Temporal video segmentation and classification have been advanced greatly by public benchmarks in recent years. However, such research still mainly focuses on human actions, failing to describe videos in a holistic view. In addition, previous research tends to pay much attention to visual information yet ignores the multi-modal nature of videos. To fill this gap, we construct the Tencent `Ads Video Segmentation'~(TAVS) dataset in the ads domain to escalate multi-modal video analysis to a new level. TAVS describes videos from three independent perspectives as `presentation form', `place', and `style', and contains rich multi-modal information such as video, audio, and text. TAVS is organized hierarchically in semantic aspects for comprehensive temporal video segmentation with three levels of categories for multi-label classification, e.g., `place' - `working place' - `office'. Therefore, TAVS is distinguished from previous temporal segmentation datasets due to its multi-modal information, holistic view of categories, and hierarchical granularities. It includes 12,000 videos, 82 classes, 33,900 segments, 121,100 shots, and 168,500 labels. Accompanied with TAVS, we also present a strong multi-modal video segmentation baseline coupled with multi-label class prediction. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate our proposed method as well as existing representative methods to reveal key challenges of our dataset TAVS.
No existing spherical convolutional neural network (CNN) framework is both computationally scalable and rotationally equivariant. Continuous approaches capture rotational equivariance but are often prohibitively computationally demanding. Discrete approaches offer more favorable computational performance but at the cost of equivariance. We develop a hybrid discrete-continuous (DISCO) group convolution that is simultaneously equivariant and computationally scalable to high-resolution. While our framework can be applied to any compact group, we specialize to the sphere. Our DISCO spherical convolutions not only exhibit $\text{SO}(3)$ rotational equivariance but also a form of asymptotic $\text{SO}(3)/\text{SO}(2)$ rotational equivariance, which is more desirable for many applications (where $\text{SO}(n)$ is the special orthogonal group representing rotations in $n$-dimensions). Through a sparse tensor implementation we achieve linear scaling in number of pixels on the sphere for both computational cost and memory usage. For 4k spherical images we realize a saving of $10^9$ in computational cost and $10^4$ in memory usage when compared to the most efficient alternative equivariant spherical convolution. We apply the DISCO spherical CNN framework to a number of benchmark dense-prediction problems on the sphere, such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation, on all of which we achieve the state-of-the-art performance.
Reading, much like music listening, is an immersive experience that transports readers while taking them on an emotional journey. Listening to complementary music has the potential to amplify the reading experience, especially when the music is stylistically cohesive and emotionally relevant. In this paper, we propose the first fully automatic method to build a dense soundtrack for books, which can play high-quality instrumental music for the entirety of the reading duration. Our work employs a unique text processing and music weaving pipeline that determines the context and emotional composition of scenes in a chapter. This allows our method to identify and play relevant excerpts from the soundtrack of the book's movie adaptation. By relying on the movie composer's craftsmanship, our book soundtracks include expert-made motifs and other scene-specific musical characteristics. We validate the design decisions of our approach through a perceptual study. Our readers note that the book soundtrack greatly enhanced their reading experience, due to high immersiveness granted via uninterrupted and style-consistent music, and a heightened emotional state attained via high precision emotion and scene context recognition.
One of the challenges of developing a summarization model arises from the difficulty in measuring the factual inconsistency of the generated text. In this study, we reinterpret the decoder overconfidence-regularizing objective suggested in (Miao et al., 2021) as a hallucination risk measurement to better estimate the quality of generated summaries. We propose a reference-free metric, HaRiM+, which only requires an off-the-shelf summarization model to compute the hallucination risk based on token likelihoods. Deploying it requires no additional training of models or ad-hoc modules, which usually need alignment to human judgments. For summary-quality estimation, HaRiM+ records state-of-the-art correlation to human judgment on three summary-quality annotation sets: FRANK, QAGS, and SummEval. We hope that our work, which merits the use of summarization models, facilitates the progress of both automated evaluation and generation of summary.
Probabilistic diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art results for image synthesis, inpainting, and text-to-image tasks. However, they are still in the early stages of generating complex 3D shapes. This work proposes DiffusionSDF, a generative model for shape completion, single-view reconstruction, and reconstruction of real-scanned point clouds. We use neural signed distance functions (SDFs) as our 3D representation to parameterize the geometry of various signals (e.g., point clouds, 2D images) through neural networks. Neural SDFs are implicit functions and diffusing them amounts to learning the reversal of their neural network weights, which we solve using a custom modulation module. Extensive experiments show that our method is capable of both realistic unconditional generation and conditional generation from partial inputs. This work expands the domain of diffusion models from learning 2D, explicit representations, to 3D, implicit representations.
We explore the benefits that multitask learning offer to speech processing as we train models on dual objectives with automatic speech recognition and intent classification or sentiment classification. Our models, although being of modest size, show improvements over models trained end-to-end on intent classification. We compare different settings to find the optimal disposition of each task module compared to one another. Finally, we study the performance of the models in low-resource scenario by training the models with as few as one example per class. We show that multitask learning in these scenarios compete with a baseline model trained on text features and performs considerably better than a pipeline model. On sentiment classification, we match the performance of an end-to-end model with ten times as many parameters. We consider 4 tasks and 4 datasets in Dutch and English.
Media news are making a large part of public opinion and, therefore, must not be fake. News on web sites, blogs, and social media must be analyzed before being published. In this paper, we present linguistic characteristics of media news items to differentiate between fake news and real news using machine learning algorithms. Neural fake news generation, headlines created by machines, semantic incongruities in text and image captions generated by machine are other types of fake news problems. These problems use neural networks which mainly control distributional features rather than evidence. We propose applying correlation between features set and class, and correlation among the features to compute correlation attribute evaluation metric and covariance metric to compute variance of attributes over the news items. Features unique, negative, positive, and cardinal numbers with high values on the metrics are observed to provide a high area under the curve (AUC) and F1-score.
This study presents a new approach to metaphorical paraphrase generation by masking literal tokens of literal sentences and unmasking them with metaphorical language models. Unlike similar studies, the proposed algorithm is not limited to the replacement of verbs, but also of nouns and adjectives. Despite the fact that the transfer rate for the former is the highest (56%), the transfer of the latter is feasible (24% and 31%). Human evaluation showed that our system-generated metaphors are considered more creative and metaphorical than human-generated ones. Additionally, when using our transferred metaphors for data augmentation we show that state of the art metaphorical sentence classification improves by 3% in F1.
In many task settings, text classification models are likely to encounter examples from novel classes on which they cannot predict correctly. Selective prediction, in which models abstain on low-confidence examples, provides a possible solution, but existing models are often overly confident on OOD examples. To remedy this overconfidence, we introduce Contrastive Novelty-Augmented Learning (CoNAL), a two-step method that generates OOD examples representative of novel classes, then trains to decrease confidence on them. First, we generate OOD examples by prompting a large language model twice: we prompt it to enumerate relevant novel labels, then generate examples from each novel class matching the task format. Second, we train our classifier with a novel contrastive objective that encourages lower confidence on generated OOD examples than training examples. When trained with CoNAL, classifiers improve in their ability to detect and abstain on OOD examples over prior methods by an average of 2.3% AUAC and 5.5% AUROC across 4 NLP datasets, with no cost to in-distribution accuracy.
In this work, we explore techniques for augmenting interactive agents with information from symbolic modules, much like humans use tools like calculators and GPS systems to assist with arithmetic and navigation. We test our agent's abilities in text games -- challenging benchmarks for evaluating the multi-step reasoning abilities of game agents in grounded, language-based environments. Our experimental study indicates that injecting the actions from these symbolic modules into the action space of a behavior cloned transformer agent increases performance on four text game benchmarks that test arithmetic, navigation, sorting, and common sense reasoning by an average of 22%, allowing an agent to reach the highest possible performance on unseen games. This action injection technique is easily extended to new agents, environments, and symbolic modules.