Qingming Huang


2024

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StyleDubber: Towards Multi-Scale Style Learning for Movie Dubbing
Gaoxiang Cong | Yuankai Qi | Liang Li | Amin Beheshti | Zhedong Zhang | Anton Hengel | Ming-Hsuan Yang | Chenggang Yan | Qingming Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Given a script, the challenge in Movie Dubbing (Visual Voice Cloning, V2C) is to generate speech that aligns well with the video in both time and emotion, based on the tone of a reference audio track. Existing state-of-the-art V2C models break the phonemes in the script according to the divisions between video frames, which solves the temporal alignment problem but leads to incomplete phoneme pronunciation and poor identity stability. To address this problem, we propose StyleDubber, which switches dubbing learning from the frame level to phoneme level. It contains three main components: (1) A multimodal style adaptor operating at the phoneme level to learn pronunciation style from the reference audio, and generate intermediate representations informed by the facial emotion presented in the video; (2) An utterance-level style learning module, which guides both the mel-spectrogram decoding and the refining processes from the intermediate embeddings to improve the overall style expression; And (3) a phoneme-guided lip aligner to maintain lip sync. Extensive experiments on two of the primary benchmarks, V2C and Grid, demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method as compared to the current state-of-the-art. The code will be made available at https://github.com/GalaxyCong/StyleDubber.

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Context-aware Difference Distilling for Multi-change Captioning
Yunbin Tu | Liang Li | Li Su | Zheng-Jun Zha | Chenggang Yan | Qingming Huang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Multi-change captioning aims to describe complex and coupled changes within an image pair in natural language. Compared with single-change captioning, this task requires the model to have higher-level cognition ability to reason an arbitrary number of changes. In this paper, we propose a novel context-aware difference distilling (CARD) network to capture all genuine changes for yielding sentences. Given an image pair, CARD first decouples context features that aggregate all similar/dissimilar semantics, termed common/difference context features. Then, the consistency and independence constraints are designed to guarantee the alignment/discrepancy of common/difference context features. Further, the common context features guide the model to mine locally unchanged features, which are subtracted from the pair to distill locally difference features. Next, the difference context features augment the locally difference features to ensure that all changes are distilled. In this way, we obtain an omni-representation of all changes, which is translated into linguistic sentences by a transformer decoder. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show CARD performs favourably against state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/tuyunbin/CARD.

2022

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Think Beyond Words: Exploring Context-Relevant Visual Commonsense for Diverse Dialogue Generation
Yiting Liu | Liang Li | Beichen Zhang | Qingming Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Commonsense knowledge has been widely considered for building intelligent open-domain dialogue agents, aiming to generate meaningful and diverse responses. Previous works in this field usually lack the ability to effectively obtain and utilize auxiliary commonsense from the external visual world. In this paper, we argue that exploiting logical information in images related to context can be effective to enrich and steer the generation process. In view of this, we propose VICTOR, a context-relevant VIsual Commonsense enhanced dialogue generaTOR for generating coherent and informative responses. To obtain the associated visual commonsense, we devise a novel approach that expands topic words on the knowledge graph and maps them into daily scenarios. During the generation, the model adopts multimodal fusion mechanism to integrate visual and textual information, and adaptively combine their decoding distributions for better response generation. The experimental results on two public datasets show that our proposed method outperforms the latest competitive methods in terms of coherence and diversity.