Current video-guided machine translation (VMT) approaches primarily use coarse-grained visual information, resulting in information redundancy, high computational overhead, and neglect of audio content. Our research demonstrates the significance of fine-grained visual and audio information in VMT from both data and methodological perspectives. From the data perspective, we have developed a large-scale dataset TriFine, the first vision-audio-subtitle tri-modal VMT dataset with annotated multimodal fine-grained tags. Each entry in this dataset not only includes the triples found in traditional VMT datasets but also encompasses seven fine-grained annotation tags derived from visual and audio modalities. From the methodological perspective, we propose a Fine-grained Information-enhanced Approach for Translation (FIAT). Experimental results have shown that, in comparison to traditional coarse-grained methods and text-only models, our fine-grained approach achieves superior performance with lower computational overhead. These findings underscore the pivotal role of fine-grained annotated information in advancing the field of VMT.
The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) revolutionizes information retrieval, allowing users to obtain required answers through complex instructions within conversations. However, publicly available services remain inadequate in addressing the needs of faculty and students to search campus-specific information. It is primarily due to the LLM’s lack of domain-specific knowledge and the limitation of search engines in supporting multilingual and timely scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we introduce ALOHA, a multilingual agent enhanced by hierarchical retrieval for university orientation. We also integrate external APIs into the front-end interface to provide interactive service. The human evaluation and case study show our proposed system has strong capabilities to yield correct, timely, and user-friendly responses to the queries in multiple languages, surpassing commercial chatbots and search engines. The system has been deployed and has provided service for more than 12,000 people.
Sounding source localization is a challenging cross-modal task due to the difficulty of cross-modal alignment. Although supervised cross-modal methods achieve encouraging performance, heavy manual annotations are expensive and inefficient. Thus it is valuable and meaningful to develop unsupervised solutions. In this paper, we propose an **U**nsupervised **S**ounding **P**ixel **L**earning (USPL) approach which enables a pixel-level sounding source localization in unsupervised paradigm. We first design a mask augmentation based multi-instance contrastive learning to realize unsupervised cross-modal coarse localization, which aligns audio-visual features to obtain coarse sounding maps. Secondly, we present an *Unsupervised Sounding Map Refinement (SMR)* module which employs the visual semantic affinity learning to explore inter-pixel relations of adjacent coordinate features. It contributes to recovering the boundary of coarse sounding maps and obtaining fine sounding maps. Finally, a *Sounding Pixel Segmentation (SPS)* module is presented to realize audio-supervised semantic segmentation. Extensive experiments are performed on the AVSBench-S4 and VGGSound datasets, exhibiting encouraging results compared with previous SOTA methods.