Given an untrimmed video and a natural language query, Natural Language Video Localization (NLVL) aims to identify the video moment described by query. To address this task, existing methods can be roughly grouped into two groups: 1) propose-and-rank models first define a set of hand-designed moment candidates and then find out the best-matching one. 2) proposal-free models directly predict two temporal boundaries of the referential moment from frames. Currently, almost all the propose-and-rank methods have inferior performance than proposal-free counterparts. In this paper, we argue that the performance of propose-and-rank models are underestimated due to the predefined manners: 1) Hand-designed rules are hard to guarantee the complete coverage of targeted segments. 2) Densely sampled candidate moments cause redundant computation and degrade the performance of ranking process. To this end, we propose a novel model termed LPNet (Learnable Proposal Network for NLVL) with a fixed set of learnable moment proposals. The position and length of these proposals are dynamically adjusted during training process. Moreover, a boundary-aware loss has been proposed to leverage frame-level information and further improve performance. Extensive ablations on two challenging NLVL benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of LPNet over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Court’s view generation is a novel but essential task for legal AI, aiming at improving the interpretability of judgment prediction results and enabling automatic legal document generation. While prior text-to-text natural language generation (NLG) approaches can be used to address this problem, neglecting the confounding bias from the data generation mechanism can limit the model performance, and the bias may pollute the learning outcomes. In this paper, we propose a novel Attentional and Counterfactual based Natural Language Generation (AC-NLG) method, consisting of an attentional encoder and a pair of innovative counterfactual decoders. The attentional encoder leverages the plaintiff’s claim and fact description as input to learn a claim-aware encoder from which the claim-related information in fact description can be emphasized. The counterfactual decoders are employed to eliminate the confounding bias in data and generate judgment-discriminative court’s views (both supportive and non-supportive views) by incorporating with a synergistic judgment predictive model. Comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method under both quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics.

Video dialog is a new and challenging task, which requires the agent to answer questions combining video information with dialog history. And different from single-turn video question answering, the additional dialog history is important for video dialog, which often includes contextual information for the question. Existing visual dialog methods mainly use RNN to encode the dialog history as a single vector representation, which might be rough and straightforward. Some more advanced methods utilize hierarchical structure, attention and memory mechanisms, which still lack an explicit reasoning process. In this paper, we introduce a novel progressive inference mechanism for video dialog, which progressively updates query information based on dialog history and video content until the agent think the information is sufficient and unambiguous. In order to tackle the multi-modal fusion problem, we propose a cross-transformer module, which could learn more fine-grained and comprehensive interactions both inside and between the modalities. And besides answer generation, we also consider question generation, which is more challenging but significant for a complete video dialog system. We evaluate our method on two large-scale datasets, and the extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method.

In this paper, we focus on natural language video localization: localizing (ie, grounding) a natural language description in a long and untrimmed video sequence. All currently published models for addressing this problem can be categorized into two types: (i) top-down approach: it does classification and regression for a set of pre-cut video segment candidates; (ii) bottom-up approach: it directly predicts probabilities for each video frame as the temporal boundaries (ie, start and end time point). However, both two approaches suffer several limitations: the former is computation-intensive for densely placed candidates, while the latter has trailed the performance of the top-down counterpart thus far. To this end, we propose a novel dense bottom-up framework: DEnse Bottom-Up Grounding (DEBUG). DEBUG regards all frames falling in the ground truth segment as foreground, and each foreground frame regresses the unique distances from its location to bi-directional ground truth boundaries. Extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks (TACoS, Charades-STA, and ActivityNet Captions) show that DEBUG is able to match the speed of bottom-up models while surpassing the performance of the state-of-the-art top-down models.