ChinaTelecom System Description to VoxCeleb Speaker Recognition Challenge 2023

This technical report describes ChinaTelecom system for Track 1 (closed) of the VoxCeleb2023 Speaker Recognition Challenge (VoxSRC 2023). Our system consists of several ResNet variants trained only on VoxCeleb2, which were fused for better performance later. Score calibration was also applied for each variant and the fused system. The final submission achieved minDCF of 0.1066 and EER of 1.980%.

You Can Ground Earlier than See: An Effective and Efficient Pipeline for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Compressed Videos

Given an untrimmed video, temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to locate a target moment semantically according to a sentence query. Although previous respectable works have made decent success, they only focus on high-level visual features extracted from the consecutive decoded frames and fail to handle the compressed videos for query modelling, suffering from insufficient representation capability and significant computational complexity during training and testing. In this paper, we pose a new setting, compressed-domain TSG, which directly utilizes compressed videos rather than fully-decompressed frames as the visual input. To handle the raw video bit-stream input, we propose a novel Three-branch Compressed-domain Spatial-temporal Fusion (TCSF) framework, which extracts and aggregates three kinds of low-level visual features (I-frame, motion vector and residual features) for effective and efficient grounding. Particularly, instead of encoding the whole decoded frames like previous works, we capture the appearance representation by only learning the I-frame feature to reduce delay or latency. Besides, we explore the motion information not only by learning the motion vector feature, but also by exploring the relations of neighboring frames via the residual feature. In this way, a three-branch spatial-temporal attention layer with an adaptive motion-appearance fusion module is further designed to extract and aggregate both appearance and motion information for the final grounding. Experiments on three challenging datasets shows that our TCSF achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods with lower complexity.

Hypotheses Tree Building for One-Shot Temporal Sentence Localization

Given an untrimmed video, temporal sentence localization (TSL) aims to localize a specific segment according to a given sentence query. Though respectable works have made decent achievements in this task, they severely rely on dense video frame annotations, which require a tremendous amount of human effort to collect. In this paper, we target another more practical and challenging setting: one-shot temporal sentence localization (one-shot TSL), which learns to retrieve the query information among the entire video with only one annotated frame. Particularly, we propose an effective and novel tree-structure baseline for one-shot TSL, called Multiple Hypotheses Segment Tree (MHST), to capture the query-aware discriminative frame-wise information under the insufficient annotations. Each video frame is taken as the leaf-node, and the adjacent frames sharing the same visual-linguistic semantics will be merged into the upper non-leaf node for tree building. At last, each root node is an individual segment hypothesis containing the consecutive frames of its leaf-nodes. During the tree construction, we also introduce a pruning strategy to eliminate the interference of query-irrelevant nodes. With our designed self-supervised loss functions, our MHST is able to generate high-quality segment hypotheses for ranking and selection with the query. Experiments on two challenging datasets demonstrate that MHST achieves competitive performance compared to existing methods.

Multi-Modal Cross-Domain Alignment Network for Video Moment Retrieval

As an increasingly popular task in multimedia information retrieval, video moment retrieval (VMR) aims to localize the target moment from an untrimmed video according to a given language query. Most previous methods depend heavily on numerous manual annotations (i.e., moment boundaries), which are extremely expensive to acquire in practice. In addition, due to the domain gap between different datasets, directly applying these pre-trained models to an unseen domain leads to a significant performance drop. In this paper, we focus on a novel task: cross-domain VMR, where fully-annotated datasets are available in one domain (``source domain''), but the domain of interest (``target domain'') only contains unannotated datasets. As far as we know, we present the first study on cross-domain VMR. To address this new task, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Cross-Domain Alignment (MMCDA) network to transfer the annotation knowledge from the source domain to the target domain. However, due to the domain discrepancy between the source and target domains and the semantic gap between videos and queries, directly applying trained models to the target domain generally leads to a performance drop. To solve this problem, we develop three novel modules: (i) a domain alignment module is designed to align the feature distributions between different domains of each modality; (ii) a cross-modal alignment module aims to map both video and query features into a joint embedding space and to align the feature distributions between different modalities in the target domain; (iii) a specific alignment module tries to obtain the fine-grained similarity between a specific frame and the given query for optimal localization. By jointly training these three modules, our MMCDA can learn domain-invariant and semantic-aligned cross-modal representations.

Hierarchical Local-Global Transformer for Temporal Sentence Grounding

This paper studies the multimedia problem of temporal sentence grounding (TSG), which aims to accurately determine the specific video segment in an untrimmed video according to a given sentence query. Traditional TSG methods mainly follow the top-down or bottom-up framework and are not end-to-end. They severely rely on time-consuming post-processing to refine the grounding results. Recently, some transformer-based approaches are proposed to efficiently and effectively model the fine-grained semantic alignment between video and query. Although these methods achieve significant performance to some extent, they equally take frames of the video and words of the query as transformer input for correlating, failing to capture their different levels of granularity with distinct semantics. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Local-Global Transformer (HLGT) to leverage this hierarchy information and model the interactions between different levels of granularity and different modalities for learning more fine-grained multi-modal representations. Specifically, we first split the video and query into individual clips and phrases to learn their local context (adjacent dependency) and global correlation (long-range dependency) via a temporal transformer. Then, a global-local transformer is introduced to learn the interactions between the local-level and global-level semantics for better multi-modal reasoning. Besides, we develop a new cross-modal cycle-consistency loss to enforce interaction between two modalities and encourage the semantic alignment between them. Finally, we design a brand-new cross-modal parallel transformer decoder to integrate the encoded visual and textual features for final grounding. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets show that our proposed HLGT achieves a new state-of-the-art performance.

Exploring Optical-Flow-Guided Motion and Detection-Based Appearance for Temporal Sentence Grounding

Temporal sentence grounding aims to localize a target segment in an untrimmed video semantically according to a given sentence query. Most previous works focus on learning frame-level features of each whole frame in the entire video, and directly match them with the textual information. Such frame-level feature extraction leads to the obstacles of these methods in distinguishing ambiguous video frames with complicated contents and subtle appearance differences, thus limiting their performance. In order to differentiate fine-grained appearance similarities among consecutive frames, some state-of-the-art methods additionally employ a detection model like Faster R-CNN to obtain detailed object-level features in each frame for filtering out the redundant background contents. However, these methods suffer from missing motion analysis since the object detection module in Faster R-CNN lacks temporal modeling. To alleviate the above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Motion- and Appearance-guided 3D Semantic Reasoning Network (MA3SRN), which incorporates optical-flow-guided motion-aware, detection-based appearance-aware, and 3D-aware object-level features to better reason the spatial-temporal object relations for accurately modelling the activity among consecutive frames. Specifically, we first develop three individual branches for motion, appearance, and 3D encoding separately to learn fine-grained motion-guided, appearance-guided, and 3D-aware object features, respectively. Then, both motion and appearance information from corresponding branches are associated to enhance the 3D-aware features for the final precise grounding. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets (ActivityNet Caption, Charades-STA and TACoS) demonstrate that the proposed MA3SRN model achieves a new state-of-the-art.

V3H: Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via View Variation and View Heredity

Real data often appear in the form of multiple incomplete views, and incomplete multi-view clustering is an effective method to integrate these incomplete views. Previous methods only learn the consistent information between different views and ignore the unique information of each view, which limits their clustering performance and generalizations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel View Variation and View Heredity approach (V 3 H). Inspired by the variation and the heredity in genetics, V 3 H first decomposes each subspace into a variation matrix for the corresponding view and a heredity matrix for all the views to represent the unique information and the consistent information respectively. Then, by aligning different views based on their cluster indicator matrices, V3H integrates the unique information from different views to improve the clustering performance. Finally, with the help of the adjustable low-rank representation based on the heredity matrix, V3H recovers the underlying true data structure to reduce the influence of the large incompleteness. More importantly, V3H presents possibly the first work to introduce genetics to clustering algorithms for learning simultaneously the consistent information and the unique information from incomplete multi-view data. Extensive experimental results on fifteen benchmark datasets validate its superiority over other state-of-the-arts.

Double Self-weighted Multi-view Clustering via Adaptive View Fusion

Multi-view clustering has been applied in many real-world applications where original data often contain noises. Some graph-based multi-view clustering methods have been proposed to try to reduce the negative influence of noises. However, previous graph-based multi-view clustering methods treat all features equally even if there are redundant features or noises, which is obviously unreasonable. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view clustering framework Double Self-weighted Multi-view Clustering (DSMC) to overcome the aforementioned deficiency. DSMC performs double self-weighted operations to remove redundant features and noises from each graph, thereby obtaining robust graphs. For the first self-weighted operation, it assigns different weights to different features by introducing an adaptive weight matrix, which can reinforce the role of the important features in the joint representation and make each graph robust. For the second self-weighting operation, it weights different graphs by imposing an adaptive weight factor, which can assign larger weights to more robust graphs. Furthermore, by designing an adaptive multiple graphs fusion, we can fuse the features in the different graphs to integrate these graphs for clustering. Experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate its advantages over other state-of-the-art multi-view clustering methods.

ANIMC: A Soft Framework for Auto-weighted Noisy and Incomplete Multi-view Clustering

Multi-view clustering has wide applications in many image processing scenarios. In these scenarios, original image data often contain missing instances and noises, which is ignored by most multi-view clustering methods. However, missing instances may make these methods difficult to use directly and noises will lead to unreliable clustering results. In this paper, we propose a novel Auto-weighted Noisy and Incomplete Multi-view Clustering framework (ANIMC) via a soft auto-weighted strategy and a doubly soft regular regression model. Firstly, by designing adaptive semi-regularized nonnegative matrix factorization (adaptive semi-RNMF), the soft auto-weighted strategy assigns a proper weight to each view and adds a soft boundary to balance the influence of noises and incompleteness. Secondly, by proposing{\theta}-norm, the doubly soft regularized regression model adjusts the sparsity of our model by choosing different{\theta}. Compared with existing methods, ANIMC has three unique advantages: 1) it is a soft algorithm to adjust our framework in different scenarios, thereby improving its generalization ability; 2) it automatically learns a proper weight for each view, thereby reducing the influence of noises; 3) it performs doubly soft regularized regression that aligns the same instances in different views, thereby decreasing the impact of missing instances. Extensive experimental results demonstrate its superior advantages over other state-of-the-art methods.

Unbalanced Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via the Scheme of View Evolution: Weak Views are Meat; Strong Views do Eat

Incomplete multi-view clustering is an important technique to deal with real-world incomplete multi-view data. Previous works assume that all views have the same incompleteness, i.e., balanced incompleteness. However, different views often have distinct incompleteness, i.e., unbalanced incompleteness, which results in strong views (low-incompleteness views) and weak views (high-incompleteness views). The unbalanced incompleteness prevents us from directly using the previous methods for clustering. In this paper, inspired by the effective biological evolution theory, we design the novel scheme of view evolution to cluster strong and weak views. Moreover, we propose an Unbalanced Incomplete Multi-view Clustering method (UIMC), which is the first effective method based on view evolution for unbalanced incomplete multi-view clustering. Compared with previous methods, UIMC has two unique advantages: 1) it proposes weighted multi-view subspace clustering to integrate these unbalanced incomplete views, which effectively solves the unbalanced incomplete multi-view problem; 2) it designs the low-rank and robust representation to recover the data, which diminishes the impact of the incompleteness and noises. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that UIMC improves the clustering performance by up to 40% on three evaluation metrics over other state-of-the-art methods.