GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Switch-BERT: Learning to Model Multimodal Interactions by Switching Attention and Input
Authors: Qingpei Guo; Kaisheng Yao; Wei Chu
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "The ability to model intra-modal and inter-modal interactions is fundamental in multimodal machine learning. The current state-of-the-art models usually adopt deep learning models with fixed structures. They can achieve exceptional performances on specific tasks, but face a particularly challenging problem of modality mismatch because of diversity of input modalities and their fixed structures. In this paper, we present Switch-BERT for joint vision and language representation learning to address this problem. Switch-BERT extends BERT architecture by introducing learnable layer-wise and cross-layer interactions. It learns to optimize attention from a set of attention modes representing these interactions. One specific property of the model is that it learns to attend outputs from various depths, therefore mitigates the modality mismatch problem. We present extensive experiments on visual question answering, image-text retrieval and referring expression comprehension experiments. Results confirm that, whereas alternative architectures including ViLBERT and UNITER may excel in particular tasks, Switch-BERT can consistently achieve better or comparable performances than the current state-of-the-art models in these tasks. Ablation studies indicate that the proposed model achieves superior performances due to its ability in learning task-specific multimodal interactions."
Word-Level Fine-Grained Story Visualization
Authors: Bowen Li
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Story visualization aims to generate a sequence of images to narrate each sentence in a multi-sentence story with a global consistency across dynamic scenes and characters. Current works still struggle with output images’ quality and consistency, and rely on additional semantic information or auxiliary captioning networks. To address these challenges, we first introduce a new sentence representation, which incorporates word information from all story sentences to mitigate the inconsistency problem. Then, we propose a new discriminator with fusion features and further extend the spatial attention to improve image quality and story consistency. Extensive experiments on different datasets and human evaluation demonstrate the superior performance of our approach, compared to state-of-the-art methods, neither using segmentation masks nor auxiliary captioning networks."
Unifying Event Detection and Captioning as Sequence Generation via Pre-training
Authors: Qi Zhang; Yuqing Song; Qin Jin
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Dense video captioning aims to generate corresponding text descriptions for a series of events in the untrimmed video, which can be divided into two sub-tasks, event detection and event captioning. Unlike previous works that tackle the two sub-tasks separately, recent works have focused on enhancing the inter-task association between the two sub-tasks. However, designing inter-task interactions for event detection and captioning is not trivial due to the large differences in their task specific solutions. Besides, previous event detection methods normally ignore temporal dependencies between events, leading to event redundancy or inconsistency problems. To tackle above the two defects, in this paper, we define event detection as a sequence generation task and propose a unified pre-training and fine-tuning framework to naturally enhance the inter-task association between event detection and captioning. Since the model predicts each event with previous events as context, the inter-dependency between events is fully exploited and thus our model can detect more diverse and consistent events in the video. Experiments on the ActivityNet dataset show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, and can be further boosted when pre-trained on extra large-scale video-text data. Code is available at https://github.com/QiQAng/UEDVC."
Multimodal Transformer with Variable-Length Memory for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Chuang Lin; Yi Jiang; Jianfei Cai; Lizhen Qu; Gholamreza Haffari; Zehuan Yuan
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a task that an agent is required to follow a language instruction to navigate to the goal position, which relies on the ongoing interactions with the environment during moving. Recent Transformer-based VLN methods have made great progress benefiting from the direct connections between visual observations and language instructions via the multimodal cross-attention mechanism. However, these methods usually represent temporal context as a fixed-length vector by using an LSTM decoder or using manually designed hidden states to build a recurrent Transformer. Considering a single fixed-length vector is often insufficient to capture long-term temporal context, in this paper, we introduce Multimodal Transformer with Variable-length Memory (MTVM) for visually-grounded natural language navigation by modeling the temporal context explicitly. Specifically, MTVM enables the agent to keep track of the navigation trajectory by directly storing activations in the previous time step in a memory bank. To further boost the performance, we propose a memory-aware consistency loss to help learn a better joint representation of temporal context with random masked instructions. We evaluate MTVM on popular R2R and CVDN datasets. Our model improves Success Rate on R2R test set by 2% and reduces Goal Process by 1.5m on CVDN test set."
Fine-Grained Visual Entailment
Authors: Christopher Thomas; Yipeng Zhang; Shih-Fu Chang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Visual entailment is a recently proposed multimodal reasoning task where the goal is to predict the logical relationship of a piece of text to an image. In this paper, we propose an extension of this task, where the goal is to predict the logical relationship of fine-grained knowledge elements within a piece of text to an image. Unlike prior work, our method is inherently explainable and makes logical predictions at different levels of granularity. Because we lack fine-grained labels to train our method, we propose a novel multi-instance learning approach which learns a fine-grained labeling using only sample-level supervision. We also impose novel semantic structural constraints which ensure that fine-grained predictions are internally semantically consistent. We evaluate our method on a new dataset of manually annotated knowledge elements and show that our method achieves 68.18% accuracy at this challenging task while significantly outperforming several strong baselines. Finally, we present extensive qualitative results illustrating our method’s predictions and the visual evidence our method relied on. Our code and annotated dataset can be found at the enclosed link."
Bottom Up Top down Detection Transformers for Language Grounding in Images and Point Clouds
Authors: Ayush Jain; Nikolaos Gkanatsios; Ishita Mediratta; Katerina Fragkiadaki
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Most models tasked to ground referential utterances in 2D and 3D scenes learn to select the referred object from a pool of object proposals provided by a pre-trained detector. This is limiting because an utterance may refer to visual entities at various levels of granularity, such as the chair, the leg of the chair, or the tip of the front leg of the chair, which may be missed by the detector. We propose a language grounding model that attends on the referential utterance and on the object proposal pool computed from a pre-trained detector to decode referenced objects with a detection head, without selecting them from the pool. In this way, it is helped by powerful pre-trained object detectors without being restricted by their misses. We call our model Bottom Up Top Down DEtection TRansformers (BUTD-DETR) because it uses both language guidance (top down) and objectness guidance (bottom-up) to ground referential utterances in images and point clouds. Moreover, BUTD-DETR casts object detection as referential grounding and uses object labels as language prompts to be grounded in the visual scene, augmenting supervision for the referential grounding task in this way. The proposed model sets a new state-of-the-art across popular 3D language grounding benchmarks with significant performance gains over previous 3D approaches (12.6% on SR3D, 11.6% on NR3D and 6.3% on ScanRefer). When applied in 2D images, it performs on par with the previous state of the art. We ablate the design choices of our model and quantify their contribution to performance. Our code and checkpoints can be found at the project website https://butd-detr.github.io"
New Datasets and Models for Contextual Reasoning in Visual Dialog
Authors: Yifeng Zhang; Ming Jiang; Qi Zhao
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Visual Dialog (VD) is a vision-language task that requires AI systems to maintain a natural question-answering dialog about visual contents. Using the dialog history as contexts, VD models have achieved promising performance on public benchmarks. However, prior VD datasets do not provide sufficient contextually dependent questions that require knowledge from the dialog history to answer. As a result, advanced VQA models can still perform well without considering the dialog context. In this work, we focus on developing new datasets and models to highlight the role of contextual reasoning in VD. We define a hierarchy of contextual patterns to represent and organize the dialog context, enabling quantitative analyses of contextual dependencies and designs of new VD datasets and models. We then develop two new datasets, namely CLEVR-VD and GQA-VD, offering context-rich dialogs over synthetic and realistic images, respectively. Furthermore, we propose a novel neural module network method featuring contextual reasoning in VD. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed datasets and method with experimental results and model comparisons across different datasets. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/SuperJohnZhang/ContextVD."
VisageSynTalk: Unseen Speaker Video-to-Speech Synthesis via Speech-Visage Feature Selection
Authors: Joanna Hong; Minsu Kim; Yong Man Ro
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "The goal of this work is to reconstruct speech from a silent talking face video. Recent studies have shown impressive performance on synthesizing speech from silent talking face videos. However, they have not explicitly considered on varying identity characteristics of different speakers, which place a challenge in the video-to-speech synthesis, and this becomes more critical in unseen-speaker settings. Our approach is to separate the speech content and the visage-style from a given silent talking face video. By guiding the model to independently focus on modeling the two representations, we can obtain the speech of high intelligibility from the model even when the input video of an unseen subject is given. To this end, we introduce speech-visage selection that separates the speech content and the speaker identity from the visual features of the input video. The disentangled representations are jointly incorporated to synthesize speech through visage-style based synthesizer which generates speech by coating the visage-styles while maintaining the speech content. Thus, the proposed framework brings the advantage of synthesizing the speech containing the right content even with the silent talking face video of an unseen subject. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on the GRID, TCD-TIMIT volunteer, and LRW datasets."
Classification-Regression for Chart Comprehension
Authors: Matan Levy; Rami Ben-Ari; Dani Lischinski
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Chart question answering (CQA) is a task used for assessing chart comprehension, which is fundamentally different from understanding natural images. CQA requires analyzing the relationships between the textual and the visual components of a chart, in order to answer general questions or infer numerical values. Most existing CQA datasets and models are based on simplifying assumptions that often enable surpassing human performance. In this work, we address this outcome and propose a new model that jointly learns classification and regression. Our language-vision setup uses co-attention transformers to capture the complex real-world interactions between the question and the textual elements. We validate our design with extensive experiments on the realistic PlotQA dataset, outperforming previous approaches by a large margin, while showing competitive performance on FigureQA. Our model is particularly well suited for realistic questions with out-of-vocabulary answers that require regression."
AssistQ: Affordance-Centric Question-Driven Task Completion for Egocentric Assistant
Authors: Benita Wong; Joya Chen; You Wu; Stan Weixian Lei; Dongxing Mao; Difei Gao; Mike Zheng Shou
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: A long-standing goal of intelligent assistants such as AR glasses/robots has been to assist users in affordance-centric real-world scenarios, such as "how can I run the microwave for 1 minute?”. However, there is still no clear task definition and suitable benchmarks. In this paper, we define a new task called Affordance-centric Question-driven Task Completion, where the AI assistant should learn from instructional videos to provide step-by-step help in the user’s view. To support the task, we constructed AssistQ, a new dataset comprising 531 question-answer samples from 100 newly filmed instructional videos. We also developed a novel Question-to-Actions (Q2A) model to address the AQTC task and validate it on the AssistQ dataset. The results show that our model significantly outperforms several VQA-related baselines while still having large room for improvement. We expect our task and dataset to advance Egocentric AI Assistant’s development. Our project page is available at: https://showlab.github.io/assistq/.
FindIt: Generalized Localization with Natural Language Queries
Authors: Weicheng Kuo; Fred Bertsch; Wei Li; AJ Piergiovanni; Mohammad Saffar; Anelia Angelova
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "We propose FindIt, a simple and versatile framework that unifies a variety of visual grounding and localization tasks including referring expression comprehension, text-based localization, and object detection. Key to our architecture is an efficient multi-scale fusion module that unifies the disparate localization requirements across the tasks. In addition, we discover that a standard object detector is surprisingly effective in unifying these tasks without a need for task-specific design, losses, or pre-computed detections. Our end-to-end trainable framework responds flexibly and accurately to a wide range of referring expression, localization or detection queries for zero, one, or multiple objects. Jointly trained on these tasks, FindIt outperforms the state of the art on both referring expression and text-based localization, and shows competitive performance on object detection. Finally, FindIt generalizes better to out-of-distribution data and novel categories compared to strong single-task baselines. All of these are accomplished by a single, unified and efficient model. The code will be released at: https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/findit."
UniTAB: Unifying Text and Box Outputs for Grounded Vision-Language Modeling
Authors: Zhengyuan Yang; Zhe Gan; Jianfeng Wang; Xiaowei Hu; Faisal Ahmed; Zicheng Liu; Yumao Lu; Lijuan Wang
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "We propose UniTAB that Unifies Text And Box outputs for grounded vision-language (VL) modeling. Grounded VL tasks such as grounded captioning require the model to generate a text description and align predicted words with object regions. To achieve this, models must generate desired text and box outputs together, and meanwhile indicate the alignments between words and boxes. In contrast to existing solutions that use multiple separate modules for different outputs, UniTAB represents both text and box outputs with a shared token sequence, and introduces a specialtoken to naturally indicate word-box alignments in the sequence. UniTAB thus could provide a more comprehensive and interpretable image description, by freely grounding generated words to object regions. On grounded captioning, UniTAB presents a simpler solution with a single output head, and significantly outperforms state of the art in both grounding and captioning evaluations. On general VL tasks that have different desired output formats (i.e., text, box, or their combination), UniTAB with a single network achieves better or comparable performance than task-specific state of the art. Experiments cover 7 VL benchmarks, including grounded captioning, visual grounding, image captioning, and visual question answering. Furthermore, UniTAB’s unified multi-task network and the task-agnostic output sequence design make the model parameter efficient and generalizable to new tasks."
Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels
Authors: Golnaz Ghiasi; Xiuye Gu; Yin Cui; Tsung-Yi Lin
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "We design an open-vocabulary image segmentation model to organize an image into meaningful regions indicated by arbitrary texts. Recent works (CLIP and ALIGN), despite attaining impressive open-vocabulary classification accuracy with image-level caption labels, are unable to segment visual concepts with pixels. We argue that these models miss an important step of visual grouping, which organizes pixels into groups before learning visual-semantic alignments. We propose OpenSeg to address the above issue while still making use of scalable image-level supervision of captions. First, it learns to propose segmentation masks for possible organizations. Then it learns visual-semantic alignments by aligning each word in a caption to one or a few predicted masks. We find the mask representations are the key to support learning image segmentation from captions, making it possible to scale up the dataset and vocabulary sizes. OpenSeg significantly outperforms the recent open-vocabulary method of LSeg by +19.9 mIoU on PASCAL dataset, thanks to its scalability."
The Abduction of Sherlock Holmes: A Dataset for Visual Abductive Reasoning
Authors: Jack Hessel; Jena D. Hwang; Jae Sung Park; Rowan Zellers; Chandra Bhagavatula; Anna Rohrbach; Kate Saenko; Yejin Choi
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Humans have remarkable capacity to reason abductively and hypothesize about what lies beyond the literal content of an image. By identifying concrete visual clues scattered throughout a scene, we almost can’t help but draw probable inferences beyond the literal scene based on our everyday experience and knowledge about the world. For example, if we see a “20 mph” sign alongside a road, we might assume the street sits in a residential area (rather than on a highway), even if no houses are pictured. Can machines perform similar visual reasoning? We present Sherlock, an annotated corpus of 103K images for testing machine capacity for abductive reasoning beyond literal image contents. We adopt a free-viewing paradigm: participants first observe and identify salient clues within images (e.g., objects, actions) and then provide a plausible inference about the scene, given the clue. In total, we collect 363K (clue, inference) pairs, which form a first-of-its-kind abductive visual reasoning dataset. Using our corpus, we test three complementary axes of abductive reasoning. We evaluate the capacity of models to: i) retrieve relevant inferences from a large candidate corpus; ii) localize evidence for inferences via bounding boxes, and iii) compare plausible inferences to match human judgments on a newly-collected diagnostic corpus of 19K Likert-scale judgments. While we find that fine-tuning CLIP-RN50x64 with a multitask objective outperforms strong baselines, significant headroom exists between model performance and human agreement. Data, models, and leaderboard available at http://visualabduction.com/."
Speaker-Adaptive Lip Reading with User-Dependent Padding
Authors: Minsu Kim; Hyunjun Kim; Yong Man Ro
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "Lip reading aims to predict speech based on lip movements alone. As it focuses on visual information to model the speech, its performance is inherently sensitive to personal lip appearances and movements. This makes the lip reading models show degraded performance when they are applied to unseen speakers due to the mismatch between training and testing conditions. Speaker adaptation technique aims to reduce this mismatch between train and test speakers, thus guiding a trained model to focus on modeling the speech content without being intervened by the speaker variations. In contrast to the efforts made in audio-based speech recognition for decades, the speaker adaptation methods have not well been studied in lip reading. In this paper, to remedy the performance degradation of lip reading model on unseen speakers, we propose a speaker-adaptive lip reading method, namely user-dependent padding. The user-dependent padding is a speaker-specific input that can participate in the visual feature extraction stage of a pre-trained lip reading model. Therefore, the lip appearances and movements information of different speakers can be considered during the visual feature encoding, adaptively for individual speakers. Moreover, the proposed method does not need 1) any additional layers, 2) to modify the learned weights of the pre-trained model, and 3) the speaker label of train data used during pre-train. It can directly adapt to unseen speakers by learning the user-dependent padding only, in a supervised or unsupervised manner. Finally, to alleviate the speaker information insufficiency in public lip reading databases, we label the speaker of a well-known audio-visual database, LRW, and design an unseen-speaker lip reading scenario named LRW-ID. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified on sentence- and word-level lip reading, and we show it can further improve the performance of a well-trained model with large speaker variations."
TISE: Bag of Metrics for Text-to-Image Synthesis Evaluation
Authors: Tan M. Dinh; Rang Nguyen; Binh-Son Hua
Venue: ECCV 2022 (main)

Abstract: "In this paper, we conduct a study on the state-of-the-art methods for text-to-image synthesis and propose a framework to evaluate these methods. We consider syntheses where an image contains a single or multiple objects. Our study outlines several issues in the current evaluation pipeline: (i) for image quality assessment, a commonly used metric, e.g., Inception Score (IS), is often either miscalibrated for the single-object case or misused for the multi-object case; (ii) for text relevance and object accuracy assessment, there is an overfitting phenomenon in the existing R-precision (RP) and Semantic Object Accuracy (SOA) metrics, respectively; (iii) for multi-object case, many vital factors for evaluation, e.g., object fidelity, positional alignment, counting alignment, are largely dismissed; (iv) the ranking of the methods based on current metrics is highly inconsistent with real images. To overcome these issues, we propose a combined set of existing and new metrics to systematically evaluate the methods. For existing metrics, we offer an improved version of IS named IS* by using temperature scaling to calibrate the confidence of the classifier used by IS; we also propose a solution to mitigate the overfitting issues of RP and SOA. For new metrics, we develop counting alignment, positional alignment, object-centric IS, and object-centric FID metrics for evaluating the multi-object case. We show that benchmarking with our bag of metrics results in a highly consistent ranking among existing methods that is well-aligned with human evaluation. As a by-product, we create AttnGAN++, a simple but strong baseline for the benchmark by stabilizing the training of AttnGAN using spectral normalization. We also release our toolbox, so-called TISE, for advocating fair and consistent evaluation of text-to-image models."