science question answer problems. Extensive experimental results show that our T-SciQ method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the ScienceQA benchmark, with an accuracy of 96.18%. Moreover, our approach outperforms the most powerful fine-tuned baseline by 4.5%.

Non-Autoregressive Math Word Problem Solver with Unified Tree Structure

Existing MWP solvers employ sequence or binary tree to present the solution expression and decode it from given problem description. However, such structures fail to handle the identical variants derived via mathematical manipulation, e.g., $(a_1+a_2)*a_3$ and $a_1*a_3+a_2*a_3$ are for the same problem but formulating different expression sequences and trees, which would raise two issues in MWP solving: 1) different output solutions for the same input problem, making the model hard to learn the mapping function between input and output spaces, and 2) difficulty of evaluating solution expression that indicates wrong between the above examples. To address these issues, we first introduce a unified tree structure to present expression, where the elements are permutable and identical for all the expression variants. We then propose a novel non-autoregressive solver, dubbed MWP-NAS, to parse the problem and reason the solution expression based on the unified tree. For the second issue, to handle the variants in evaluation, we propose to match the unified tree and design a path-based metric to evaluate the partial accuracy of expression. Extensive experiments have been conducted on Math23K and MAWPS, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MWP-NAS. The codes and checkpoints are available at: https://github.com/mengqunhan/MWP-NAS

Instance-Variant Loss with Gaussian RBF Kernel for 3D Cross-modal Retriveal

3D cross-modal retrieval is gaining attention in the multimedia community. Central to this topic is learning a joint embedding space to represent data from different modalities, such as images, 3D point clouds, and polygon meshes, to extract modality-invariant and discriminative features. Hence, the performance of cross-modal retrieval methods heavily depends on the representational capacity of this embedding space. Existing methods treat all instances equally, applying the same penalty strength to instances with varying degrees of difficulty, ignoring the differences between instances. This can result in ambiguous convergence or local optima, severely compromising the separability of the feature space. To address this limitation, we propose an Instance-Variant loss to assign different penalty strengths to different instances, improving the space separability. Specifically, we assign different penalty weights to instances positively related to their intra-class distance. Simultaneously, we reduce the cross-modal discrepancy between features by learning a shared weight vector for the same class data from different modalities. By leveraging the Gaussian RBF kernel to evaluate sample similarity, we further propose an Intra-Class loss function that minimizes the intra-class distance among same-class instances. Extensive experiments on three 3D cross-modal datasets show that our proposed method surpasses recent state-of-the-art approaches.

Learning Semantic-Aware Knowledge Guidance for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) investigates how to improve illumination and produce normal-light images. The majority of existing methods improve low-light images via a global and uniform manner, without taking into account the semantic information of different regions. Without semantic priors, a network may easily deviate from a region's original color. To address this issue, we propose a novel semantic-aware knowledge-guided framework (SKF) that can assist a low-light enhancement model in learning rich and diverse priors encapsulated in a semantic segmentation model. We concentrate on incorporating semantic knowledge from three key aspects: a semantic-aware embedding module that wisely integrates semantic priors in feature representation space, a semantic-guided color histogram loss that preserves color consistency of various instances, and a semantic-guided adversarial loss that produces more natural textures by semantic priors. Our SKF is appealing in acting as a general framework in LLIE task. Extensive experiments show that models equipped with the SKF significantly outperform the baselines on multiple datasets and our SKF generalizes to different models and scenes well. The code is available at Semantic-Aware-Low-Light-Image-Enhancement.

Investigating and Mitigating the Side Effects of Noisy Views in Multi-view Clustering in Practical Scenarios

Multi-view clustering (MvC) aims at exploring the category structure among multi-view data without label supervision. Multiple views provide more information than single views and thus existing MvC methods can achieve satisfactory performance. However, their performance might seriously degenerate when the views are noisy in practical scenarios. In this paper, we first formally investigate the drawback of noisy views and then propose a theoretically grounded deep MvC method (namely MvCAN) to address this issue. Specifically, we propose a novel MvC objective that enables un-shared parameters and inconsistent clustering predictions across multiple views to reduce the side effects of noisy views. Furthermore, a non-parametric iterative process is designed to generate a robust learning target for mining multiple views' useful information. Theoretical analysis reveals that MvCAN works by achieving the multi-view consistency, complementarity, and noise robustness. Finally, experiments on public datasets demonstrate that MvCAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods and is robust against the existence of noisy views.

ScanERU: Interactive 3D Visual Grounding based on Embodied Reference Understanding

Aiming to link natural language descriptions to specific regions in a 3D scene represented as 3D point clouds, 3D visual grounding is a very fundamental task for human-robot interaction. The recognition errors can significantly impact the overall accuracy and then degrade the operation of AI systems. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods suffer from the difficulty of low recognition accuracy in cases of multiple adjacent objects with similar appearances.To address this issue, this work intuitively introduces the human-robot interaction as a cue to facilitate the development of 3D visual grounding. Specifically, a new task termed Embodied Reference Understanding (ERU) is first designed for this concern. Then a new dataset called ScanERU is constructed to evaluate the effectiveness of this idea. Different from existing datasets, our ScanERU is the first to cover semi-synthetic scene integration with textual, real-world visual, and synthetic gestural information. Additionally, this paper formulates a heuristic framework based on attention mechanisms and human body movements to enlighten the research of ERU. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, especially in the recognition of multiple identical objects. Our codes and dataset are ready to be available publicly.

A Complete Survey on Generative AI (AIGC): Is ChatGPT from GPT-4 to GPT-5 All You Need?

As ChatGPT goes viral, generative AI (AIGC, a.k.a AI-generated content) has made headlines everywhere because of its ability to analyze and create text, images, and beyond. With such overwhelming media coverage, it is almost impossible for us to miss the opportunity to glimpse AIGC from a certain angle. In the era of AI transitioning from pure analysis to creation, it is worth noting that ChatGPT, with its most recent language model GPT-4, is just a tool out of numerous AIGC tasks. Impressed by the capability of the ChatGPT, many people are wondering about its limits: can GPT-5 (or other future GPT variants) help ChatGPT unify all AIGC tasks for diversified content creation? Toward answering this question, a comprehensive review of existing AIGC tasks is needed. As such, our work comes to fill this gap promptly by offering a first look at AIGC, ranging from its techniques to applications. Modern generative AI relies on various technical foundations, ranging from model architecture and self-supervised pretraining to generative modeling methods (like GAN and diffusion models). After introducing the fundamental techniques, this work focuses on the technological development of various AIGC tasks based on their output type, including text, images, videos, 3D content, etc., which depicts the full potential of ChatGPT's future. Moreover, we summarize their significant applications in some mainstream industries, such as education and creativity content. Finally, we discuss the challenges currently faced and present an outlook on how generative AI might evolve in the near future.

ICL-D3IE: In-Context Learning with Diverse Demonstrations Updating for Document Information Extraction

Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT, have demonstrated remarkable results in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks with in-context learning, which involves inference based on a few demonstration examples. Despite their successes in NLP tasks, no investigation has been conducted to assess the ability of LLMs to perform document information extraction (DIE) using in-context learning. Applying LLMs to DIE poses two challenges: the modality and task gap. To this end, we propose a simple but effective in-context learning framework called ICL-D3IE, which enables LLMs to perform DIE with different types of demonstration examples. Specifically, we extract the most difficult and distinct segments from hard training documents as hard demonstrations for benefiting all test instances. We design demonstrations describing relationships that enable LLMs to understand positional relationships. We introduce formatting demonstrations for easy answer extraction. Additionally, the framework improves diverse demonstrations by updating them iteratively. Our experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the ICL-D3IE framework enables GPT-3/ChatGPT to achieve superior performance when compared to previous pre-trained methods fine-tuned with full training in both the in-distribution (ID) setting and in the out-of-distribution (OOD) setting.