It is well believed that the higher uncertainty in a word of the caption, the more inter-correlated context information is required to determine it. However, current image captioning methods usually consider the generation of all words in a sentence sequentially and equally. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-aware image captioning framework, which parallelly and iteratively operates insertion of discontinuous candidate words between existing words from easy to difficult until converged. We hypothesize that high-uncertainty words in a sentence need more prior information to make a correct decision and should be produced at a later stage. The resulting non-autoregressive hierarchy makes the caption generation explainable and intuitive. Specifically, we utilize an image-conditioned bag-of-word model to measure the word uncertainty and apply a dynamic programming algorithm to construct the training pairs. During inference, we devise an uncertainty-adaptive parallel beam search technique that yields an empirically logarithmic time complexity. Extensive experiments on the MS COCO benchmark reveal that our approach outperforms the strong baseline and related methods on both captioning quality as well as decoding speed.

Recently, vector quantized autoregressive (VQ-AR) models have shown remarkable results in text-to-image synthesis by equally predicting discrete image tokens from the top left to bottom right in the latent space. Although the simple generative process surprisingly works well, is this the best way to generate the image? For instance, human creation is more inclined to the outline-to-fine of an image, while VQ-AR models themselves do not consider any relative importance of each component. In this paper, we present a progressive denoising model for high-fidelity text-to-image image generation. The proposed method takes effect by creating new image tokens from coarse to fine based on the existing context in a parallel manner and this procedure is recursively applied until an image sequence is completed. The resulting coarse-to-fine hierarchy makes the image generation process intuitive and interpretable. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the progressive model produces significantly better results when compared with the previous VQ-AR method in FID score across a wide variety of categories and aspects. Moreover, the text-to-image generation time of traditional AR increases linearly with the output image resolution and hence is quite time-consuming even for normal-size images. In contrast, our approach allows achieving a better trade-off between generation quality and speed.

随着在线聊天的日益普及，贴纸在我们的在线沟通中变得越来越重要。在开放域对话中选择适当的贴纸需要对对话和贴纸以及两种类型的方式之间的关系有全面的了解。为了应对这些挑战，我们提出了一种由三个辅助任务组成的多任务学习方法，以增强对对话历史，情感和语义含义的理解。在最近的一个具有挑战性的数据集中进行的广泛实验表明，我们的模型可以更好地结合多模式信息，并在强质基础上获得更高的精度。消融研究进一步验证了每个辅助任务的有效性。我们的代码可在\ url {https://github.com/nonstopfor/sticker-selection}中找到

现有的图像字幕的方法通常从左到右生成句子逐字，并在本地上下文中受到限制，包括给定的图像和历史记录生成的单词。在解码过程中，有许多研究目的是利用全球信息，例如迭代改进。但是，它仍然探讨了如何有效，有效地纳入未来的环境。为了回答这个问题，受到非自动回归图像字幕（NAIC）的启发，可以通过修改后的掩码操作利用两侧关系，我们的目标是将此进步嫁接到常规的自动回归图像字幕（AIC）模型，同时保持推理效率而无需进行推理效率额外的时间成本。具体而言，首先对AIC和NAIC模型结合了共享的视觉编码器，迫使视觉编码器包含足够有效的未来上下文。然后鼓励AIC模型捕获NAIC模型在其不自信的单词上互换的跨层互换的因果动态，该单词遵循教师学生的范式，并通过分配校准训练目标进行了优化。经验证据表明，我们所提出的方法清楚地超过了自动指标和人类评估的最新基线，对MS COCO基准测试。源代码可在以下网址获得：https：//github.com/feizc/future-caption。

密集的视频字幕（DVC）旨在生成多句子描述，以阐明视频中的多个事件，这是具有挑战性，需要的视觉一致性，疑惑一致性和语言多样性。现有方法主要生成各个视频段的标题，缺乏适应全局视觉上下文和快速发展的视觉内容和文本描述之间的渐进对齐，这导致冗余和拼接描述。在本文中，我们介绍了信息流的概念，以模拟跨视频序列和标题的渐进信息。通过设计跨模型信息流对准机制，捕获和对齐的视觉和文本信息流，其在事件/主题演化上以更丰富的上下文和动态赋予标题处理。基于跨模型信息流对准模块，我们进一步提出了DVCFlow框架，它由全球本地视觉编码器组成，用于捕获每个视频段的全局功能和本地特征，以及用于产生标题的预先培训的标题生成器。对流行的ActivityNet标题和Youcookii数据集的广泛实验表明，我们的方法显着优于竞争基础，并根据主题和客观测试产生更多人类文本。

Weakly-supervised object localization aims to indicate the category as well as the scope of an object in an image given only the image-level labels. Most of the existing works are based on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and endeavor to enlarge the discriminative area inside the activation map to perceive the whole object, yet ignore the co-occurrence confounder of the object and context (e.g., fish and water), which makes the model inspection hard to distinguish object boundaries. Besides, the use of CAM also brings a dilemma problem that the classification and localization always suffer from a performance gap and can not reach their highest accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a casual knowledge distillation method, dubbed KD-CI-CAM, to address these two under-explored issues in one go. More specifically, we tackle the co-occurrence context confounder problem via causal intervention (CI), which explores the causalities among image features, contexts, and categories to eliminate the biased object-context entanglement in the class activation maps. Based on the de-biased object feature, we additionally propose a multi-teacher causal distillation framework to balance the absorption of classification knowledge and localization knowledge during model training. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of KD-CI-CAM in learning clear object boundaries from confounding contexts and addressing the dilemma problem between classification and localization performance.

In the scenario of black-box adversarial attack, the target model's parameters are unknown, and the attacker aims to find a successful adversarial perturbation based on query feedback under a query budget. Due to the limited feedback information, existing query-based black-box attack methods often require many queries for attacking each benign example. To reduce query cost, we propose to utilize the feedback information across historical attacks, dubbed example-level adversarial transferability. Specifically, by treating the attack on each benign example as one task, we develop a meta-learning framework by training a meta-generator to produce perturbations conditioned on benign examples. When attacking a new benign example, the meta generator can be quickly fine-tuned based on the feedback information of the new task as well as a few historical attacks to produce effective perturbations. Moreover, since the meta-train procedure consumes many queries to learn a generalizable generator, we utilize model-level adversarial transferability to train the meta-generator on a white-box surrogate model, then transfer it to help the attack against the target model. The proposed framework with the two types of adversarial transferability can be naturally combined with any off-the-shelf query-based attack methods to boost their performance, which is verified by extensive experiments.

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) has attracted considerable attention as a gradient-based Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method. Since the introduction of DARTS, there has been little work done on adapting the action space based on state-of-art architecture design principles for CNNs. In this work, we aim to address this gap by incrementally augmenting the DARTS search space with micro-design changes inspired by ConvNeXt and studying the trade-off between accuracy, evaluation layer count, and computational cost. To this end, we introduce the Pseudo-Inverted Bottleneck conv block intending to reduce the computational footprint of the inverted bottleneck block proposed in ConvNeXt. Our proposed architecture is much less sensitive to evaluation layer count and outperforms a DARTS network with similar size significantly, at layer counts as small as 2. Furthermore, with less layers, not only does it achieve higher accuracy with lower GMACs and parameter count, GradCAM comparisons show that our network is able to better detect distinctive features of target objects compared to DARTS.

We study estimation and testing in the Poisson regression model with noisy high dimensional covariates, which has wide applications in analyzing noisy big data. Correcting for the estimation bias due to the covariate noise leads to a non-convex target function to minimize. Treating the high dimensional issue further leads us to augment an amenable penalty term to the target function. We propose to estimate the regression parameter through minimizing the penalized target function. We derive the L1 and L2 convergence rates of the estimator and prove the variable selection consistency. We further establish the asymptotic normality of any subset of the parameters, where the subset can have infinitely many components as long as its cardinality grows sufficiently slow. We develop Wald and score tests based on the asymptotic normality of the estimator, which permits testing of linear functions of the members if the subset. We examine the finite sample performance of the proposed tests by extensive simulation. Finally, the proposed method is successfully applied to the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative study, which motivated this work initially.

Video-language pre-training has advanced the performance of various downstream video-language tasks. However, most previous methods directly inherit or adapt typical image-language pre-training paradigms to video-language pre-training, thus not fully exploiting the unique characteristic of video, i.e., temporal. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Temporal-Aware video-language pre-training framework, HiTeA, with two novel pre-training tasks for modeling cross-modal alignment between moments and texts as well as the temporal relations of video-text pairs. Specifically, we propose a cross-modal moment exploration task to explore moments in videos, which results in detailed video moment representation. Besides, the inherent temporal relations are captured by aligning video-text pairs as a whole in different time resolutions with multi-modal temporal relation exploration task. Furthermore, we introduce the shuffling test to evaluate the temporal reliance of datasets and video-language pre-training models. We achieve state-of-the-art results on 15 well-established video-language understanding and generation tasks, especially on temporal-oriented datasets (e.g., SSv2-Template and SSv2-Label) with 8.6% and 11.1% improvement respectively. HiTeA also demonstrates strong generalization ability when directly transferred to downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. Models and demo will be available on ModelScope.