There are three problems existing in the popular data-to-text datasets. First, the large-scale datasets either contain noise or lack real application scenarios. Second, the datasets close to real applications are relatively small in size. Last, current datasets bias in the English language while leaving other languages underexplored. To alleviate these limitations, in this paper, we present CATS, a pragmatic Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset with large scale and high quality. The dataset aims to generate textual descriptions for the answer in the practical TableQA system. Further, to bridge the structural gap between the input SQL and table and establish better semantic alignments, we propose a Unified Graph Transformation approach to establish a joint encoding space for the two hybrid knowledge resources and convert this task to a graph-to-text problem. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Further analysis on CATS attests to both the high quality and challenges of the dataset.
Adaptive network pruning approach has recently drawn significant attention due to its excellent capability to identify the importance and redundancy of layers and filters and customize a suitable pruning solution. However, it remains unsatisfactory since current adaptive pruning methods rely mostly on an additional monitor to score layer and filter importance, and thus faces high complexity and weak interpretability. To tackle these issues, we have deeply researched the weight reconstruction process in iterative prune-train process and propose a Protective Self-Adaptive Pruning (PSAP) method. First of all, PSAP can utilize its own information, weight sparsity ratio, to adaptively adjust pruning ratio of layers before each pruning step. Moreover, we propose a protective reconstruction mechanism to prevent important filters from being pruned through supervising gradients and to avoid unrecoverable information loss as well. Our PSAP is handy and explicit because it merely depends on weights and gradients of model itself, instead of requiring an additional monitor as in early works. Experiments on ImageNet and CIFAR-10 also demonstrate its superiority to current works in both accuracy and compression ratio, especially for compressing with a high ratio or pruning from scratch.
Change captioning is to describe the semantic change between a pair of similar images in natural language. It is more challenging than general image captioning, because it requires capturing fine-grained change information while being immune to irrelevant viewpoint changes, and solving syntax ambiguity in change descriptions. In this paper, we propose a neighborhood contrastive transformer to improve the model's perceiving ability for various changes under different scenes and cognition ability for complex syntax structure. Concretely, we first design a neighboring feature aggregating to integrate neighboring context into each feature, which helps quickly locate the inconspicuous changes under the guidance of conspicuous referents. Then, we devise a common feature distilling to compare two images at neighborhood level and extract common properties from each image, so as to learn effective contrastive information between them. Finally, we introduce the explicit dependencies between words to calibrate the transformer decoder, which helps better understand complex syntax structure during training. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets with different change scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/tuyunbin/NCT.
Table-to-text generation aims at automatically generating text to help people conveniently obtain salient information in tables. Recent works explicitly decompose the generation process into content planning and surface generation stages, employing two autoregressive networks for them respectively. However, they are computationally expensive due to the non-parallelizable nature of autoregressive decoding and the redundant parameters of two networks. In this paper, we propose the first totally non-autoregressive table-to-text model (Plan-then-Seam, PTS) that produces its outputs in parallel with one single network. PTS firstly writes and calibrates one plan of the content to be generated with a novel rethinking pointer predictor, and then takes the plan as the context for seaming to decode the description. These two steps share parameters and perform iteratively to capture token inter-dependency while keeping parallel decoding. Experiments on two public benchmarks show that PTS achieves 3.0~5.6 times speedup for inference time, reducing 50% parameters, while maintaining as least comparable performance against strong two-stage table-to-text competitors.
Contrastive deep graph clustering, which aims to divide nodes into disjoint groups via contrastive mechanisms, is a challenging research spot. Among the recent works, hard sample mining-based algorithms have achieved great attention for their promising performance. However, we find that the existing hard sample mining methods have two problems as follows. 1) In the hardness measurement, the important structural information is overlooked for similarity calculation, degrading the representativeness of the selected hard negative samples. 2) Previous works merely focus on the hard negative sample pairs while neglecting the hard positive sample pairs. Nevertheless, samples within the same cluster but with low similarity should also be carefully learned. To solve the problems, we propose a novel contrastive deep graph clustering method dubbed Hard Sample Aware Network (HSAN) by introducing a comprehensive similarity measure criterion and a general dynamic sample weighing strategy. Concretely, in our algorithm, the similarities between samples are calculated by considering both the attribute embeddings and the structure embeddings, better revealing sample relationships and assisting hardness measurement. Moreover, under the guidance of the carefully collected high-confidence clustering information, our proposed weight modulating function will first recognize the positive and negative samples and then dynamically up-weight the hard sample pairs while down-weighting the easy ones. In this way, our method can mine not only the hard negative samples but also the hard positive sample, thus improving the discriminative capability of the samples further. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed method.
Given a piece of text, a video clip and a reference audio, the movie dubbing (also known as visual voice clone V2C) task aims to generate speeches that match the speaker's emotion presented in the video using the desired speaker voice as reference. V2C is more challenging than conventional text-to-speech tasks as it additionally requires the generated speech to exactly match the varying emotions and speaking speed presented in the video. Unlike previous works, we propose a novel movie dubbing architecture to tackle these problems via hierarchical prosody modelling, which bridges the visual information to corresponding speech prosody from three aspects: lip, face, and scene. Specifically, we align lip movement to the speech duration, and convey facial expression to speech energy and pitch via attention mechanism based on valence and arousal representations inspired by recent psychology findings. Moreover, we design an emotion booster to capture the atmosphere from global video scenes. All these embeddings together are used to generate mel-spectrogram and then convert to speech waves via existing vocoder. Extensive experimental results on the Chem and V2C benchmark datasets demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method. The source code and trained models will be released to the public.
The tradeoff between performance and inference speed is critical for practical applications. Architecture reparameterization obtains better tradeoffs and it is becoming an increasingly popular ingredient in modern convolutional neural networks. Nonetheless, its quantization performance is usually too poor to deploy (e.g. more than 20% top-1 accuracy drop on ImageNet) when INT8 inference is desired. In this paper, we dive into the underlying mechanism of this failure, where the original design inevitably enlarges quantization error. We propose a simple, robust, and effective remedy to have a quantization-friendly structure that also enjoys reparameterization benefits. Our method greatly bridges the gap between INT8 and FP32 accuracy for RepVGG. Without bells and whistles, the top-1 accuracy drop on ImageNet is reduced within 2\% by standard post-training quantization.
Accurate localization ability is fundamental in autonomous driving. Traditional visual localization frameworks approach the semantic map-matching problem with geometric models, which rely on complex parameter tuning and thus hinder large-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose BEV-Locator: an end-to-end visual semantic localization neural network using multi-view camera images. Specifically, a visual BEV (Birds-Eye-View) encoder extracts and flattens the multi-view images into BEV space. While the semantic map features are structurally embedded as map queries sequence. Then a cross-model transformer associates the BEV features and semantic map queries. The localization information of ego-car is recursively queried out by cross-attention modules. Finally, the ego pose can be inferred by decoding the transformer outputs. We evaluate the proposed method in large-scale nuScenes and Qcraft datasets. The experimental results show that the BEV-locator is capable to estimate the vehicle poses under versatile scenarios, which effectively associates the cross-model information from multi-view images and global semantic maps. The experiments report satisfactory accuracy with mean absolute errors of 0.052m, 0.135m and 0.251$^\circ$ in lateral, longitudinal translation and heading angle degree.