Convex Hull-based Algebraic Constraint for Visual Quadric SLAM

Using Quadrics as the object representation has the benefits of both generality and closed-form projection derivation between image and world spaces. Although numerous constraints have been proposed for dual quadric reconstruction, we found that many of them are imprecise and provide minimal improvements to localization.After scrutinizing the existing constraints, we introduce a concise yet more precise convex hull-based algebraic constraint for object landmarks, which is applied to object reconstruction, frontend pose estimation, and backend bundle adjustment.This constraint is designed to fully leverage precise semantic segmentation, effectively mitigating mismatches between complex-shaped object contours and dual quadrics.Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our approach is applicable to both monocular and RGB-D SLAM and achieves improved object mapping and localization than existing quadric SLAM methods. The implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/tiev-tongji/convexhull-based-algebraic-constraint.

Enhancing Listened Speech Decoding from EEG via Parallel Phoneme Sequence Prediction

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) offer numerous human-centered application possibilities, particularly affecting people with neurological disorders. Text or speech decoding from brain activities is a relevant domain that could augment the quality of life for people with impaired speech perception. We propose a novel approach to enhance listened speech decoding from electroencephalography (EEG) signals by utilizing an auxiliary phoneme predictor that simultaneously decodes textual phoneme sequences. The proposed model architecture consists of three main parts: EEG module, speech module, and phoneme predictor. The EEG module learns to properly represent EEG signals into EEG embeddings. The speech module generates speech waveforms from the EEG embeddings. The phoneme predictor outputs the decoded phoneme sequences in text modality. Our proposed approach allows users to obtain decoded listened speech from EEG signals in both modalities (speech waveforms and textual phoneme sequences) simultaneously, eliminating the need for a concatenated sequential pipeline for each modality. The proposed approach also outperforms previous methods in both modalities. The source code and speech samples are publicly available.

MVC-VPR: Mutual Learning of Viewpoint Classification and Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) aims to robustly identify locations by leveraging image retrieval based on descriptors encoded from environmental images. However, drastic appearance changes of images captured from different viewpoints at the same location pose incoherent supervision signals for descriptor learning, which severely hinder the performance of VPR. Previous work proposes classifying images based on manually defined rules or ground truth labels for viewpoints, followed by descriptor training based on the classification results. However, not all datasets have ground truth labels of viewpoints and manually defined rules may be suboptimal, leading to degraded descriptor performance.To address these challenges, we introduce the mutual learning of viewpoint self-classification and VPR. Starting from coarse classification based on geographical coordinates, we progress to finer classification of viewpoints using simple clustering techniques. The dataset is partitioned in an unsupervised manner while simultaneously training a descriptor extractor for place recognition. Experimental results show that this approach almost perfectly partitions the dataset based on viewpoints, thus achieving mutually reinforcing effects. Our method even excels state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods that partition datasets using ground truth labels.

Can Generic LLMs Help Analyze Child-adult Interactions Involving Children with Autism in Clinical Observation?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in understanding human communication and interaction. However, their performance in the domain of child-inclusive interactions, including in clinical settings, remains less explored. In this work, we evaluate generic LLMs' ability to analyze child-adult dyadic interactions in a clinically relevant context involving children with ASD. Specifically, we explore LLMs in performing four tasks: classifying child-adult utterances, predicting engaged activities, recognizing language skills and understanding traits that are clinically relevant. Our evaluation shows that generic LLMs are highly capable of analyzing long and complex conversations in clinical observation sessions, often surpassing the performance of non-expert human evaluators. The results show their potential to segment interactions of interest, assist in language skills evaluation, identify engaged activities, and offer clinical-relevant context for assessments.

Egocentric Speaker Classification in Child-Adult Dyadic Interactions: From Sensing to Computational Modeling

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by challenges in social communication, repetitive behavior, and sensory processing. One important research area in ASD is evaluating children's behavioral changes over time during treatment. The standard protocol with this objective is BOSCC, which involves dyadic interactions between a child and clinicians performing a pre-defined set of activities. A fundamental aspect of understanding children's behavior in these interactions is automatic speech understanding, particularly identifying who speaks and when. Conventional approaches in this area heavily rely on speech samples recorded from a spectator perspective, and there is limited research on egocentric speech modeling. In this study, we design an experiment to perform speech sampling in BOSCC interviews from an egocentric perspective using wearable sensors and explore pre-training Ego4D speech samples to enhance child-adult speaker classification in dyadic interactions. Our findings highlight the potential of egocentric speech collection and pre-training to improve speaker classification accuracy.

Data Efficient Child-Adult Speaker Diarization with Simulated Conversations

Automating child speech analysis is crucial for applications such as neurocognitive assessments. Speaker diarization, which identifies ``who spoke when'', is an essential component of the automated analysis. However, publicly available child-adult speaker diarization solutions are scarce due to privacy concerns and a lack of annotated datasets, while manually annotating data for each scenario is both time-consuming and costly. To overcome these challenges, we propose a data-efficient solution by creating simulated child-adult conversations using AudioSet. We then train a Whisper Encoder-based model, achieving strong zero-shot performance on child-adult speaker diarization using real datasets. The model performance improves substantially when fine-tuned with only 30 minutes of real train data, with LoRA further improving the transfer learning performance. The source code and the child-adult speaker diarization model trained on simulated conversations are publicly available.

ModalityMirror: Improving Audio Classification in Modality Heterogeneity Federated Learning with Multimodal Distillation

Multimodal Federated Learning frequently encounters challenges of client modality heterogeneity, leading to undesired performances for secondary modality in multimodal learning. It is particularly prevalent in audiovisual learning, with audio is often assumed to be the weaker modality in recognition tasks. To address this challenge, we introduce ModalityMirror to improve audio model performance by leveraging knowledge distillation from an audiovisual federated learning model. ModalityMirror involves two phases: a modality-wise FL stage to aggregate uni-modal encoders; and a federated knowledge distillation stage on multi-modality clients to train an unimodal student model. Our results demonstrate that ModalityMirror significantly improves the audio classification compared to the state-of-the-art FL methods such as Harmony, particularly in audiovisual FL facing video missing. Our approach unlocks the potential for exploiting the diverse modality spectrum inherent in multi-modal FL.

Creating a Lens of Chinese Culture: A Multimodal Dataset for Chinese Pun Rebus Art Understanding

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in understanding everyday content. However, their performance in the domain of art, particularly culturally rich art forms, remains less explored. As a pearl of human wisdom and creativity, art encapsulates complex cultural narratives and symbolism. In this paper, we offer the Pun Rebus Art Dataset, a multimodal dataset for art understanding deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. We focus on three primary tasks: identifying salient visual elements, matching elements with their symbolic meanings, and explanations for the conveyed messages. Our evaluation reveals that state-of-the-art VLMs struggle with these tasks, often providing biased and hallucinated explanations and showing limited improvement through in-context learning. By releasing the Pun Rebus Art Dataset, we aim to facilitate the development of VLMs that can better understand and interpret culturally specific content, promoting greater inclusiveness beyond English-based corpora.

Can Synthetic Audio From Generative Foundation Models Assist Audio Recognition and Speech Modeling?

Recent advances in foundation models have enabled audio-generative models that produce high-fidelity sounds associated with music, events, and human actions. Despite the success achieved in modern audio-generative models, the conventional approach to assessing the quality of the audio generation relies heavily on distance metrics like Frechet Audio Distance. In contrast, we aim to evaluate the quality of audio generation by examining the effectiveness of using them as training data. Specifically, we conduct studies to explore the use of synthetic audio for audio recognition. Moreover, we investigate whether synthetic audio can serve as a resource for data augmentation in speech-related modeling. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate the potential of using synthetic audio for audio recognition and speech-related modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/usc-sail/SynthAudio.

Exploring Speech Foundation Models for Speaker Diarization in Child-Adult Dyadic Interactions

Speech foundation models, trained on vast datasets, have opened unique opportunities in addressing challenging low-resource speech understanding, such as child speech. In this work, we explore the capabilities of speech foundation models on child-adult speaker diarization. We show that exemplary foundation models can achieve 39.5% and 62.3% relative reductions in Diarization Error Rate and Speaker Confusion Rate, respectively, compared to previous speaker diarization methods. In addition, we benchmark and evaluate the speaker diarization results of the speech foundation models with varying the input audio window size, speaker demographics, and training data ratio. Our results highlight promising pathways for understanding and adopting speech foundation models to facilitate child speech understanding.