We study a matrix recovery problem with unknown correspondence: given the observation matrix $M_o=[A,\tilde P B]$, where $\tilde P$ is an unknown permutation matrix, we aim to recover the underlying matrix $M=[A,B]$. Such problem commonly arises in many applications where heterogeneous data are utilized and the correspondence among them are unknown, e.g., due to privacy concerns. We show that it is possible to recover $M$ via solving a nuclear norm minimization problem under a proper low-rank condition on $M$, with provable non-asymptotic error bound for the recovery of $M$. We propose an algorithm, $\text{M}^3\text{O}$ (Matrix recovery via Min-Max Optimization) which recasts this combinatorial problem as a continuous minimax optimization problem and solves it by proximal gradient with a Max-Oracle. $\text{M}^3\text{O}$ can also be applied to a more general scenario where we have missing entries in $M_o$ and multiple groups of data with distinct unknown correspondence. Experiments on simulated data, the MovieLens 100K dataset and Yale B database show that $\text{M}^3\text{O}$ achieves state-of-the-art performance over several baselines and can recover the ground-truth correspondence with high accuracy.
Deep learning-based scene text detection methods have progressed substantially over the past years. However, there remain several problems to be solved. Generally, long curve text instances tend to be fragmented because of the limited receptive field size of CNN. Besides, simple representations using rectangle or quadrangle bounding boxes fall short when dealing with more challenging arbitrary-shaped texts. In addition, the scale of text instances varies greatly which leads to the difficulty of accurate prediction through a single segmentation network. To address these problems, we innovatively propose a two-stage segmentation based arbitrary text detector named \textit{NASK} (\textbf{N}eed \textbf{A} \textbf{S}econd loo\textbf{K}). Specifically, \textit{NASK} consists of a Text Instance Segmentation network namely \textit{TIS} (\(1^{st}\) stage), a Text RoI Pooling module and a Fiducial pOint eXpression module termed as \textit{FOX} (\(2^{nd}\) stage). Firstly, \textit{TIS} conducts instance segmentation to obtain rectangle text proposals with a proposed Group Spatial and Channel Attention module (\textit{GSCA}) to augment the feature expression. Then, Text RoI Pooling transforms these rectangles to the fixed size. Finally, \textit{FOX} is introduced to reconstruct text instances with a more tighter representation using the predicted geometrical attributes including text center line, text line orientation, character scale and character orientation. Experimental results on two public benchmarks including \textit{Total-Text} and \textit{SCUT-CTW1500} have demonstrated that the proposed \textit{NASK} achieves state-of-the-art results.
Advances in technology have led to the development of methods that can create desired visual multimedia. In particular, image generation using deep learning has been extensively studied across diverse fields. In comparison, video generation, especially on conditional inputs, remains a challenging and less explored area. To narrow this gap, we aim to train our model to produce a video corresponding to a given text description. We propose a novel training framework, Text-to-Image-to-Video Generative Adversarial Network (TiVGAN), which evolves frame-by-frame and finally produces a full-length video. In the first phase, we focus on creating a high-quality single video frame while learning the relationship between the text and an image. As the steps proceed, our model is trained gradually on more number of consecutive frames.This step-by-step learning process helps stabilize the training and enables the creation of high-resolution video based on conditional text descriptions. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
The objective of this paper is to combine multiple frame-level features into a single utterance-level representation considering pairwise relationship. For this purpose, we propose a novel graph attentive feature aggregation module by interpreting each frame-level feature as a node of a graph. The inter-relationship between all possible pairs of features, typically exploited indirectly, can be directly modeled using a graph. The module comprises a graph attention layer and a graph pooling layer followed by a readout operation. The graph attention layer first models the non-Euclidean data manifold between different nodes. Then, the graph pooling layer discards less informative nodes considering the significance of the nodes. Finally, the readout operation combines the remaining nodes into a single representation. We employ two recent systems, SE-ResNet and RawNet2, with different input features and architectures and demonstrate that the proposed feature aggregation module consistently shows a relative improvement over 10%, compared to the baseline.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) models' current trend consists of using increasingly more extra-data to build the best models as possible. It implies more expensive computational costs and training time, difficulties for deployment, and worries about these models' carbon footprint reveal a critical problem in the future. Against this trend, our goal is to develop NLP models requiring no extra-data and minimizing training time. To do so, in this paper, we explore Markov chain models, Hidden Markov Chain (HMC) and Pairwise Markov Chain (PMC), for NLP segmentation tasks. We apply these models for three classic applications: POS Tagging, Named-Entity-Recognition, and Chunking. We develop an original method to adapt these models for text segmentation's specific challenges to obtain relevant performances with very short training and execution times. PMC achieves equivalent results to those obtained by Conditional Random Fields (CRF), one of the most applied models for these tasks when no extra-data are used. Moreover, PMC has training times 30 times shorter than the CRF ones, which validates this model given our objectives.
Online hate speech is an important issue that breaks the cohesiveness of online social communities and even raises public safety concerns in our societies. Motivated by this rising issue, researchers have developed many traditional machine learning and deep learning methods to detect hate speech in online social platforms automatically. However, most of these methods have only considered single type textual feature, e.g., term frequency, or using word embeddings. Such approaches neglect the other rich textual information that could be utilized to improve hate speech detection. In this paper, we propose DeepHate, a novel deep learning model that combines multi-faceted text representations such as word embeddings, sentiments, and topical information, to detect hate speech in online social platforms. We conduct extensive experiments and evaluate DeepHate on three large publicly available real-world datasets. Our experiment results show that DeepHate outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on the hate speech detection task. We also perform case studies to provide insights into the salient features that best aid in detecting hate speech in online social platforms.
In Uganda, Luganda is the most spoken native language. It is used for communication in informal as well as formal business transactions. The development of technology startups globally related to TTS has mainly been with languages like English, French, etc. These are added in TTS engines by Google, Microsoft among others, allowing developers in these regions to innovate TTS products. Luganda is not supported because the language is not built and trained on these engines. In this study, we analyzed the Luganda language structure and constructions and then proposed and developed a Luganda TTS. The system was built and trained using locally sourced Luganda language text and audio. The engine is now able to capture text and reads it aloud. We tested the accuracy using MRT and MOS. MRT and MOS tests results are quite good with MRT having better results. The results general score was 71%. This study will enhance previous solutions to NLP gaps in Uganda, as well as provide raw data such that other research in this area can take place.
Recently, various multimodal networks for Visually-Rich Document Understanding(VRDU) have been proposed, showing the promotion of transformers by integrating visual and layout information with the text embeddings. However, most existing approaches utilize the position embeddings to incorporate the sequence information, neglecting the noisy improper reading order obtained by OCR tools. In this paper, we propose a robust layout-aware multimodal network named XYLayoutLM to capture and leverage rich layout information from proper reading orders produced by our Augmented XY Cut. Moreover, a Dilated Conditional Position Encoding module is proposed to deal with the input sequence of variable lengths, and it additionally extracts local layout information from both textual and visual modalities while generating position embeddings. Experiment results show that our XYLayoutLM achieves competitive results on document understanding tasks.
Sentiment classification is a fundamental task in content analysis. Although deep learning has demonstrated promising performance in text classification compared with shallow models, it is still not able to train a satisfying classifier for text sentiment. Human beings are more sophisticated than machine learning models in terms of understanding and capturing the emotional polarities of texts. In this paper, we leverage the power of human intelligence into text sentiment classification. We propose Crowd-based neural networks for Text Sentiment Classification (CrowdTSC for short). We design and post the questions on a crowdsourcing platform to collect the keywords in texts. Sampling and clustering are utilized to reduce the cost of crowdsourcing. Also, we present an attention-based neural network and a hybrid neural network, which incorporate the collected keywords as human being's guidance into deep neural networks. Extensive experiments on public datasets confirm that CrowdTSC outperforms state-of-the-art models, justifying the effectiveness of crowd-based keyword guidance.
Modeling long range dependencies in sequential data is a fundamental step towards attaining human-level performance in many modalities such as text, vision and audio. While attention-based models are a popular and effective choice in modeling short-range interactions, their performance on tasks requiring long range reasoning has been largely inadequate. In a breakthrough result, Gu et al. (2022) proposed the $\textit{Structured State Space}$ (S4) architecture delivering large gains over state-of-the-art models on several long-range tasks across various modalities. The core proposition of S4 is the parameterization of state matrices via a diagonal plus low rank structure, allowing efficient computation. In this work, we show that one can match the performance of S4 even without the low rank correction and thus assuming the state matrices to be diagonal. Our $\textit{Diagonal State Space}$ (DSS) model matches the performance of S4 on Long Range Arena tasks, speech classification on Speech Commands dataset, while being conceptually simpler and straightforward to implement.