Audio-text Retrieval with Transformer-based Hierarchical Alignment and Disentangled Cross-modal Representation

Most existing audio-text retrieval (ATR) approaches typically rely on a single-level interaction to associate audio and text, limiting their ability to align different modalities and leading to suboptimal matches. In this work, we present a novel ATR framework that leverages two-stream Transformers in conjunction with a Hierarchical Alignment (THA) module to identify multi-level correspondences of different Transformer blocks between audio and text. Moreover, current ATR methods mainly focus on learning a global-level representation, missing out on intricate details to capture audio occurrences that correspond to textual semantics. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Disentangled Cross-modal Representation (DCR) approach that disentangles high-dimensional features into compact latent factors to grasp fine-grained audio-text semantic correlations. Additionally, we develop a confidence-aware (CA) module to estimate the confidence of each latent factor pair and adaptively aggregate cross-modal latent factors to achieve local semantic alignment. Experiments show that our THA effectively boosts ATR performance, with the DCR approach further contributing to consistent performance gains.

ACE: A Cross-Platform Visual-Exoskeletons System for Low-Cost Dexterous Teleoperation

Learning from demonstrations has shown to be an effective approach to robotic manipulation, especially with the recently collected large-scale robot data with teleoperation systems. Building an efficient teleoperation system across diverse robot platforms has become more crucial than ever. However, there is a notable lack of cost-effective and user-friendly teleoperation systems for different end-effectors, e.g., anthropomorphic robot hands and grippers, that can operate across multiple platforms. To address this issue, we develop ACE, a cross-platform visual-exoskeleton system for low-cost dexterous teleoperation. Our system utilizes a hand-facing camera to capture 3D hand poses and an exoskeleton mounted on a portable base, enabling accurate real-time capture of both finger and wrist poses. Compared to previous systems, which often require hardware customization according to different robots, our single system can generalize to humanoid hands, arm-hands, arm-gripper, and quadruped-gripper systems with high-precision teleoperation. This enables imitation learning for complex manipulation tasks on diverse platforms.

FD2Talk: Towards Generalized Talking Head Generation with Facial Decoupled Diffusion Model

Talking head generation is a significant research topic that still faces numerous challenges. Previous works often adopt generative adversarial networks or regression models, which are plagued by generation quality and average facial shape problem. Although diffusion models show impressive generative ability, their exploration in talking head generation remains unsatisfactory. This is because they either solely use the diffusion model to obtain an intermediate representation and then employ another pre-trained renderer, or they overlook the feature decoupling of complex facial details, such as expressions, head poses and appearance textures. Therefore, we propose a Facial Decoupled Diffusion model for Talking head generation called FD2Talk, which fully leverages the advantages of diffusion models and decouples the complex facial details through multi-stages. Specifically, we separate facial details into motion and appearance. In the initial phase, we design the Diffusion Transformer to accurately predict motion coefficients from raw audio. These motions are highly decoupled from appearance, making them easier for the network to learn compared to high-dimensional RGB images. Subsequently, in the second phase, we encode the reference image to capture appearance textures. The predicted facial and head motions and encoded appearance then serve as the conditions for the Diffusion UNet, guiding the frame generation. Benefiting from decoupling facial details and fully leveraging diffusion models, extensive experiments substantiate that our approach excels in enhancing image quality and generating more accurate and diverse results compared to previous state-of-the-art methods.

MMRA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multi-Granularity and Multi-Image Relational Association Capabilities in Large Visual Language Models

Given the remarkable success that large visual language models (LVLMs) have achieved in image perception tasks, the endeavor to make LVLMs perceive the world like humans is drawing increasing attention. Current multi-modal benchmarks primarily focus on facts or specific topic-related knowledge contained within individual images. However, they often overlook the associative relations between multiple images, which require the identification and analysis of similarities among entities or content present in different images. Therefore, we propose the multi-image relation association task and a meticulously curated Multi-granularity Multi-image Relational Association (MMRA) benchmark, comprising 1,024 samples. In order to systematically and comprehensively evaluate current LVLMs, we establish an associational relation system among images that contain 11 subtasks (e.g, UsageSimilarity, SubEvent) at two granularity levels (i.e., image and entity) according to the relations in ConceptNet. Our experiments reveal that on the MMRA benchmark, current multi-image LVLMs exhibit distinct advantages and disadvantages across various subtasks. Notably, fine-grained, entity-level multi-image perception tasks pose a greater challenge for LVLMs compared to image-level tasks. Moreover, LVLMs perform poorly on spatial-related tasks, indicating that LVLMs still have limited spatial awareness. Additionally, our findings indicate that while LVLMs demonstrate a strong capability to perceive image details, enhancing their ability to associate information across multiple images hinges on improving the reasoning capabilities of their language model component. Moreover, we explored the ability of LVLMs to perceive image sequences within the context of our multi-image association task. Our experiments show that the majority of current LVLMs do not adequately model image sequences during the pre-training process.

MMRA: A Benchmark for Multi-granularity Multi-image Relational Association

Given the remarkable success that large visual language models (LVLMs) have achieved in image perception tasks, the endeavor to make LVMLs perceive the world like humans is drawing increasing attention. Current multi-modal benchmarks mainly focus on the objective fact or certain topic related potential knowledge within a image, but overlook the associative relations between multiple images. Therefore, we define a multi-image relation association task, and meticulously curate \textbf{MMRA} benchmark, a \textbf{M}ulti-granularity \textbf{M}ulti-image \textbf{R}elational \textbf{A}ssociation benchmark, consisted of \textbf{1026} samples. In order to systematically and comprehensively evaluate mainstream LVLMs, we establish an associational relation system among images that contain \textbf{11 subtasks} (e.g, UsageSimilarity, SubEvent, etc.) at two granularity levels (i.e., "\textbf{image}" and "\textbf{entity}") according to the relations in ConceptNet. Our experiments demonstrate that, on our MMRA benchmark, current mainstream LVLMs all have their own advantages and disadvantages across different subtasks. It is worth noting that, at the entity level, the performance of all models is worse than that of them at the image level, indicating that the fine-grained multi-image perception task is still challenging for LVLMs. The tasks related to spatial perception are relatively difficult for LVLMs to handle. Furthermore, we find that LVMLs exhibit a good ability to perceive image details, and the key to enhancing their multi-image association capability is to strengthen the reasoning ability of their language model component. All our codes and data are released at htt\url{https://github.com/Wusiwei0410/MMRA}.

Open-TeleVision: Teleoperation with Immersive Active Visual Feedback

Teleoperation serves as a powerful method for collecting on-robot data essential for robot learning from demonstrations. The intuitiveness and ease of use of the teleoperation system are crucial for ensuring high-quality, diverse, and scalable data. To achieve this, we propose an immersive teleoperation system Open-TeleVision that allows operators to actively perceive the robot's surroundings in a stereoscopic manner. Additionally, the system mirrors the operator's arm and hand movements on the robot, creating an immersive experience as if the operator's mind is transmitted to a robot embodiment. We validate the effectiveness of our system by collecting data and training imitation learning policies on four long-horizon, precise tasks (Can Sorting, Can Insertion, Folding, and Unloading) for 2 different humanoid robots and deploy them in the real world. The system is open-sourced at: https://robot-tv.github.io/

CLEME2.0: Towards More Interpretable Evaluation by Disentangling Edits for Grammatical Error Correction

The paper focuses on improving the interpretability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) metrics, which receives little attention in previous studies. To bridge the gap, we propose CLEME2.0, a reference-based evaluation strategy that can describe four elementary dimensions of GEC systems, namely hit-correction, error-correction, under-correction, and over-correction. They collectively contribute to revealing the critical characteristics and locating drawbacks of GEC systems. Evaluating systems by Combining these dimensions leads to high human consistency over other reference-based and reference-less metrics. Extensive experiments on 2 human judgement datasets and 6 reference datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method. All the codes will be released after the peer review.

EXCGEC: A Benchmark of Edit-wise Explainable Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

Existing studies explore the explainability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) in a limited scenario, where they ignore the interaction between corrections and explanations. To bridge the gap, this paper introduces the task of EXplainable GEC (EXGEC), which focuses on the integral role of both correction and explanation tasks. To facilitate the task, we propose EXCGEC, a tailored benchmark for Chinese EXGEC consisting of 8,216 explanation-augmented samples featuring the design of hybrid edit-wise explanations. We benchmark several series of LLMs in multiple settings, covering post-explaining and pre-explaining. To promote the development of the task, we introduce a comprehensive suite of automatic metrics and conduct human evaluation experiments to demonstrate the human consistency of the automatic metrics for free-text explanations. All the codes and data will be released after the review.

Towards Spoken Language Understanding via Multi-level Multi-grained Contrastive Learning

Spoken language understanding (SLU) is a core task in task-oriented dialogue systems, which aims at understanding the user's current goal through constructing semantic frames. SLU usually consists of two subtasks, including intent detection and slot filling. Although there are some SLU frameworks joint modeling the two subtasks and achieving high performance, most of them still overlook the inherent relationships between intents and slots and fail to achieve mutual guidance between the two subtasks. To solve the problem, we propose a multi-level multi-grained SLU framework MMCL to apply contrastive learning at three levels, including utterance level, slot level, and word level to enable intent and slot to mutually guide each other. For the utterance level, our framework implements coarse granularity contrastive learning and fine granularity contrastive learning simultaneously. Besides, we also apply the self-distillation method to improve the robustness of the model. Experimental results and further analysis demonstrate that our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art results on two public multi-intent SLU datasets, obtaining a 2.6 overall accuracy improvement on the MixATIS dataset compared to previous best models.

Uncertainty-aware sign language video retrieval with probability distribution modeling

Sign language video retrieval plays a key role in facilitating information access for the deaf community. Despite significant advances in video-text retrieval, the complexity and inherent uncertainty of sign language preclude the direct application of these techniques. Previous methods achieve the mapping between sign language video and text through fine-grained modal alignment. However, due to the scarcity of fine-grained annotation, the uncertainty inherent in sign language video is underestimated, limiting the further development of sign language retrieval tasks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Uncertainty-aware Probability Distribution Retrieval (UPRet), that conceptualizes the mapping process of sign language video and text in terms of probability distributions, explores their potential interrelationships, and enables flexible mappings. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which achieves state-of-the-art results on How2Sign (59.1%), PHOENIX-2014T (72.0%), and CSL-Daily (78.4%).