Text is ubiquitous in our visual world, conveying crucial information, such as in documents, websites, and everyday photographs. In this work, we propose UReader, a first exploration of universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). By leveraging the shallow text recognition ability of the MLLM, we only finetuned 1.2% parameters and the training cost is much lower than previous work following domain-specific pretraining and finetuning paradigms. Concretely, UReader is jointly finetuned on a wide range of Visually-situated Language Understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. To enhance the visual text and semantic understanding, we further apply two auxiliary tasks with the same format, namely text reading and key points generation tasks. We design a shape-adaptive cropping module before the encoder-decoder architecture of MLLM to leverage the frozen low-resolution vision encoder for processing high-resolution images. Without downstream finetuning, our single model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks, across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. Codes and instruction-tuning datasets will be released.

As a special task of natural language generation, conditional lyrics generation needs to consider the structure of generated lyrics and the relationship between lyrics and music. Due to various forms of conditions, a lyrics generation system is expected to generate lyrics conditioned on different signals, such as music scores, music audio, or partially-finished lyrics, etc. However, most of the previous works have ignored the musical attributes hidden behind the lyrics and the structure of the lyrics. Additionally, most works only handle limited lyrics generation conditions, such as lyrics generation based on music score or partial lyrics, they can not be easily extended to other generation conditions with the same framework. In this paper, we propose a unified structure-aware lyrics generation framework named UniLG. Specifically, we design compound templates that incorporate textual and musical information to improve structure modeling and unify the different lyrics generation conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Both objective and subjective evaluations show significant improvements in generating structural lyrics.

Automatic image captioning evaluation is critical for benchmarking and promoting advances in image captioning research. Existing metrics only provide a single score to measure caption qualities, which are less explainable and informative. Instead, we humans can easily identify the problems of captions in details, e.g., which words are inaccurate and which salient objects are not described, and then rate the caption quality. To support such informative feedback, we propose an Informative Metric for Reference-free Image Caption evaluation (InfoMetIC). Given an image and a caption, InfoMetIC is able to report incorrect words and unmentioned image regions at fine-grained level, and also provide a text precision score, a vision recall score and an overall quality score at coarse-grained level. The coarse-grained score of InfoMetIC achieves significantly better correlation with human judgements than existing metrics on multiple benchmarks. We also construct a token-level evaluation dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of InfoMetIC in fine-grained evaluation. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/HAWLYQ/InfoMetIC.

To help the visually impaired enjoy movies, automatic movie narrating systems are expected to narrate accurate, coherent, and role-aware plots when there are no speaking lines of actors. Existing works benchmark this challenge as a normal video captioning task via some simplifications, such as removing role names and evaluating narrations with ngram-based metrics, which makes it difficult for automatic systems to meet the needs of real application scenarios. To narrow this gap, we construct a large-scale Chinese movie benchmark, named Movie101. Closer to real scenarios, the Movie Clip Narrating (MCN) task in our benchmark asks models to generate role-aware narration paragraphs for complete movie clips where no actors are speaking. External knowledge, such as role information and movie genres, is also provided for better movie understanding. Besides, we propose a new metric called Movie Narration Score (MNScore) for movie narrating evaluation, which achieves the best correlation with human evaluation. Our benchmark also supports the Temporal Narration Grounding (TNG) task to investigate clip localization given text descriptions. For both two tasks, our proposed methods well leverage external knowledge and outperform carefully designed baselines. The dataset and codes are released at https://github.com/yuezih/Movie101.

Most research on stylized image captioning aims to generate style-specific captions using unpaired text, and has achieved impressive performance for simple styles like positive and negative. However, unlike previous single-sentence captions whose style is mostly embodied in distinctive words or phrases, real-world styles are likely to be implied at the syntactic and discourse levels. In this work, we introduce a new task of Stylized Visual Storytelling (SVST), which aims to describe a photo stream with stylized stories that are more expressive and attractive. We propose a multitasking memory-augmented framework called StyleVSG, which is jointly trained on factual visual storytelling data and unpaired style corpus, achieving a trade-off between style accuracy and visual relevance. Particularly for unpaired stylized text, StyleVSG learns to reconstruct the stylistic story from roughly parallel visual inputs mined with the CLIP model, avoiding problems caused by random mapping in previous methods. Furthermore, a memory module is designed to preserve the consistency and coherence of generated stories. Experiments show that our method can generate attractive and coherent stories with different styles such as fairy tale, romance, and humor. The overall performance of our StyleVSG surpasses state-of-the-art methods on both automatic and human evaluation metrics.

Automatic movie narration generation and narration grounding are very important to provide a true movie experience for the blind and visually impaired. To tell the movie story well, it is necessary to mention plot-related details (such as character names) and keep the narrations in a plot coherent. Taking these two points into consideration, we construct a Chinese large-scale video benchmark from 101 movies for Movie Understanding and Narrating (MovieUN) to support the Movie Clip Narrating (MCN) task and Temporal Narration Grounding (TNG) task. We split movies in MovieUN into movie clips according to plots, and pair them with corresponding narrations provided by the movie narrators. Ultimately, the TNG task involves 3,253 long video clips totaling 179 hours. The MCN task contains 33,060 video clips totaling 105 hours. We benchmark state-of-the-art video captioning models and temporal grounding models in MCN and TNG tasks, respectively. Furthermore, to accurately comprehend plots of different characters, we propose methods to incorporate portraits of actors as external knowledge in both tasks. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The dataset and codes are released at https://github.com/yuezih/MovieUN.

The emotional state of a speaker can be influenced by many different factors in dialogues, such as dialogue scene, dialogue topic, and interlocutor stimulus. The currently available data resources to support such multimodal affective analysis in dialogues are however limited in scale and diversity. In this work, we propose a Multi-modal Multi-scene Multi-label Emotional Dialogue dataset, M³ED, which contains 990 dyadic emotional dialogues from 56 different TV series, a total of 9,082 turns and 24,449 utterances. M³ED is annotated with 7 emotion categories (happy, surprise, sad, disgust, anger, fear, and neutral) at utterance level, and encompasses acoustic, visual, and textual modalities. To the best of our knowledge, M³ED is the first multimodal emotional dialogue dataset in Chinese.It is valuable for cross-culture emotion analysis and recognition. We apply several state-of-the-art methods on the M³ED dataset to verify the validity and quality of the dataset. We also propose a general Multimodal Dialogue-aware Interaction framework, MDI, to model the dialogue context for emotion recognition, which achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods on the M³ED. The full dataset and codes are available.

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has attracted increasing attention in the affective computing research field. Previous works have mainly focused on modeling the semantic interactions in the dialogue and implicitly inferring the evolution of the speakers’ emotional states. Few works have considered the emotional interactions, which directly reflect the emotional evolution of speakers in the dialogue. According to psychological and behavioral studies, the emotional inertia and emotional stimulus are important factors that affect the speaker’s emotional state in conversations. In this work, we propose a novel Dialogue Emotion Interaction Network, DialogueEIN, to explicitly model the intra-speaker, inter-speaker, global and local emotional interactions to respectively simulate the emotional inertia, emotional stimulus, global and local emotional evolution in dialogues. Extensive experiments on four ERC benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP, MELD, EmoryNLP and DailyDialog, show that our proposed DialogueEIN considering emotional interaction factors can achieve superior or competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our codes and models are released.

Due to complex cognitive and inferential efforts involved in the manual generation of one caption per image/video input, the human annotation resources are very limited for captioning tasks. We define language resource efficient as reaching the same performance with fewer annotated captions per input. We first study the performance degradation of caption models in different language resource settings. Our analysis of caption models with SC loss shows that the performance degradation is caused by the increasingly noisy estimation of reward and baseline with fewer language resources. To mitigate this issue, we propose to reduce the variance of noise in the baseline by generalizing the single pairwise comparison in SC loss and using multiple generalized pairwise comparisons. The generalized pairwise comparison (GPC) measures the difference between the evaluation scores of two captions with respect to an input. Empirically, we show that the model trained with the proposed GPC loss is efficient on language resource and achieves similar performance with the state-of-the-art models on MSCOCO by using only half of the language resources. Furthermore, our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a video caption dataset that has only one labeled caption per input in the training set.

Multimodal fusion has been proved to improve emotion recognition performance in previous works. However, in real-world applications, we often encounter the problem of missing modality, and which modalities will be missing is uncertain. It makes the fixed multimodal fusion fail in such cases. In this work, we propose a unified model, Missing Modality Imagination Network (MMIN), to deal with the uncertain missing modality problem. MMIN learns robust joint multimodal representations, which can predict the representation of any missing modality given available modalities under different missing modality conditions. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the unified MMIN model significantly improves emotion recognition performance under both uncertain missing-modality testing conditions and full-modality ideal testing condition. The code will be available at https://github.com/AIM3-RUC/MMIN.

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a crucial component in affective dialogue systems, which helps the system understand users’ emotions and generate empathetic responses. However, most works focus on modeling speaker and contextual information primarily on the textual modality or simply leveraging multimodal information through feature concatenation. In order to explore a more effective way of utilizing both multimodal and long-distance contextual information, we propose a new model based on multimodal fused graph convolutional network, MMGCN, in this work. MMGCN can not only make use of multimodal dependencies effectively, but also leverage speaker information to model inter-speaker and intra-speaker dependency. We evaluate our proposed model on two public benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD, and the results prove the effectiveness of MMGCN, which outperforms other SOTA methods by a significant margin under the multimodal conversation setting.

Multimodal semantic comprehension has attracted increasing research interests recently such as visual question answering and caption generation. However, due to the data limitation, fine-grained semantic comprehension has not been well investigated, which requires to capture semantic details of multimodal contents. In this work, we introduce “YouMakeup”, a large-scale multimodal instructional video dataset to support fine-grained semantic comprehension research in specific domain. YouMakeup contains 2,800 videos from YouTube, spanning more than 420 hours in total. Each video is annotated with a sequence of natural language descriptions for instructional steps, grounded in temporal video range and spatial facial areas. The annotated steps in a video involve subtle difference in actions, products and regions, which requires fine-grained understanding and reasoning both temporally and spatially. In order to evaluate models’ ability for fined-grained comprehension, we further propose two groups of tasks including generation tasks and visual question answering from different aspects. We also establish a baseline of step caption generation for future comparison. The dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/AIM3-RUC/YouMakeup to support research investigation in fine-grained semantic comprehension.