Transformation vs Tradition: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for Arts and Humanities

Recent advances in artificial general intelligence (AGI), particularly large language models and creative image generation systems have demonstrated impressive capabilities on diverse tasks spanning the arts and humanities. However, the swift evolution of AGI has also raised critical questions about its responsible deployment in these culturally significant domains traditionally seen as profoundly human. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the applications and implications of AGI for text, graphics, audio, and video pertaining to arts and the humanities. We survey cutting-edge systems and their usage in areas ranging from poetry to history, marketing to film, and communication to classical art. We outline substantial concerns pertaining to factuality, toxicity, biases, and public safety in AGI systems, and propose mitigation strategies. The paper argues for multi-stakeholder collaboration to ensure AGI promotes creativity, knowledge, and cultural values without undermining truth or human dignity. Our timely contribution summarizes a rapidly developing field, highlighting promising directions while advocating for responsible progress centering on human flourishing. The analysis lays the groundwork for further research on aligning AGI's technological capacities with enduring social goods.

ATM: Action Temporality Modeling for Video Question Answering

Despite significant progress in video question answering (VideoQA), existing methods fall short of questions that require causal/temporal reasoning across frames. This can be attributed to imprecise motion representations. We introduce Action Temporality Modeling (ATM) for temporality reasoning via three-fold uniqueness: (1) rethinking the optical flow and realizing that optical flow is effective in capturing the long horizon temporality reasoning; (2) training the visual-text embedding by contrastive learning in an action-centric manner, leading to better action representations in both vision and text modalities; and (3) preventing the model from answering the question given the shuffled video in the fine-tuning stage, to avoid spurious correlation between appearance and motion and hence ensure faithful temporality reasoning. In the experiments, we show that ATM outperforms previous approaches in terms of the accuracy on multiple VideoQAs and exhibits better true temporality reasoning ability.

Defending Adversarial Patches via Joint Region Localizing and Inpainting

Deep neural networks are successfully used in various applications, but show their vulnerability to adversarial examples. With the development of adversarial patches, the feasibility of attacks in physical scenes increases, and the defenses against patch attacks are urgently needed. However, defending such adversarial patch attacks is still an unsolved problem. In this paper, we analyse the properties of adversarial patches, and find that: on the one hand, adversarial patches will lead to the appearance or contextual inconsistency in the target objects; on the other hand, the patch region will show abnormal changes on the high-level feature maps of the objects extracted by a backbone network. Considering the above two points, we propose a novel defense method based on a ``localizing and inpainting" mechanism to pre-process the input examples. Specifically, we design an unified framework, where the ``localizing" sub-network utilizes a two-branch structure to represent the above two aspects to accurately detect the adversarial patch region in the image. For the ``inpainting" sub-network, it utilizes the surrounding contextual cues to recover the original content covered by the adversarial patch. The quality of inpainted images is also evaluated by measuring the appearance consistency and the effects of adversarial attacks. These two sub-networks are then jointly trained via an iterative optimization manner. In this way, the ``localizing" and ``inpainting" modules can interact closely with each other, and thus learn a better solution. A series of experiments versus traffic sign classification and detection tasks are conducted to defend against various adversarial patch attacks.

Focusing on what to decode and what to train: Efficient Training with HOI Split Decoders and Specific Target Guided DeNoising

Recent one-stage transformer-based methods achieve notable gains in the Human-object Interaction Detection (HOI) task by leveraging the detection of DETR. However, the current methods redirect the detection target of the object decoder, and the box target is not explicitly separated from the query embeddings, which leads to long and hard training. Furthermore, matching the predicted HOI instances with the ground-truth is more challenging than object detection, simply adapting training strategies from the object detection makes the training more difficult. To clear the ambiguity between human and object detection and share the prediction burden, we propose a novel one-stage framework (SOV), which consists of a subject decoder, an object decoder, and a verb decoder. Moreover, we propose a novel Specific Target Guided (STG) DeNoising strategy, which leverages learnable object and verb label embeddings to guide the training and accelerates the training convergence. In addition, for the inference part, the label-specific information is directly fed into the decoders by initializing the query embeddings from the learnable label embeddings. Without additional features or prior language knowledge, our method (SOV-STG) achieves higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art method in one-third of training epochs. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/cjw2021/SOV-STG}.

GateHUB: Gated History Unit with Background Suppression for Online Action Detection

Online action detection is the task of predicting the action as soon as it happens in a streaming video. A major challenge is that the model does not have access to the future and has to solely rely on the history, i.e., the frames observed so far, to make predictions. It is therefore important to accentuate parts of the history that are more informative to the prediction of the current frame. We present GateHUB, Gated History Unit with Background Suppression, that comprises a novel position-guided gated cross-attention mechanism to enhance or suppress parts of the history as per how informative they are for current frame prediction. GateHUB further proposes Future-augmented History (FaH) to make history features more informative by using subsequently observed frames when available. In a single unified framework, GateHUB integrates the transformer's ability of long-range temporal modeling and the recurrent model's capacity to selectively encode relevant information. GateHUB also introduces a background suppression objective to further mitigate false positive background frames that closely resemble the action frames. Extensive validation on three benchmark datasets, THUMOS, TVSeries, and HDD, demonstrates that GateHUB significantly outperforms all existing methods and is also more efficient than the existing best work. Furthermore, a flow-free version of GateHUB is able to achieve higher or close accuracy at 2.8x higher frame rate compared to all existing methods that require both RGB and optical flow information for prediction.

Transformer-based Cross-Modal Recipe Embeddings with Large Batch Training

In this paper, we present a cross-modal recipe retrieval framework, Transformer-based Network for Large Batch Training (TNLBT), which is inspired by ACME~(Adversarial Cross-Modal Embedding) and H-T~(Hierarchical Transformer). TNLBT aims to accomplish retrieval tasks while generating images from recipe embeddings. We apply the Hierarchical Transformer-based recipe text encoder, the Vision Transformer~(ViT)-based recipe image encoder, and an adversarial network architecture to enable better cross-modal embedding learning for recipe texts and images. In addition, we use self-supervised learning to exploit the rich information in the recipe texts having no corresponding images. Since contrastive learning could benefit from a larger batch size according to the recent literature on self-supervised learning, we adopt a large batch size during training and have validated its effectiveness. In the experiments, the proposed framework significantly outperformed the current state-of-the-art frameworks in both cross-modal recipe retrieval and image generation tasks on the benchmark Recipe1M. This is the first work which confirmed the effectiveness of large batch training on cross-modal recipe embeddings.

QAHOI: Query-Based Anchors for Human-Object Interaction Detection

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection as a downstream of object detection tasks requires localizing pairs of humans and objects and extracting the semantic relationships between humans and objects from an image. Recently, one-stage approaches have become a new trend for this task due to their high efficiency. However, these approaches focus on detecting possible interaction points or filtering human-object pairs, ignoring the variability in the location and size of different objects at spatial scales. To address this problem, we propose a transformer-based method, QAHOI (Query-Based Anchors for Human-Object Interaction detection), which leverages a multi-scale architecture to extract features from different spatial scales and uses query-based anchors to predict all the elements of an HOI instance. We further investigate that a powerful backbone significantly increases accuracy for QAHOI, and QAHOI with a transformer-based backbone outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods by large margins on the HICO-DET benchmark. The source code is available at $\href{https://github.com/cjw2021/QAHOI}{\text{this https URL}}$.

Group Activity Prediction with Sequential Relational Anticipation Model

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to predict group activities given the beginning frames with incomplete activity executions. Existing action prediction approaches learn to enhance the representation power of the partial observation. However, for group activity prediction, the relation evolution of people's activity and their positions over time is an important cue for predicting group activity. To this end, we propose a sequential relational anticipation model (SRAM) that summarizes the relational dynamics in the partial observation and progressively anticipates the group representations with rich discriminative information. Our model explicitly anticipates both activity features and positions by two graph auto-encoders, aiming to learn a discriminative group representation for group activity prediction. Experimental results on two popularly used datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art activity prediction methods.

ContourRend: A Segmentation Method for Improving Contours by Rendering

A good object segmentation should contain clear contours and complete regions. However, mask-based segmentation can not handle contour features well on a coarse prediction grid, thus causing problems of blurry edges. While contour-based segmentation provides contours directly, but misses contours' details. In order to obtain fine contours, we propose a segmentation method named ContourRend which adopts a contour renderer to refine segmentation contours. And we implement our method on a segmentation model based on graph convolutional network (GCN). For the single object segmentation task on cityscapes dataset, the GCN-based segmentation con-tour is used to generate a contour of a single object, then our contour renderer focuses on the pixels around the contour and predicts the category at high resolution. By rendering the contour result, our method reaches 72.41% mean intersection over union (IoU) and surpasses baseline Polygon-GCN by 1.22%.

Adversarial Multi-Binary Neural Network for Multi-class Classification

Multi-class text classification is one of the key problems in machine learning and natural language processing. Emerging neural networks deal with the problem using a multi-output softmax layer and achieve substantial progress, but they do not explicitly learn the correlation among classes. In this paper, we use a multi-task framework to address multi-class classification, where a multi-class classifier and multiple binary classifiers are trained together. Moreover, we employ adversarial training to distinguish the class-specific features and the class-agnostic features. The model benefits from better feature representation. We conduct experiments on two large-scale multi-class text classification tasks and demonstrate that the proposed architecture outperforms baseline approaches.