MLS-Track: Multilevel Semantic Interaction in RMOT

The new trend in multi-object tracking task is to track objects of interest using natural language. However, the scarcity of paired prompt-instance data hinders its progress. To address this challenge, we propose a high-quality yet low-cost data generation method base on Unreal Engine 5 and construct a brand-new benchmark dataset, named Refer-UE-City, which primarily includes scenes from intersection surveillance videos, detailing the appearance and actions of people and vehicles. Specifically, it provides 14 videos with a total of 714 expressions, and is comparable in scale to the Refer-KITTI dataset. Additionally, we propose a multi-level semantic-guided multi-object framework called MLS-Track, where the interaction between the model and text is enhanced layer by layer through the introduction of Semantic Guidance Module (SGM) and Semantic Correlation Branch (SCB). Extensive experiments on Refer-UE-City and Refer-KITTI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework and it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code and datatsets will be available.

Joint Physical-Digital Facial Attack Detection Via Simulating Spoofing Clues

Face recognition systems are frequently subjected to a variety of physical and digital attacks of different types. Previous methods have achieved satisfactory performance in scenarios that address physical attacks and digital attacks, respectively. However, few methods are considered to integrate a model that simultaneously addresses both physical and digital attacks, implying the necessity to develop and maintain multiple models. To jointly detect physical and digital attacks within a single model, we propose an innovative approach that can adapt to any network architecture. Our approach mainly contains two types of data augmentation, which we call Simulated Physical Spoofing Clues augmentation (SPSC) and Simulated Digital Spoofing Clues augmentation (SDSC). SPSC and SDSC augment live samples into simulated attack samples by simulating spoofing clues of physical and digital attacks, respectively, which significantly improve the capability of the model to detect "unseen" attack types. Extensive experiments show that SPSC and SDSC can achieve state-of-the-art generalization in Protocols 2.1 and 2.2 of the UniAttackData dataset, respectively. Our method won first place in "Unified Physical-Digital Face Attack Detection" of the 5th Face Anti-spoofing Challenge@CVPR2024. Our final submission obtains 3.75% APCER, 0.93% BPCER, and 2.34% ACER, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xianhua-He/cvpr2024-face-anti-spoofing-challenge.

Large Language Model Meets Graph Neural Network in Knowledge Distillation

Despite recent community revelations about the advancements and potential applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) in understanding Text-Attributed Graph (TAG), the deployment of LLMs for production is hindered by its high computational and storage requirements, as well as long latencies during model inference. Simultaneously, although traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are light weight and adept at learning structural features of graphs, their ability to grasp the complex semantics in TAG is somewhat constrained for real applications. To address these limitations, we concentrate on the downstream task of node classification in TAG and propose a novel graph knowledge distillation framework, termed Linguistic Graph Knowledge Distillation (LinguGKD), using LLMs as teacher models and GNNs as student models for knowledge distillation. It involves TAG-oriented instruction tuning of LLM on designed tailored prompts, followed by propagating knowledge and aligning the hierarchically learned node features from the teacher LLM to the student GNN in latent space, employing a layer-adaptive contrastive learning strategy. Through extensive experiments on a variety of LLM and GNN models and multiple benchmark datasets, the proposed LinguGKD significantly boosts the student GNN's predictive accuracy and convergence rate, without the need of extra data or model parameters. Compared to teacher LLM, distilled GNN achieves superior inference speed equipped with much fewer computing and storage demands, when surpassing the teacher LLM's classification accuracy on some of benchmark datasets.

S-T CRF: Spatial-Temporal Conditional Random Field for Human Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction is of significant importance in computer vision. Accurate pedestrian trajectory prediction benefits autonomous vehicles and robots in planning their motion. Pedestrians' trajectories are greatly influenced by their intentions. Prior studies having introduced various deep learning methods only pay attention to the spatial and temporal information of trajectory, overlooking the explicit intention information. In this study, we introduce a novel model, termed the \textbf{S-T CRF}: \textbf{S}patial-\textbf{T}emporal \textbf{C}onditional \textbf{R}andom \textbf{F}ield, which judiciously incorporates intention information besides spatial and temporal information of trajectory. This model uses a Conditional Random Field (CRF) to generate a representation of future intentions, greatly improving the prediction of subsequent trajectories when combined with spatial-temporal representation. Furthermore, the study innovatively devises a space CRF loss and a time CRF loss, meticulously designed to enhance interaction constraints and temporal dynamics, respectively. Extensive experimental evaluations on dataset ETH/UCY and SDD demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses existing baseline approaches.

GETNext: Trajectory Flow Map Enhanced Transformer for Next POI Recommendation

Next POI recommendation intends to forecast users' immediate future movements given their current status and historical information, yielding great values for both users and service providers. However, this problem is perceptibly complex because various data trends need to be considered together. This includes the spatial locations, temporal contexts, user's preferences, etc. Most existing studies view the next POI recommendation as a sequence prediction problem while omitting the collaborative signals from other users. Instead, we propose a user-agnostic global trajectory flow map and a novel Graph Enhanced Transformer model (GETNext) to better exploit the extensive collaborative signals for a more accurate next POI prediction, and alleviate the cold start problem in the meantime. GETNext incorporates the global transition patterns, user's general preference, spatio-temporal context, and time-aware category embeddings together into a transformer model to make the prediction of user's future moves. With this design, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with a large margin and also sheds light on the cold start challenges within the spatio-temporal involved recommendation problems.

USER: Unsupervised Structural Entropy-based Robust Graph Neural Network

Unsupervised/self-supervised graph neural networks (GNN) are vulnerable to inherent randomness in the input graph data which greatly affects the performance of the model in downstream tasks. In this paper, we alleviate the interference of graph randomness and learn appropriate representations of nodes without label information. To this end, we propose USER, an unsupervised robust version of graph neural networks that is based on structural entropy. We analyze the property of intrinsic connectivity and define intrinsic connectivity graph. We also identify the rank of the adjacency matrix as a crucial factor in revealing a graph that provides the same embeddings as the intrinsic connectivity graph. We then introduce structural entropy in the objective function to capture such a graph. Extensive experiments conducted on clustering and link prediction tasks under random-noises and meta-attack over three datasets show USER outperforms benchmarks and is robust to heavier randomness.

Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

Towards Automatically Extracting UML Class Diagrams from Natural Language Specifications

In model-driven engineering (MDE), UML class diagrams serve as a way to plan and communicate between developers. However, it is complex and resource-consuming. We propose an automated approach for the extraction of UML class diagrams from natural language software specifications. To develop our approach, we create a dataset of UML class diagrams and their English specifications with the help of volunteers. Our approach is a pipeline of steps consisting of the segmentation of the input into sentences, the classification of the sentences, the generation of UML class diagram fragments from sentences, and the composition of these fragments into one UML class diagram. We develop a quantitative testing framework specific to UML class diagram extraction. Our approach yields low precision and recall but serves as a benchmark for future research.

GACAN: Graph Attention-Convolution-Attention Networks for Traffic Forecasting Based on Multi-granularity Time Series

Traffic forecasting is an integral part of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Achieving a high prediction accuracy is a challenging task due to a high level of dynamics and complex spatial-temporal dependency of road networks. For this task, we propose Graph Attention-Convolution-Attention Networks (GACAN). The model uses a novel Att-Conv-Att (ACA) block which contains two graph attention layers and one spectral-based GCN layer sandwiched in between. The graph attention layers are meant to capture temporal features while the spectral-based GCN layer is meant to capture spatial features. The main novelty of the model is the integration of time series of four different time granularities: the original time series, together with hourly, daily, and weekly time series. Unlike previous work that used multi-granularity time series by handling every time series separately, GACAN combines the outcome of processing all time series after each graph attention layer. Thus, the effects of different time granularities are integrated throughout the model. We perform a series of experiments on three real-world datasets. The experimental results verify the advantage of using multi-granularity time series and that the proposed GACAN model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

Tribrid: Stance Classification with Neural Inconsistency Detection

We study the problem of performing automatic stance classification on social media with neural architectures such as BERT. Although these architectures deliver impressive results, their level is not yet comparable to the one of humans and they might produce errors that have a significant impact on the downstream task (e.g., fact-checking). To improve the performance, we present a new neural architecture where the input also includes automatically generated negated perspectives over a given claim. The model is jointly learned to make simultaneously multiple predictions, which can be used either to improve the classification of the original perspective or to filter out doubtful predictions. In the first case, we propose a weakly supervised method for combining the predictions into a final one. In the second case, we show that using the confidence scores to remove doubtful predictions allows our method to achieve human-like performance over the retained information, which is still a sizable part of the original input.