Sign language (SL) is the primary method of communication for the 70 million Deaf people around the world. Video dictionaries of isolated signs are a core SL learning tool. Replacing these with 3D avatars can aid learning and enable AR/VR applications, improving access to technology and online media. However, little work has attempted to estimate expressive 3D avatars from SL video; occlusion, noise, and motion blur make this task difficult. We address this by introducing novel linguistic priors that are universally applicable to SL and provide constraints on 3D hand pose that help resolve ambiguities within isolated signs. Our method, SGNify, captures fine-grained hand pose, facial expression, and body movement fully automatically from in-the-wild monocular SL videos. We evaluate SGNify quantitatively by using a commercial motion-capture system to compute 3D avatars synchronized with monocular video. SGNify outperforms state-of-the-art 3D body-pose- and shape-estimation methods on SL videos. A perceptual study shows that SGNify's 3D reconstructions are significantly more comprehensible and natural than those of previous methods and are on par with the source videos. Code and data are available at $\href{http://sgnify.is.tue.mpg.de}{\text{sgnify.is.tue.mpg.de}}$.
The use of transfer learning methods is largely responsible for the present breakthrough in Natural Learning Processing (NLP) tasks across multiple domains. In order to solve the problem of sentiment detection, we examined the performance of four different types of well-known state-of-the-art transformer models for text classification. Models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), Robustly Optimized BERT Pre-training Approach (RoBERTa), a distilled version of BERT (DistilBERT), and a large bidirectional neural network architecture (XLNet) were proposed. The performance of the four models that were used to detect disaster in the text was compared. All the models performed well enough, indicating that transformer-based models are suitable for the detection of disaster in text. The RoBERTa transformer model performs best on the test dataset with a score of 82.6% and is highly recommended for quality predictions. Furthermore, we discovered that the learning algorithms' performance was influenced by the pre-processing techniques, the nature of words in the vocabulary, unbalanced labeling, and the model parameters.
Sentiment Classification is a fundamental task in the field of Natural Language Processing, and has very important academic and commercial applications. It aims to automatically predict the degree of sentiment present in a text that contains opinions and subjectivity at some level, like product and movie reviews, or tweets. This can be really difficult to accomplish, in part, because different domains of text contains different words and expressions. In addition, this difficulty increases when text is written in a non-English language due to the lack of databases and resources. As a consequence, several cross-domain and cross-language techniques are often applied to this task in order to improve the results. In this work we perform a study on the ability of a classification system trained with a large database of product reviews to generalize to different Spanish domains. Reviews were collected from the MercadoLibre website from seven Latin American countries, allowing the creation of a large and balanced dataset. Results suggest that generalization across domains is feasible though very challenging when trained with these product reviews, and can be improved by pre-training and fine-tuning the classification model.
Audio editing is applicable for various purposes, such as adding background sound effects, replacing a musical instrument, and repairing damaged audio. Recently, some diffusion-based methods achieved zero-shot audio editing by using a diffusion and denoising process conditioned on the text description of the output audio. However, these methods still have some problems: 1) they have not been trained on editing tasks and cannot ensure good editing effects; 2) they can erroneously modify audio segments that do not require editing; 3) they need a complete description of the output audio, which is not always available or necessary in practical scenarios. In this work, we propose AUDIT, an instruction-guided audio editing model based on latent diffusion models. Specifically, AUDIT has three main design features: 1) we construct triplet training data (instruction, input audio, output audio) for different audio editing tasks and train a diffusion model using instruction and input (to be edited) audio as conditions and generating output (edited) audio; 2) it can automatically learn to only modify segments that need to be edited by comparing the difference between the input and output audio; 3) it only needs edit instructions instead of full target audio descriptions as text input. AUDIT achieves state-of-the-art results in both objective and subjective metrics for several audio editing tasks (e.g., adding, dropping, replacement, inpainting, super-resolution). Demo samples are available at https://audit-demo.github.io/.
The extraordinary performance of large language models (LLMs) heightens the importance of detecting whether the context is generated by an AI system. More importantly, while more and more companies and institutions release their LLMs, the origin can be hard to trace. Since LLMs are heading towards the time of AGI, similar to the origin tracing in anthropology, it is of great importance to trace the origin of LLMs. In this paper, we first raise the concern of the origin tracing of LLMs and propose an effective method to trace and detect AI-generated contexts. We introduce a novel algorithm that leverages the contrastive features between LLMs and extracts model-wise features to trace the text origins. Our proposed method works under both white-box and black-box settings therefore can be widely generalized to detect various LLMs.(e.g. can be generalized to detect GPT-3 models without the GPT-3 models). Also, our proposed method requires only limited data compared with the supervised learning methods and can be extended to trace new-coming model origins. We construct extensive experiments to examine whether we can trace the origins of given texts. We provide valuable observations based on the experimental results, such as the difficulty level of AI origin tracing, and the AI origin similarities, and call for ethical concerns of LLM providers. We are releasing all codes and data as a toolkit and benchmark for future AI origin tracing and detecting studies. \footnote{We are releasing all available resource at \url{https://github.com/OpenLMLab/}.}
Given comparative text, comparative relation extraction aims to extract two targets (\eg two cameras) in comparison and the aspect they are compared for (\eg image quality). The extracted comparative relations form the basis of further opinion analysis.Existing solutions formulate this task as a sequence labeling task, to extract targets and aspects. However, they cannot directly extract comparative relation(s) from text. In this paper, we show that comparative relations can be directly extracted with high accuracy, by generative model. Based on GPT-2, we propose a Generation-based Comparative Relation Extractor (GCRE-GPT). Experiment results show that \modelname achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on two datasets.
Text-to-SQL parsers typically struggle with databases unseen during the train time. Adapting parsers to new databases is a challenging problem due to the lack of natural language queries in the new schemas. We present ReFill, a framework for synthesizing high-quality and textually diverse parallel datasets for adapting a Text-to-SQL parser to a target schema. ReFill learns to retrieve-and-edit text queries from the existing schemas and transfers them to the target schema. We show that retrieving diverse existing text, masking their schema-specific tokens, and refilling with tokens relevant to the target schema, leads to significantly more diverse text queries than achievable by standard SQL-to-Text generation methods. Through experiments spanning multiple databases, we demonstrate that fine-tuning parsers on datasets synthesized using ReFill consistently outperforms the prior data-augmentation methods.
Scene text recognition (STR) enables computers to recognize and read the text in various real-world scenes. Recent STR models benefit from taking linguistic information in addition to visual cues into consideration. We propose a novel Masked Vision-Language Transformers (MVLT) to capture both the explicit and the implicit linguistic information. Our encoder is a Vision Transformer, and our decoder is a multi-modal Transformer. MVLT is trained in two stages: in the first stage, we design a STR-tailored pretraining method based on a masking strategy; in the second stage, we fine-tune our model and adopt an iterative correction method to improve the performance. MVLT attains superior results compared to state-of-the-art STR models on several benchmarks. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/onealwj/MVLT.
We introduce a language modeling approach for text to speech synthesis (TTS). Specifically, we train a neural codec language model (called Vall-E) using discrete codes derived from an off-the-shelf neural audio codec model, and regard TTS as a conditional language modeling task rather than continuous signal regression as in previous work. During the pre-training stage, we scale up the TTS training data to 60K hours of English speech which is hundreds of times larger than existing systems. Vall-E emerges in-context learning capabilities and can be used to synthesize high-quality personalized speech with only a 3-second enrolled recording of an unseen speaker as an acoustic prompt. Experiment results show that Vall-E significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS system in terms of speech naturalness and speaker similarity. In addition, we find Vall-E could preserve the speaker's emotion and acoustic environment of the acoustic prompt in synthesis. See https://aka.ms/valle for demos of our work.
Self-supervised learning in computer vision trains on unlabeled data, such as images or (image, text) pairs, to obtain an image encoder that learns high-quality embeddings for input data. Emerging backdoor attacks towards encoders expose crucial vulnerabilities of self-supervised learning, since downstream classifiers (even further trained on clean data) may inherit backdoor behaviors from encoders. Existing backdoor detection methods mainly focus on supervised learning settings and cannot handle pre-trained encoders especially when input labels are not available. In this paper, we propose DECREE, the first backdoor detection approach for pre-trained encoders, requiring neither classifier headers nor input labels. We evaluate DECREE on over 400 encoders trojaned under 3 paradigms. We show the effectiveness of our method on image encoders pre-trained on ImageNet and OpenAI's CLIP 400 million image-text pairs. Our method consistently has a high detection accuracy even if we have only limited or no access to the pre-training dataset.