A major goal of multimodal research is to improve machine understanding of images and text. Tasks include image captioning, text-to-image generation, and vision-language representation learning. So far, research has focused on the relationships between images and text. For example, captioning models attempt to understand the semantics of images which are then transformed into text. An important question is: which annotation reflects best a deep understanding of image content? Similarly, given a text, what is the best image that can present the semantics of the text? In this work, we argue that the best text or caption for a given image is the text which would generate the image which is the most similar to that image. Likewise, the best image for a given text is the image that results in the caption which is best aligned with the original text. To this end, we propose a unified framework that includes both a text-to-image generative model and an image-to-text generative model. Extensive experiments validate our approach.

Audio-visual approaches involving visual inputs have laid the foundation for recent progress in speech separation. However, the optimization of the concurrent usage of auditory and visual inputs is still an active research area. Inspired by the cortico-thalamo-cortical circuit, in which the sensory processing mechanisms of different modalities modulate one another via the non-lemniscal sensory thalamus, we propose a novel cortico-thalamo-cortical neural network (CTCNet) for audio-visual speech separation (AVSS). First, the CTCNet learns hierarchical auditory and visual representations in a bottom-up manner in separate auditory and visual subnetworks, mimicking the functions of the auditory and visual cortical areas. Then, inspired by the large number of connections between cortical regions and the thalamus, the model fuses the auditory and visual information in a thalamic subnetwork through top-down connections. Finally, the model transmits this fused information back to the auditory and visual subnetworks, and the above process is repeated several times. The results of experiments on three speech separation benchmark datasets show that CTCNet remarkably outperforms existing AVSS methods with considerablely fewer parameters. These results suggest that mimicking the anatomical connectome of the mammalian brain has great potential for advancing the development of deep neural networks. Project repo is https://github.com/JusperLee/CTCNet.

Boolean query construction is often critical for medical systematic review literature search. To create an effective Boolean query, systematic review researchers typically spend weeks coming up with effective query terms and combinations. One challenge to creating an effective systematic review Boolean query is the selection of effective MeSH Terms to include in the query. In our previous work, we created neural MeSH term suggestion methods and compared them to state-of-the-art MeSH term suggestion methods. We found neural MeSH term suggestion methods to be highly effective. In this demonstration, we build upon our previous work by creating (1) a Web-based MeSH term suggestion prototype system that allows users to obtain suggestions from a number of underlying methods and (2) a Python library that implements ours and others' MeSH term suggestion methods and that is aimed at researchers who want to further investigate, create or deploy such type of methods. We describe the architecture of the web-based system and how to use it for the MeSH term suggestion task. For the Python library, we describe how the library can be used for advancing further research and experimentation, and we validate the results of the methods contained in the library on standard datasets. Our web-based prototype system is available at http://ielab-mesh-suggest.uqcloud.net, while our Python library is at https://github.com/ielab/meshsuggestlib.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid progress of image captioning. However, the demands for large memory storage and heavy computational burden prevent these captioning models from being deployed on mobile devices. The main obstacles lie in the heavyweight visual feature extractors (i.e., object detectors) and complicated cross-modal fusion networks. To this end, we propose LightCap, a lightweight image captioner for resource-limited devices. The core design is built on the recent CLIP model for efficient image captioning. To be specific, on the one hand, we leverage the CLIP model to extract the compact grid features without relying on the time-consuming object detectors. On the other hand, we transfer the image-text retrieval design of CLIP to image captioning scenarios by devising a novel visual concept extractor and a cross-modal modulator. We further optimize the cross-modal fusion model and parallel prediction heads via sequential and ensemble distillations. With the carefully designed architecture, our model merely contains 40M parameters, saving the model size by more than 75% and the FLOPs by more than 98% in comparison with the current state-of-the-art methods. In spite of the low capacity, our model still exhibits state-of-the-art performance on prevalent datasets, e.g., 136.6 CIDEr on COCO Karpathy test split. Testing on the smartphone with only a single CPU, the proposed LightCap exhibits a fast inference speed of 188ms per image, which is ready for practical applications.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we first examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed two shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling and arbitrary table joins. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that incorporates key relationships from schema, imposes strong typing, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated natural language questions. When existing powerful semantic parsers are pre-finetuned on our high-quality synthesized data, our experiments show that these models have significant accuracy boosts on popular benchmarks, including new state-of-the-art performance on Spider.

Although DETR-based 3D detectors can simplify the detection pipeline and achieve direct sparse predictions, their performance still lags behind dense detectors with post-processing for 3D object detection from point clouds. DETRs usually adopt a larger number of queries than GTs (e.g., 300 queries v.s. 40 objects in Waymo) in a scene, which inevitably incur many false positives during inference. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective sparse 3D detector, named Query Contrast Voxel-DETR (ConQueR), to eliminate the challenging false positives, and achieve more accurate and sparser predictions. We observe that most false positives are highly overlapping in local regions, caused by the lack of explicit supervision to discriminate locally similar queries. We thus propose a Query Contrast mechanism to explicitly enhance queries towards their best-matched GTs over all unmatched query predictions. This is achieved by the construction of positive and negative GT-query pairs for each GT, and a contrastive loss to enhance positive GT-query pairs against negative ones based on feature similarities. ConQueR closes the gap of sparse and dense 3D detectors, and reduces up to ~60% false positives. Our single-frame ConQueR achieves new state-of-the-art (sota) 71.6 mAPH/L2 on the challenging Waymo Open Dataset validation set, outperforming previous sota methods (e.g., PV-RCNN++) by over 2.0 mAPH/L2.

The weakly supervised instance segmentation is a challenging task. The existing methods typically use bounding boxes as supervision and optimize the network with a regularization loss term such as pairwise color affinity loss for instance segmentation. Through systematic analysis, we found that the commonly used pairwise affinity loss has two limitations: (1) it works with color affinity but leads to inferior performance with other modalities such as depth gradient, (2)the original affinity loss does not prevent trivial predictions as intended but actually accelerates this process due to the affinity loss term being symmetric. To overcome these two limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel asymmetric affinity loss which provides the penalty against the trivial prediction and generalizes well with affinity loss from different modalities. With the proposed asymmetric affinity loss, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the Cityscapes dataset and outperforms our baseline method by 3.5% in mask AP.

In this paper, we study the problem of visual grounding by considering both phrase extraction and grounding (PEG). In contrast to the previous phrase-known-at-test setting, PEG requires a model to extract phrases from text and locate objects from images simultaneously, which is a more practical setting in real applications. As phrase extraction can be regarded as a $1$D text segmentation problem, we formulate PEG as a dual detection problem and propose a novel DQ-DETR model, which introduces dual queries to probe different features from image and text for object prediction and phrase mask prediction. Each pair of dual queries is designed to have shared positional parts but different content parts. Such a design effectively alleviates the difficulty of modality alignment between image and text (in contrast to a single query design) and empowers Transformer decoder to leverage phrase mask-guided attention to improve performance. To evaluate the performance of PEG, we also propose a new metric CMAP (cross-modal average precision), analogous to the AP metric in object detection. The new metric overcomes the ambiguity of Recall@1 in many-box-to-one-phrase cases in phrase grounding. As a result, our PEG pre-trained DQ-DETR establishes new state-of-the-art results on all visual grounding benchmarks with a ResNet-101 backbone. For example, it achieves $91.04\%$ and $83.51\%$ in terms of recall rate on RefCOCO testA and testB with a ResNet-101 backbone. Code will be availabl at \url{https://github.com/IDEA-Research/DQ-DETR}.

开放世界对象检测是一个更具笼统和挑战性的目标，旨在识别和本地化由任意类别名称描述的对象。最近的工作GLIP通过将检测数据集的所有类别名称连接到句子中，从而将此问题作为接地问题，从而导致类别名称之间的效率低下的相互作用。本文介绍了Distclip，这是一种通过诉诸于设计概念词典的知识富集，是一种平行的视觉概念训练预训练方法，用于开放世界检测。为了提高学习效率，我们提出了一种新型的并行概念公式，该公式分别提取概念，以更好地利用异质数据集（即检测，接地和图像文本对）进行培训。我们进一步设计了来自各种在线资源和检测数据集的概念字典〜（带有描述），以提供每个概念的先验知识。通过用描述丰富这些概念，我们明确地建立了各种概念之间的关系，以促进开放域学习。所提出的概念词典进一步用于提供足够的负面概念，用于构建单词区域对齐损失\，并完成图像对文本对数据标题中缺少描述的对象的标签。所提出的框架显示出强烈的零射击性能性能，例如，在LVIS数据集上，我们的DETCLIP-T优于9.9％的地图GLIPT-T优于GLIP-T，并且与完全避免的型号相比，稀有类别的稀有类别提高了13.5％。作为我们的。

对比性语言图像预训练（剪辑）通过随时可用的自然语言监督学习丰富的表示。它可以改善下游视觉任务的一般性能，包括但不限于零射击，长尾巴，细分，检索，标题和视频。但是，据我们所知，尚未研究剪辑的视觉解释性。为了提供其预测的视觉解释，我们提出了图像文本相似性图（ITSM）。基于它，我们出人意料地发现，剪辑比前景更喜欢背景区域，并且对人类理解提出了错误的可视化。在实验上，我们发现魔鬼在汇总部分，其中不适当的合并方法导致一种称为语义转移的现象。为了纠正和提高可视化结果，我们提出了蒙版的最大池，并使用自我监督图像编码器的注意力图。同时，解释性任务和识别任务需要不同的表示。为了解决这个问题，我们提出了双重预测，以满足这一要求。我们将上述方法整合为可解释的对比度图像预训练（ICLIP）。实验表明ICLIP极大地提高了可解释性。例如，在VOC 2012数据集中，非平凡的改进分别为$ 32.85 \％$和$ 49.10 \％$。