Enhancing Emotion Recognition in Conversation through Emotional Cross-Modal Fusion and Inter-class Contrastive Learning

The purpose of emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is to identify the emotion category of an utterance based on contextual information. Previous ERC methods relied on simple connections for cross-modal fusion and ignored the information differences between modalities, resulting in the model being unable to focus on modality-specific emotional information. At the same time, the shared information between modalities was not processed to generate emotions. Information redundancy problem. To overcome these limitations, we propose a cross-modal fusion emotion prediction network based on vector connections. The network mainly includes two stages: the multi-modal feature fusion stage based on connection vectors and the emotion classification stage based on fused features. Furthermore, we design a supervised inter-class contrastive learning module based on emotion labels. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating excellent performance on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets.

RSET: Remapping-based Sorting Method for Emotion Transfer Speech Synthesis

Although current Text-To-Speech (TTS) models are able to generate high-quality speech samples, there are still challenges in developing emotion intensity controllable TTS. Most existing TTS models achieve emotion intensity control by extracting intensity information from reference speeches. Unfortunately, limited by the lack of modeling for intra-class emotion intensity and the model's information decoupling capability, the generated speech cannot achieve fine-grained emotion intensity control and suffers from information leakage issues. In this paper, we propose an emotion transfer TTS model, which defines a remapping-based sorting method to model intra-class relative intensity information, combined with Mutual Information (MI) to decouple speaker and emotion information, and synthesizes expressive speeches with perceptible intensity differences. Experiments show that our model achieves fine-grained emotion control while preserving speaker information.

Incremental Pseudo-Labeling for Black-Box Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Black-Box unsupervised domain adaptation (BBUDA) learns knowledge only with the prediction of target data from the source model without access to the source data and source model, which attempts to alleviate concerns about the privacy and security of data. However, incorrect pseudo-labels are prevalent in the prediction generated by the source model due to the cross-domain discrepancy, which may substantially degrade the performance of the target model. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that incrementally selects high-confidence pseudo-labels to improve the generalization ability of the target model. Specifically, we first generate pseudo-labels using a source model and train a crude target model by a vanilla BBUDA method. Second, we iteratively select high-confidence data from the low-confidence data pool by thresholding the softmax probabilities, prototype labels, and intra-class similarity. Then, we iteratively train a stronger target network based on the crude target model to correct the wrongly labeled samples to improve the accuracy of the pseudo-label. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art black-box unsupervised domain adaptation performance on three benchmark datasets.

Imp: Highly Capable Large Multimodal Models for Mobile Devices

By harnessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), recent large multimodal models (LMMs) have shown remarkable versatility in open-world multimodal understanding. Nevertheless, they are usually parameter-heavy and computation-intensive, thus hindering their applicability in resource-constrained scenarios. To this end, several lightweight LMMs have been proposed successively to maximize the capabilities under constrained scale (e.g., 3B). Despite the encouraging results achieved by these methods, most of them only focus on one or two aspects of the design space, and the key design choices that influence model capability have not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study for lightweight LMMs from the aspects of model architecture, training strategy, and training data. Based on our findings, we obtain Imp -- a family of highly capable LMMs at the 2B-4B scales. Notably, our Imp-3B model steadily outperforms all the existing lightweight LMMs of similar size, and even surpasses the state-of-the-art LMMs at the 13B scale. With low-bit quantization and resolution reduction techniques, our Imp model can be deployed on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen3 mobile chip with a high inference speed of about 13 tokens/s.

Unleashing the Power of Multi-Task Learning: A Comprehensive Survey Spanning Traditional, Deep, and Pretrained Foundation Model Eras

MTL is a learning paradigm that effectively leverages both task-specific and shared information to address multiple related tasks simultaneously. In contrast to STL, MTL offers a suite of benefits that enhance both the training process and the inference efficiency. MTL's key advantages encompass streamlined model architecture, performance enhancement, and cross-domain generalizability. Over the past twenty years, MTL has become widely recognized as a flexible and effective approach in various fields, including CV, NLP, recommendation systems, disease prognosis and diagnosis, and robotics. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of MTL, encompassing the technical aspects of cutting-edge methods from traditional approaches to deep learning and the latest trend of pretrained foundation models. Our survey methodically categorizes MTL techniques into five key areas: regularization, relationship learning, feature propagation, optimization, and pre-training. This categorization not only chronologically outlines the development of MTL but also dives into various specialized strategies within each category. Furthermore, the survey reveals how the MTL evolves from handling a fixed set of tasks to embracing a more flexible approach free from task or modality constraints. It explores the concepts of task-promptable and -agnostic training, along with the capacity for ZSL, which unleashes the untapped potential of this historically coveted learning paradigm. Overall, we hope this survey provides the research community with a comprehensive overview of the advancements in MTL from its inception in 1997 to the present in 2023. We address present challenges and look ahead to future possibilities, shedding light on the opportunities and potential avenues for MTL research in a broad manner. This project is publicly available at https://github.com/junfish/Awesome-Multitask-Learning.

Frequency-Guided Multi-Level Human Action Anomaly Detection with Normalizing Flows

We introduce the task of human action anomaly detection (HAAD), which aims to identify anomalous motions in an unsupervised manner given only the pre-determined normal category of training action samples. Compared to prior human-related anomaly detection tasks which primarily focus on unusual events from videos, HAAD involves the learning of specific action labels to recognize semantically anomalous human behaviors. To address this task, we propose a normalizing flow (NF)-based detection framework where the sample likelihood is effectively leveraged to indicate anomalies. As action anomalies often occur in some specific body parts, in addition to the full-body action feature learning, we incorporate extra encoding streams into our framework for a finer modeling of body subsets. Our framework is thus multi-level to jointly discover global and local motion anomalies. Furthermore, to show awareness of the potentially jittery data during recording, we resort to discrete cosine transformation by converting the action samples from the temporal to the frequency domain to mitigate the issue of data instability. Extensive experimental results on two human action datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the baselines formed by adapting state-of-the-art human activity AD approaches to our task of HAAD.

Leveraging Large Language Model to Generate a Novel Metaheuristic Algorithm with CRISPE Framework

In this paper, we borrow the large language model (LLM) ChatGPT-3.5 to automatically and quickly design a new metaheuristic algorithm (MA) with only a small amount of input. The novel animal-inspired MA named zoological search optimization (ZSO) draws inspiration from the collective behaviors of animals for solving continuous optimization problems. Specifically, the basic ZSO algorithm involves two search operators: the prey-predator interaction operator and the social flocking operator to balance exploration and exploitation well. Besides, the standard prompt engineering framework CRISPE (i.e., Capacity and Role, Insight, Statement, Personality, and Experiment) is responsible for the specific prompt design. Furthermore, we designed four variants of the ZSO algorithm with slight human-interacted adjustment. In numerical experiments, we comprehensively investigate the performance of ZSO-derived algorithms on CEC2014 benchmark functions, CEC2022 benchmark functions, and six engineering optimization problems. 20 popular and state-of-the-art MAs are employed as competitors. The experimental results and statistical analysis confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of ZSO-derived algorithms. At the end of this paper, we explore the prospects for the development of the metaheuristics community under the LLM era.

Tackling Noisy Labels with Network Parameter Additive Decomposition

Given data with noisy labels, over-parameterized deep networks suffer overfitting mislabeled data, resulting in poor generalization. The memorization effect of deep networks shows that although the networks have the ability to memorize all noisy data, they would first memorize clean training data, and then gradually memorize mislabeled training data. A simple and effective method that exploits the memorization effect to combat noisy labels is early stopping. However, early stopping cannot distinguish the memorization of clean data and mislabeled data, resulting in the network still inevitably overfitting mislabeled data in the early training stage.In this paper, to decouple the memorization of clean data and mislabeled data, and further reduce the side effect of mislabeled data, we perform additive decomposition on network parameters. Namely, all parameters are additively decomposed into two groups, i.e., parameters $\mathbf{w}$ are decomposed as $\mathbf{w}=\bm{\sigma}+\bm{\gamma}$. Afterward, the parameters $\bm{\sigma}$ are considered to memorize clean data, while the parameters $\bm{\gamma}$ are considered to memorize mislabeled data. Benefiting from the memorization effect, the updates of the parameters $\bm{\sigma}$ are encouraged to fully memorize clean data in early training, and then discouraged with the increase of training epochs to reduce interference of mislabeled data. The updates of the parameters $\bm{\gamma}$ are the opposite. In testing, only the parameters $\bm{\sigma}$ are employed to enhance generalization. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world benchmarks confirm the superior performance of our method.

AUD-TGN: Advancing Action Unit Detection with Temporal Convolution and GPT-2 in Wild Audiovisual Contexts

Leveraging the synergy of both audio data and visual data is essential for understanding human emotions and behaviors, especially in in-the-wild setting. Traditional methods for integrating such multimodal information often stumble, leading to less-than-ideal outcomes in the task of facial action unit detection. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel approach utilizing audio-visual multimodal data. This method enhances audio feature extraction by leveraging Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Log-Mel spectrogram features alongside a pre-trained VGGish network. Moreover, this paper adaptively captures fusion features across modalities by modeling the temporal relationships, and ultilizes a pre-trained GPT-2 model for sophisticated context-aware fusion of multimodal information. Our method notably improves the accuracy of AU detection by understanding the temporal and contextual nuances of the data, showcasing significant advancements in the comprehension of intricate scenarios. These findings underscore the potential of integrating temporal dynamics and contextual interpretation, paving the way for future research endeavors.

Multimodal Fusion Method with Spatiotemporal Sequences and Relationship Learning for Valence-Arousal Estimation

This paper presents our approach for the VA (Valence-Arousal) estimation task in the ABAW6 competition. We devised a comprehensive model by preprocessing video frames and audio segments to extract visual and audio features. Through the utilization of Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) modules, we effectively captured the temporal and spatial correlations between these features. Subsequently, we employed a Transformer encoder structure to learn long-range dependencies, thereby enhancing the model's performance and generalization ability. Our method leverages a multimodal data fusion approach, integrating pre-trained audio and video backbones for feature extraction, followed by TCN-based spatiotemporal encoding and Transformer-based temporal information capture. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving competitive performance in VA estimation on the AffWild2 dataset.