Towards Spoken Language Understanding via Multi-level Multi-grained Contrastive Learning

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a core task in task-oriented dialogue systems, which aims at understanding the user's current goal through constructing semantic frames. SLU usually consists of two subtasks, including intent detection and slot filling. Although there are some SLU frameworks joint modeling the two subtasks and achieving high performance, most of them still overlook the inherent relationships between intents and slots and fail to achieve mutual guidance between the two subtasks. To solve the problem, we propose a multi-level multi-grained SLU framework MMCL to apply contrastive learning at three levels, including utterance level, slot level, and word level to enable intent and slot to mutually guide each other. For the utterance level, our framework implements coarse granularity contrastive learning and fine granularity contrastive learning simultaneously. Besides, we also apply the self-distillation method to improve the robustness of the model. Experimental results and further analysis demonstrate that our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art results on two public multi-intent SLU datasets, obtaining a 2.6 overall accuracy improvement on the MixATIS dataset compared to previous best models.

Textual Inversion and Self-supervised Refinement for Radiology Report Generation

Existing mainstream approaches follow the encoder-decoder paradigm for generating radiology reports. They focus on improving the network structure of encoders and decoders, which leads to two shortcomings: overlooking the modality gap and ignoring report content constraints. In this paper, we proposed Textual Inversion and Self-supervised Refinement (TISR) to address the above two issues. Specifically, textual inversion can project text and image into the same space by representing images as pseudo words to eliminate the cross-modeling gap. Subsequently, self-supervised refinement refines these pseudo words through contrastive loss computation between images and texts, enhancing the fidelity of generated reports to images. Notably, TISR is orthogonal to most existing methods, plug-and-play. We conduct experiments on two widely-used public datasets and achieve significant improvements on various baselines, which demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization of TISR. The code will be available soon.

Uncertainty-aware sign language video retrieval with probability distribution modeling

Sign language video retrieval plays a key role in facilitating information access for the deaf community. Despite significant advances in video-text retrieval, the complexity and inherent uncertainty of sign language preclude the direct application of these techniques. Previous methods achieve the mapping between sign language video and text through fine-grained modal alignment. However, due to the scarcity of fine-grained annotation, the uncertainty inherent in sign language video is underestimated, limiting the further development of sign language retrieval tasks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Uncertainty-aware Probability Distribution Retrieval (UPRet), that conceptualizes the mapping process of sign language video and text in terms of probability distributions, explores their potential interrelationships, and enables flexible mappings. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves state-of-the-art results on How2Sign (59.1%), PHOENIX-2014T (72.0%), and CSL-Daily (78.4%).

Cross-Modal Conditioned Reconstruction for Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation

Recent developments underscore the potential of textual information in enhancing learning models for a deeper understanding of medical visual semantics. However, language-guided medical image segmentation still faces a challenging issue. Previous works employ implicit and ambiguous architectures to embed textual information. This leads to segmentation results that are inconsistent with the semantics represented by the language, sometimes even diverging significantly. To this end, we propose a novel cross-modal conditioned Reconstruction for Language-guided Medical Image Segmentation (RecLMIS) to explicitly capture cross-modal interactions, which assumes that well-aligned medical visual features and medical notes can effectively reconstruct each other. We introduce conditioned interaction to adaptively predict patches and words of interest. Subsequently, they are utilized as conditioning factors for mutual reconstruction to align with regions described in the medical notes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our RecLMIS, surpassing LViT by 3.74% mIoU on the publicly available MosMedData+ dataset and achieving an average increase of 1.89% mIoU for cross-domain tests on our QATA-CoV19 dataset. Simultaneously, we achieve a relative reduction of 20.2% in parameter count and a 55.5% decrease in computational load. The code will be available at https://github.com/ShashankHuang/RecLMIS.

Chem-FINESE: Validating Fine-Grained Few-shot Entity Extraction through Text Reconstruction

Fine-grained few-shot entity extraction in the chemical domain faces two unique challenges. First, compared with entity extraction tasks in the general domain, sentences from chemical papers usually contain more entities. Moreover, entity extraction models usually have difficulty extracting entities of long-tailed types. In this paper, we propose Chem-FINESE, a novel sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) based few-shot entity extraction approach, to address these two challenges. Our Chem-FINESE has two components: a seq2seq entity extractor to extract named entities from the input sentence and a seq2seq self-validation module to reconstruct the original input sentence from extracted entities. Inspired by the fact that a good entity extraction system needs to extract entities faithfully, our new self-validation module leverages entity extraction results to reconstruct the original input sentence. Besides, we design a new contrastive loss to reduce excessive copying during the extraction process. Finally, we release ChemNER+, a new fine-grained chemical entity extraction dataset that is annotated by domain experts with the ChemNER schema. Experiments in few-shot settings with both ChemNER+ and CHEMET datasets show that our newly proposed framework has contributed up to 8.26% and 6.84% absolute F1-score gains respectively.

ML-LMCL: Mutual Learning and Large-Margin Contrastive Learning for Improving ASR Robustness in Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a fundamental task in the task-oriented dialogue systems. However, the inevitable errors from automatic speech recognition (ASR) usually impair the understanding performance and lead to error propagation. Although there are some attempts to address this problem through contrastive learning, they (1) treat clean manual transcripts and ASR transcripts equally without discrimination in fine-tuning; (2) neglect the fact that the semantically similar pairs are still pushed away when applying contrastive learning; (3) suffer from the problem of Kullback-Leibler (KL) vanishing. In this paper, we propose Mutual Learning and Large-Margin Contrastive Learning (ML-LMCL), a novel framework for improving ASR robustness in SLU. Specifically, in fine-tuning, we apply mutual learning and train two SLU models on the manual transcripts and the ASR transcripts, respectively, aiming to iteratively share knowledge between these two models. We also introduce a distance polarization regularizer to avoid pushing away the intra-cluster pairs as much as possible. Moreover, we use a cyclical annealing schedule to mitigate KL vanishing issue. Experiments on three datasets show that ML-LMCL outperforms existing models and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.

G2L: Semantically Aligned and Uniform Video Grounding via Geodesic and Game Theory

The recent video grounding works attempt to introduce vanilla contrastive learning into video grounding. However, we claim that this naive solution is suboptimal. Contrastive learning requires two key properties: (1) \emph{alignment} of features of similar samples, and (2) \emph{uniformity} of the induced distribution of the normalized features on the hypersphere. Due to two annoying issues in video grounding: (1) the co-existence of some visual entities in both ground truth and other moments, \ie semantic overlapping; (2) only a few moments in the video are annotated, \ie sparse annotation dilemma, vanilla contrastive learning is unable to model the correlations between temporally distant moments and learned inconsistent video representations. Both characteristics lead to vanilla contrastive learning being unsuitable for video grounding. In this paper, we introduce Geodesic and Game Localization (G2L), a semantically aligned and uniform video grounding framework via geodesic and game theory. We quantify the correlations among moments leveraging the geodesic distance that guides the model to learn the correct cross-modal representations. Furthermore, from the novel perspective of game theory, we propose semantic Shapley interaction based on geodesic distance sampling to learn fine-grained semantic alignment in similar moments. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Unify, Align and Refine: Multi-Level Semantic Alignment for Radiology Report Generation

Automatic radiology report generation has attracted enormous research interest due to its practical value in reducing the workload of radiologists. However, simultaneously establishing global correspondences between the image (e.g., Chest X-ray) and its related report and local alignments between image patches and keywords remains challenging. To this end, we propose an Unify, Align and then Refine (UAR) approach to learn multi-level cross-modal alignments and introduce three novel modules: Latent Space Unifier (LSU), Cross-modal Representation Aligner (CRA) and Text-to-Image Refiner (TIR). Specifically, LSU unifies multimodal data into discrete tokens, making it flexible to learn common knowledge among modalities with a shared network. The modality-agnostic CRA learns discriminative features via a set of orthonormal basis and a dual-gate mechanism first and then globally aligns visual and textual representations under a triplet contrastive loss. TIR boosts token-level local alignment via calibrating text-to-image attention with a learnable mask. Additionally, we design a two-stage training procedure to make UAR gradually grasp cross-modal alignments at different levels, which imitates radiologists' workflow: writing sentence by sentence first and then checking word by word. Extensive experiments and analyses on IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our UAR against varied state-of-the-art methods.

SSVMR: Saliency-based Self-training for Video-Music Retrieval

With the rise of short videos, the demand for selecting appropriate background music (BGM) for a video has increased significantly, video-music retrieval (VMR) task gradually draws much attention by research community. As other cross-modal learning tasks, existing VMR approaches usually attempt to measure the similarity between the video and music in the feature space. However, they (1) neglect the inevitable label noise; (2) neglect to enhance the ability to capture critical video clips. In this paper, we propose a novel saliency-based self-training framework, which is termed SSVMR. Specifically, we first explore to fully make use of the information containing in the training dataset by applying a semi-supervised method to suppress the adverse impact of label noise problem, where a self-training approach is adopted. In addition, we propose to capture the saliency of the video by mixing two videos at span level and preserving the locality of the two original videos. Inspired by back translation in NLP, we also conduct back retrieval to obtain more training data. Experimental results on MVD dataset show that our SSVMR achieves the state-of-the-art performance by a large margin, obtaining a relative improvement of 34.8% over the previous best model in terms of R@1.

Generating Templated Caption for Video Grounding

Video grounding aims to locate a moment of interest matching the given query sentence from an untrimmed video. Previous works ignore the \emph{sparsity dilemma} in video annotations, which fails to provide the context information between potential events and query sentences in the dataset. In this paper, we contend that providing easily available captions which describe general actions \ie, templated captions defined in our paper, will significantly boost the performance. To this end, we propose a Templated Caption Network (TCNet) for video grounding. Specifically, we first introduce dense video captioning to generate dense captions, and then obtain templated captions by Non-Templated Caption Suppression (NTCS). To utilize templated captions better, we propose Caption Guided Attention (CGA) project the semantic relations between templated captions and query sentences into temporal space and fuse them into visual representations. Considering the gap between templated captions and ground truth, we propose Asymmetric Dual Matching Supervised Contrastive Learning (ADMSCL) for constructing more negative pairs to maximize cross-modal mutual information. Without bells and whistles, extensive experiments on three public datasets (\ie, ActivityNet Captions, TACoS and ActivityNet-CG) demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.