Enhancing Image-Text Matching with Adaptive Feature Aggregation

Image-text matching aims to find matched cross-modal pairs accurately. While current methods often rely on projecting cross-modal features into a common embedding space, they frequently suffer from imbalanced feature representations across different modalities, leading to unreliable retrieval results. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Feature Enhancement Module that adaptively aggregates single-modal features for more balanced and robust image-text retrieval. Additionally, we propose a new loss function that overcomes the shortcomings of original triplet ranking loss, thereby significantly improving retrieval performance. The proposed model has been evaluated on two public datasets and achieves competitive retrieval performance when compared with several state-of-the-art models. Implementation codes can be found here.

Surgical Phase Recognition in Laparoscopic Cholecystectomy

Automatic recognition of surgical phases in surgical videos is a fundamental task in surgical workflow analysis. In this report, we propose a Transformer-based method that utilizes calibrated confidence scores for a 2-stage inference pipeline, which dynamically switches between a baseline model and a separately trained transition model depending on the calibrated confidence level. Our method outperforms the baseline model on the Cholec80 dataset, and can be applied to a variety of action segmentation methods.

Inference in Probabilistic Logic Programs with Continuous Random Variables

Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP), exemplified by Sato and Kameya's PRISM, Poole's ICL, Raedt et al's ProbLog and Vennekens et al's LPAD, is aimed at combining statistical and logical knowledge representation and inference. A key characteristic of PLP frameworks is that they are conservative extensions to non-probabilistic logic programs which have been widely used for knowledge representation. PLP frameworks extend traditional logic programming semantics to a distribution semantics, where the semantics of a probabilistic logic program is given in terms of a distribution over possible models of the program. However, the inference techniques used in these works rely on enumerating sets of explanations for a query answer. Consequently, these languages permit very limited use of random variables with continuous distributions. In this paper, we present a symbolic inference procedure that uses constraints and represents sets of explanations without enumeration. This permits us to reason over PLPs with Gaussian or Gamma-distributed random variables (in addition to discrete-valued random variables) and linear equality constraints over reals. We develop the inference procedure in the context of PRISM; however the procedure's core ideas can be easily applied to other PLP languages as well. An interesting aspect of our inference procedure is that PRISM's query evaluation process becomes a special case in the absence of any continuous random variables in the program. The symbolic inference procedure enables us to reason over complex probabilistic models such as Kalman filters and a large subclass of Hybrid Bayesian networks that were hitherto not possible in PLP frameworks. (To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming).

Parameter Learning in PRISM Programs with Continuous Random Variables

Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP), exemplified by Sato and Kameya's PRISM, Poole's ICL, De Raedt et al's ProbLog and Vennekens et al's LPAD, combines statistical and logical knowledge representation and inference. Inference in these languages is based on enumerative construction of proofs over logic programs. Consequently, these languages permit very limited use of random variables with continuous distributions. In this paper, we extend PRISM with Gaussian random variables and linear equality constraints, and consider the problem of parameter learning in the extended language. Many statistical models such as finite mixture models and Kalman filter can be encoded in extended PRISM. Our EM-based learning algorithm uses a symbolic inference procedure that represents sets of derivations without enumeration. This permits us to learn the distribution parameters of extended PRISM programs with discrete as well as Gaussian variables. The learning algorithm naturally generalizes the ones used for PRISM and Hybrid Bayesian Networks.