Abstract

Localizing objects in 3D scenes based on natural language requires understanding and reasoning about spatial relations. In particular, it is often crucial to distinguish similar objects referred by the text, such as "the left most chair" and "a chair next to the window". In this work we propose a language-conditioned transformer model for grounding 3D objects and their spatial relations. To this end, we design a spatial self-attention layer that accounts for relative distances and orientations between objects in input 3D point clouds. Training such a layer with visual and language inputs enables to disambiguate spatial relations and to localize objects referred by the text. To facilitate the cross-modal learning of relations, we further propose a teacher-student approach where the teacher model is first trained using ground-truth object labels, and then helps to train a student model using point cloud inputs. We perform ablation studies showing advantages of our approach. We also demonstrate our model to significantly outperform the state of the art on the challenging Nr3D, Sr3D and ScanRefer 3D object grounding datasets.

Abstract

Reading, much like music listening, is an immersive experience that transports readers while taking them on an emotional journey. Listening to complementary music has the potential to amplify the reading experience, especially when the music is stylistically cohesive and emotionally relevant. In this paper, we propose the first fully automatic method to build a dense soundtrack for books, which can play high-quality instrumental music for the entirety of the reading duration. Our work employs a unique text processing and music weaving pipeline that determines the context and emotional composition of scenes in a chapter. This allows our method to identify and play relevant excerpts from the soundtrack of the book’s movie adaptation. By relying on the movie composer’s craftsmanship, our book soundtracks include expert-made motifs and other scene-specific musical characteristics. We validate the design decisions of our approach through a perceptual study. Our readers note that the book soundtrack greatly enhanced their reading experience, due to high immersiveness granted via uninterrupted and style-consistent music, and a heightened emotional state attained via high precision emotion and scene context recognition.

Abstract

Dense video understanding requires answering several questions such as who is doing what to whom, with what, how, why, and where. Recently, Video Situation Recognition (VidSitu) is framed as a task for structured prediction of multiple events, their relationships, and actions and various verb-role pairs attached to descriptive entities. This task poses several challenges in identifying, disambiguating, and co-referencing entities across multiple verb-role pairs, but also faces some challenges of evaluation. In this work, we propose the addition of spatiotemporal grounding as an essential component of the structured prediction task in a weakly supervised setting, and present a novel three stage Transformer model, VideoWhisperer, that is empowered to make joint predictions. In stage one, we learn contextualised embeddings for video features in parallel with key objects that appear in the video clips to enable fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning. The second stage sees verb-role queries attend and pool information from object embeddings, localising answers to questions posed about the action. The final stage generates these answers as captions to describe each verb-role pair present in the video. Our model operates on a group of events (clips) simultaneously and predicts verbs, verb-role pairs, their nouns, and their grounding on-the-fly. When evaluated on a grounding-augmented version of the VidSitu dataset, we observe a large improvement in entity captioning accuracy, as well as the ability to localize verb-roles without grounding annotations at training time.

Abstract

Modeling person interactions with their surroundings has proven to be effective for recognizing and localizing human actions in videos. While most recent works focus on learning short term interactions, in this work, we consider long-term person interactions and jointly localize actions of multiple actors over an entire video shot. We construct a graph with nodes that correspond to keyframe actor instances and connect them with two edge types. Spatial edges connect actors within a keyframe, and temporal edges connect multiple instances of the same actor over a video shot. We propose a Graph Neural Network that explicitly models spatial and temporal states for each person instance and learns to effectively combine information from both modalities to make predictions at the same time. We conduct experiments on the AVA dataset and show that our graph-based model provides consistent improvements over several video descriptors, achieving state-of-the-art performance without any fine-tuning.

Abstract

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) aims to enable embodied agents to navigate in realistic environments us- ing natural language instructions. Given the scarcity of domain-specific training data and the high diversity of im- age and language inputs, the generalization of VLN agents to unseen environments remains challenging. Recent meth- ods explore pretraining to improve generalization, however, the use of generic image-caption datasets or existing small- scale VLN environments is suboptimal and results in limited improvements. In this work, we introduce BnB1, a large- scale and diverse in-domain VLN dataset. We first col- lect image-caption (IC) pairs from hundreds of thousands of listings from online rental marketplaces. Using IC pairs we next propose automatic strategies to generate millions of VLN path-instruction (PI) pairs. We further propose a shuffling loss that improves the learning of temporal or- der inside PI pairs. We use BnB to pretrain our Airbert2 model that can be adapted to discriminative and genera- tive settings and show that it outperforms state of the art for Room-to-Room (R2R) navigation and Remote Referring Ex- pression (REVERIE) benchmarks. Moreover, our in-domain pretraining significantly increases performance on a chal- lenging few-shot VLN evaluation, where we train the model only on VLN instructions from a few houses

Abstract

The visual world naturally exhibits an imbalance in the number of object or scene instances resulting in a long-tailed distribution. This imbalance poses significant challenges for classification models based on deep learning. Oversampling instances of the tail classes attempts to solve this imbalance. However, the limited visual diver- sity results in a network with poor representation ability. A simple counter to this is decoupling the representation and classifier net- works and using oversampling only to train the classifier. In this paper, instead of repeatedly re-sampling the same im- age (and thereby features), we explore a direction that attempts to generate meaningful features by estimating the tail category’s distribution. Inspired by ideas from recent work on few-shot learn- ing [ 53], we create calibrated distributions to sample additional features that are subsequently used to train the classifier. Through several experiments on the CIFAR-100-LT (long-tail) dataset with varying imbalance factors and on mini-ImageNet-LT (long-tail), we show the efficacy of our approach and establish a new state-of- the-art. We also present a qualitative analysis of generated features using t-SNE visualizations and analyze the nearest neighbors used to calibrate the tail class distributions. Our code is available at https://github.com/rahulvigneswaran/TailCalibX.