Larry Davis


2019

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WSLLN:Weakly Supervised Natural Language Localization Networks
Mingfei Gao | Larry Davis | Richard Socher | Caiming Xiong
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We propose weakly supervised language localization networks (WSLLN) to detect events in long, untrimmed videos given language queries. To learn the correspondence between visual segments and texts, most previous methods require temporal coordinates (start and end times) of events for training, which leads to high costs of annotation. WSLLN relieves the annotation burden by training with only video-sentence pairs without accessing to temporal locations of events. With a simple end-to-end structure, WSLLN measures segment-text consistency and conducts segment selection (conditioned on the text) simultaneously. Results from both are merged and optimized as a video-sentence matching problem. Experiments on ActivityNet Captions and DiDeMo demonstrate that WSLLN achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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Referring to Objects in Videos Using Spatio-Temporal Identifying Descriptions
Peratham Wiriyathammabhum | Abhinav Shrivastava | Vlad Morariu | Larry Davis
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Shortcomings in Vision and Language

This paper presents a new task, the grounding of spatio-temporal identifying descriptions in videos. Previous work suggests potential bias in existing datasets and emphasizes the need for a new data creation schema to better model linguistic structure. We introduce a new data collection scheme based on grammatical constraints for surface realization to enable us to investigate the problem of grounding spatio-temporal identifying descriptions in videos. We then propose a two-stream modular attention network that learns and grounds spatio-temporal identifying descriptions based on appearance and motion. We show that motion modules help to ground motion-related words and also help to learn in appearance modules because modular neural networks resolve task interference between modules. Finally, we propose a future challenge and a need for a robust system arising from replacing ground truth visual annotations with automatic video object detector and temporal event localization.

2018

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Learning to Color from Language
Varun Manjunatha | Mohit Iyyer | Jordan Boyd-Graber | Larry Davis
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

Automatic colorization is the process of adding color to greyscale images. We condition this process on language, allowing end users to manipulate a colorized image by feeding in different captions. We present two different architectures for language-conditioned colorization, both of which produce more accurate and plausible colorizations than a language-agnostic version. Furthermore, we demonstrate through crowdsourced experiments that we can dramatically alter colorizations simply by manipulating descriptive color words in captions.