No Arabic abstract
Temporal grounding aims to temporally localize a video moment in the video whose semantics are related to a given natural language query. Existing methods typically apply a detection or regression pipeline on the fused representation with a focus on designing complicated heads and fusion strategies. Instead, from a perspective on temporal grounding as a metric-learning problem, we present a Dual Matching Network (DMN), to directly model the relations between language queries and video moments in a joint embedding space. This new metric-learning framework enables fully exploiting negative samples from two new aspects: constructing negative cross-modal pairs from a dual matching scheme and mining negative pairs across different videos. These new negative samples could enhance the joint representation learning of two modalities via cross-modal pair discrimination to maximize their mutual information. Experiments show that DMN achieves highly competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods on four video grounding benchmarks. Based on DMN, we present a winner solution for STVG challenge of the 3rd PIC workshop. This suggests that metric-learning is still a promising method for temporal grounding via capturing the essential cross-modal correlation in a joint embedding space.
There are rich synchronized audio and visual events in our daily life. Inside the events, audio scenes are associated with the corresponding visual objects; meanwhile, sounding objects can indicate and help to separate their individual sounds in the audio track. Based on this observation, in this paper, we propose a cyclic co-learning (CCoL) paradigm that can jointly learn sounding object visual grounding and audio-visual sound separation in a unified framework. Concretely, we can leverage grounded object-sound relations to improve the results of sound separation. Meanwhile, benefiting from discriminative information from separated sounds, we improve training example sampling for sounding object grounding, which builds a co-learning cycle for the two tasks and makes them mutually beneficial. Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms the compared recent approaches on both tasks, and they can benefit from each other with our cyclic co-learning.
Temporal grounding of natural language in untrimmed videos is a fundamental yet challenging multimedia task facilitating cross-media visual content retrieval. We focus on the weakly supervised setting of this task that merely accesses to coarse video-level language description annotation without temporal boundary, which is more consistent with reality as such weak labels are more readily available in practice. In this paper, we propose a emph{Boundary Adaptive Refinement} (BAR) framework that resorts to reinforcement learning (RL) to guide the process of progressively refining the temporal boundary. To the best of our knowledge, we offer the first attempt to extend RL to temporal localization task with weak supervision. As it is non-trivial to obtain a straightforward reward function in the absence of pairwise granular boundary-query annotations, a cross-modal alignment evaluator is crafted to measure the alignment degree of segment-query pair to provide tailor-designed rewards. This refinement scheme completely abandons traditional sliding window based solution pattern and contributes to acquiring more efficient, boundary-flexible and content-aware grounding results. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks Charades-STA and ActivityNet demonstrate that BAR outperforms the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised method and even beats some competitive fully-supervised ones.
In this paper, we are tackling the weakly-supervised referring expression grounding task, for the localization of a referent object in an image according to a query sentence, where the mapping between image regions and queries are not available during the training stage. In traditional methods, an object region that best matches the referring expression is picked out, and then the query sentence is reconstructed from the selected region, where the reconstruction difference serves as the loss for back-propagation. The existing methods, however, conduct both the matching and the reconstruction approximately as they ignore the fact that the matching correctness is unknown. To overcome this limitation, a discriminative triad is designed here as the basis to the solution, through which a query can be converted into one or multiple discriminative triads in a very scalable way. Based on the discriminative triad, we further propose the triad-level matching and reconstruction modules which are lightweight yet effective for the weakly-supervised training, making it three times lighter and faster than the previous state-of-the-art methods. One important merit of our work is its superior performance despite the simple and neat design. Specifically, the proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy when evaluated on RefCOCO (39.21%), RefCOCO+ (39.18%) and RefCOCOg (43.24%) datasets, that is 4.17%, 4.08% and 7.8% higher than the previous one, respectively.
Deep metric learning has been effectively used to learn distance metrics for different visual tasks like image retrieval, clustering, etc. In order to aid the training process, existing methods either use a hard mining strategy to extract the most informative samples or seek to generate hard synthetics using an additional network. Such approaches face different challenges and can lead to biased embeddings in the former case, and (i) harder optimization (ii) slower training speed (iii) higher model complexity in the latter case. In order to overcome these challenges, we propose a novel approach that looks for optimal hard negatives (LoOp) in the embedding space, taking full advantage of each tuple by calculating the minimum distance between a pair of positives and a pair of negatives. Unlike mining-based methods, our approach considers the entire space between pairs of embeddings to calculate the optimal hard negatives. Extensive experiments combining our approach and representative metric learning losses reveal a significant boost in performance on three benchmark datasets.
Temporal sentence grounding in videos~(TSGV), which aims to localize one target segment from an untrimmed video with respect to a given sentence query, has drawn increasing attentions in the research community over the past few years. Different from the task of temporal action localization, TSGV is more flexible since it can locate complicated activities via natural languages, without restrictions from predefined action categories. Meanwhile, TSGV is more challenging since it requires both textual and visual understanding for semantic alignment between two modalities~(i.e., text and video). In this survey, we give a comprehensive overview for TSGV, which i) summarizes the taxonomy of existing methods, ii) provides a detailed description of the evaluation protocols~(i.e., datasets and metrics) to be used in TSGV, and iii) in-depth discusses potential problems of current benchmarking designs and research directions for further investigations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic survey on temporal sentence grounding. More specifically, we first discuss existing TSGV approaches by grouping them into four categories, i.e., two-stage methods, end-to-end methods, reinforcement learning-based methods, and weakly supervised methods. Then we present the benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics to assess current research progress. Finally, we discuss some limitations in TSGV through pointing out potential problems improperly resolved in the current evaluation protocols, which may push forwards more cutting edge research in TSGV. Besides, we also share our insights on several promising directions, including three typical tasks with new and practical settings based on TSGV.