Document Visual Question Answering (VQA) aims to understand visually-rich documents to answer questions in natural language, which is an emerging research topic for both Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. In this work, we introduce a new Document VQA dataset, named TAT-DQA, which consists of 3,067 document pages comprising semi-structured table(s) and unstructured text as well as 16,558 question-answer pairs by extending the TAT-QA dataset. These documents are sampled from real-world financial reports and contain lots of numbers, which means discrete reasoning capability is demanded to answer questions on this dataset. Based on TAT-DQA, we further develop a novel model named MHST that takes into account the information in multi-modalities, including text, layout and visual image, to intelligently address different types of questions with corresponding strategies, i.e., extraction or reasoning. Extensive experiments show that the MHST model significantly outperforms the baseline methods, demonstrating its effectiveness. However, the performance still lags far behind that of expert humans. We expect that our new TAT-DQA dataset would facilitate the research on deep understanding of visually-rich documents combining vision and language, especially for scenarios that require discrete reasoning. Also, we hope the proposed model would inspire researchers to design more advanced Document VQA models in future.
In the latest social networks, more and more people prefer to express their emotions in videos through text, speech, and rich facial expressions. Multimodal video emotion analysis techniques can help understand users' inner world automatically based on human expressions and gestures in images, tones in voices, and recognized natural language. However, in the existing research, the acoustic modality has long been in a marginal position as compared to visual and textual modalities. That is, it tends to be more difficult to improve the contribution of the acoustic modality for the whole multimodal emotion recognition task. Besides, although better performance can be obtained by introducing common deep learning methods, the complex structures of these training models always result in low inference efficiency, especially when exposed to high-resolution and long-length videos. Moreover, the lack of a fully end-to-end multimodal video emotion recognition system hinders its application. In this paper, we designed a fully multimodal video-to-emotion system (named FV2ES) for fast yet effective recognition inference, whose benefits are threefold: (1) The adoption of the hierarchical attention method upon the sound spectra breaks through the limited contribution of the acoustic modality and outperforms the existing models' performance on both IEMOCAP and CMU-MOSEI datasets; (2) the introduction of the idea of multi-scale for visual extraction while single-branch for inference brings higher efficiency and maintains the prediction accuracy at the same time; (3) the further integration of data pre-processing into the aligned multimodal learning model allows the significant reduction of computational costs and storage space.
The time delay neural network (TDNN) represents one of the state-of-the-art of neural solutions to text-independent speaker verification. However, they require a large number of filters to capture the speaker characteristics at any local frequency region. In addition, the performance of such systems may degrade under short utterance scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a multi-scale frequency-channel attention (MFA), where we characterize speakers at different scales through a novel dual-path design which consists of a convolutional neural network and TDNN. We evaluate the proposed MFA on the VoxCeleb database and observe that the proposed framework with MFA can achieve state-of-the-art performance while reducing parameters and computation complexity. Further, the MFA mechanism is found to be effective for speaker verification with short test utterances.
A big convergence of language, vision, and multimodal pretraining is emerging. In this work, we introduce a general-purpose multimodal foundation model BEiT-3, which achieves state-of-the-art transfer performance on both vision and vision-language tasks. Specifically, we advance the big convergence from three aspects: backbone architecture, pretraining task, and model scaling up. We introduce Multiway Transformers for general-purpose modeling, where the modular architecture enables both deep fusion and modality-specific encoding. Based on the shared backbone, we perform masked "language" modeling on images (Imglish), texts (English), and image-text pairs ("parallel sentences") in a unified manner. Experimental results show that BEiT-3 obtains state-of-the-art performance on object detection (COCO), semantic segmentation (ADE20K), image classification (ImageNet), visual reasoning (NLVR2), visual question answering (VQAv2), image captioning (COCO), and cross-modal retrieval (Flickr30K, COCO).
With an increased interest in the production of personal health technologies designed to track user data (e.g., nutrient intake, step counts), there is now more opportunity than ever to surface meaningful behavioral insights to everyday users in the form of natural language. This knowledge can increase their behavioral awareness and allow them to take action to meet their health goals. It can also bridge the gap between the vast collection of personal health data and the summary generation required to describe an individual's behavioral tendencies. Previous work has focused on rule-based time-series data summarization methods designed to generate natural language summaries of interesting patterns found within temporal personal health data. We examine recurrent, convolutional, and Transformer-based encoder-decoder models to automatically generate natural language summaries from numeric temporal personal health data. We showcase the effectiveness of our models on real user health data logged in MyFitnessPal and show that we can automatically generate high-quality natural language summaries. Our work serves as a first step towards the ambitious goal of automatically generating novel and meaningful temporal summaries from personal health data.
Semantic textual similarity (STS) in the clinical domain helps improve diagnostic efficiency and produce concise texts for downstream data mining tasks. However, given the high degree of domain knowledge involved in clinic text, it remains challenging for general language models to infer implicit medical relationships behind clinical sentences and output similarities correctly. In this paper, we present a graph-augmented cyclic learning framework for similarity estimation in the clinical domain. The framework can be conveniently implemented on a state-of-art backbone language model, and improve its performance by leveraging domain knowledge through co-training with an auxiliary graph convolution network (GCN) based network. We report the success of introducing domain knowledge in GCN and the co-training framework by improving the Bio-clinical BERT baseline by 16.3% and 27.9%, respectively.
A text to image generation (T2I) model aims to generate photo-realistic images which are semantically consistent with the text descriptions. Built upon the recent advances in generative adversarial networks (GANs), existing T2I models have made great progress. However, a close inspection of their generated images reveals two major limitations: (1) The condition batch normalization methods are applied on the whole image feature maps equally, ignoring the local semantics; (2) The text encoder is fixed during training, which should be trained with the image generator jointly to learn better text representations for image generation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework Semantic-Spatial Aware GAN, which is trained in an end-to-end fashion so that the text encoder can exploit better text information. Concretely, we introduce a novel Semantic-Spatial Aware Convolution Network, which (1) learns semantic-adaptive transformation conditioned on text to effectively fuse text features and image features, and (2) learns a mask map in a weakly-supervised way that depends on the current text-image fusion process in order to guide the transformation spatially. Experiments on the challenging COCO and CUB bird datasets demonstrate the advantage of our method over the recent state-of-the-art approaches, regarding both visual fidelity and alignment with input text description. Code is available at https://github.com/wtliao/text2image.
Neural text ranking models have witnessed significant advancement and are increasingly being deployed in practice. Unfortunately, they also inherit adversarial vulnerabilities of general neural models, which have been detected but remain underexplored by prior studies. Moreover, the inherit adversarial vulnerabilities might be leveraged by blackhat SEO to defeat better-protected search engines. In this study, we propose an imitation adversarial attack on black-box neural passage ranking models. We first show that the target passage ranking model can be transparentized and imitated by enumerating critical queries/candidates and then train a ranking imitation model. Leveraging the ranking imitation model, we can elaborately manipulate the ranking results and transfer the manipulation attack to the target ranking model. For this purpose, we propose an innovative gradient-based attack method, empowered by the pairwise objective function, to generate adversarial triggers, which causes premeditated disorderliness with very few tokens. To equip the trigger camouflages, we add the next sentence prediction loss and the language model fluency constraint to the objective function. Experimental results on passage ranking demonstrate the effectiveness of the ranking imitation attack model and adversarial triggers against various SOTA neural ranking models. Furthermore, various mitigation analyses and human evaluation show the effectiveness of camouflages when facing potential mitigation approaches. To motivate other scholars to further investigate this novel and important problem, we make the experiment data and code publicly available.
NECE is an event-based text analysis toolkit built for narrative documents. NECE aims to provide users open and easy accesses to an event-based summary and abstraction of long narrative documents through both a graphic interface and a python package, which can be readily used in narrative analysis, understanding, or other advanced purposes. Our work addresses the challenge of long passage events extraction and temporal ordering of key events; at the same time, it offers options to select and view events related to narrative entities, such as main characters and gender groups. We conduct human evaluation to demonstrate the quality of the event chain extraction system and character features mining algorithms. Lastly, we shed light on the toolkit's potential downstream applications by demonstrating its usage in gender bias analysis and Question-Answering tasks.
Little research has been done on Neural Machine Translation (NMT) for Azerbaijani. In this paper, we benchmark the performance of Azerbaijani-English NMT systems on a range of techniques and datasets. We evaluate which segmentation techniques work best on Azerbaijani translation and benchmark the performance of Azerbaijani NMT models across several domains of text. Our results show that while Unigram segmentation improves NMT performance and Azerbaijani translation models scale better with dataset quality than quantity, cross-domain generalization remains a challenge