“多模态的对话情绪识别(emotion recognition in conversation,ERC)是构建情感对话系统的关键。近年来基于图的融合方法在会话中动态聚合多模态上下文特征,提高了模型在多模态对话情绪识别方面的性能。然而,这些方法都没有充分保留和利用输入数据中的有价值的信息。具体地说,它们都没有保留从输入到融合结果的任务相关信息,并且忽略了标签本身蕴含的信息。本文提出了一种基于互信息最大化和对比损失的多模态对话情绪识别模型MMIC来解决上述的问题。模型通过在输入级和融合级上分级最大化模态之间的互信息(mutual information),使任务相关信息在融合过程中得以保存,从而生成更丰富的多模态表示。本文还在基于图的动态融合网络中引入了监督对比学习(supervised contrastive learning),通过充分利用标签蕴含的信息,使不同情绪相互排斥,增强了模型识别相似情绪的能力。在两个英文和一个中文的公共数据集上的大量实验证明了所提出模型的有效性和优越性。此外,在所提出模型上进行的案例探究有效地证实了模型可以有效保留任务相关信息,更好地区分出相似的情绪。消融实验和可视化结果证明了模型中每个模块的有效性。”

Most Outside-Knowledge Visual Question Answering (OK-VQA) systems employ a two-stage framework that first retrieves external knowledge given the visual question and then predicts the answer based on the retrieved content. However, the retrieved knowledge is often inadequate. Retrievals are frequently too general and fail to cover specific knowledge needed to answer the question. Also, the naturally available supervision (whether the passage contains the correct answer) is weak and does not guarantee question relevancy. To address these issues, we propose an Entity-Focused Retrieval (EnFoRe) model that provides stronger supervision during training and recognizes question-relevant entities to help retrieve more specific knowledge. Experiments show that our EnFoRe model achieves superior retrieval performance on OK-VQA, the currently largest outside-knowledge VQA dataset. We also combine the retrieved knowledge with state-of-the-art VQA models, and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance on OK-VQA.

Daily scenes are complex in the real world due to occlusion, undesired lighting conditions, etc. Although humans handle those complicated environments well, they evoke challenges for machine learning systems to identify and describe the target without ambiguity. Most previous research focuses on mining discriminating features within the same category for the target object. One the other hand, as the scene becomes more complicated, human frequently uses the neighbor objects as complementary information to describe the target one. Motivated by that, we propose a novel Complementary Neighboring-based Attention Network (CoNAN) that explicitly utilizes the visual differences between the target object and its highly-related neighbors. These highly-related neighbors are determined by an attentional ranking module, as complementary features, highlighting the discriminating aspects for the target object. The speaker module then takes the visual difference features as an additional input to generate the expression. Our qualitative and quantitative results on the dataset RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg demonstrate that our generated expressions outperform other state-of-the-art models by a clear margin.

Visual question answering (VQA) and image captioning require a shared body of general knowledge connecting language and vision. We present a novel approach to better VQA performance that exploits this connection by jointly generating captions that are targeted to help answer a specific visual question. The model is trained using an existing caption dataset by automatically determining question-relevant captions using an online gradient-based method. Experimental results on the VQA v2 challenge demonstrates that our approach obtains state-of-the-art VQA performance (e.g. 68.4% in the Test-standard set using a single model) by simultaneously generating question-relevant captions.

AI systems’ ability to explain their reasoning is critical to their utility and trustworthiness. Deep neural networks have enabled significant progress on many challenging problems such as visual question answering (VQA). However, most of them are opaque black boxes with limited explanatory capability. This paper presents a novel approach to developing a high-performing VQA system that can elucidate its answers with integrated textual and visual explanations that faithfully reflect important aspects of its underlying reasoning while capturing the style of comprehensible human explanations. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the advantages of this approach compared to competing methods using both automated metrics and human evaluation.