No Arabic abstract
Video grounding aims to localize the temporal segment corresponding to a sentence query from an untrimmed video. Almost all existing video grounding methods fall into two frameworks: 1) Top-down model: It predefines a set of segment candidates and then conducts segment classification and regression. 2) Bottom-up model: It directly predicts frame-wise probabilities of the referential segment boundaries. However, all these methods are not end-to-end, ie, they always rely on some time-consuming post-processing steps to refine predictions. To this end, we reformulate video grounding as a set prediction task and propose a novel end-to-end multi-modal Transformer model, dubbed as textbf{GTR}. Specifically, GTR has two encoders for video and language encoding, and a cross-modal decoder for grounding prediction. To facilitate the end-to-end training, we use a Cubic Embedding layer to transform the raw videos into a set of visual tokens. To better fuse these two modalities in the decoder, we design a new Multi-head Cross-Modal Attention. The whole GTR is optimized via a Many-to-One matching loss. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive studies to investigate different model design choices. Extensive results on three benchmarks have validated the superiority of GTR. All three typical GTR variants achieve record-breaking performance on all datasets and metrics, with several times faster inference speed.
We address the problem of text-guided video temporal grounding, which aims to identify the time interval of certain event based on a natural language description. Different from most existing methods that only consider RGB images as visual features, we propose a multi-modal framework to extract complementary information from videos. Specifically, we adopt RGB images for appearance, optical flow for motion, and depth maps for image structure. While RGB images provide abundant visual cues of certain event, the performance may be affected by background clutters. Therefore, we use optical flow to focus on large motion and depth maps to infer the scene configuration when the action is related to objects recognizable with their shapes. To integrate the three modalities more effectively and enable inter-modal learning, we design a dynamic fusion scheme with transformers to model the interactions between modalities. Furthermore, we apply intra-modal self-supervised learning to enhance feature representations across videos for each modality, which also facilitates multi-modal learning. We conduct extensive experiments on the Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions datasets, and show that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches.
Video editing tools are widely used nowadays for digital design. Although the demand for these tools is high, the prior knowledge required makes it difficult for novices to get started. Systems that could follow natural language instructions to perform automatic editing would significantly improve accessibility. This paper introduces the language-based video editing (LBVE) task, which allows the model to edit, guided by text instruction, a source video into a target video. LBVE contains two features: 1) the scenario of the source video is preserved instead of generating a completely different video; 2) the semantic is presented differently in the target video, and all changes are controlled by the given instruction. We propose a Multi-Modal Multi-Level Transformer (M$^3$L-Transformer) to carry out LBVE. The M$^3$L-Transformer dynamically learns the correspondence between video perception and language semantic at different levels, which benefits both the video understanding and video frame synthesis. We build three new datasets for evaluation, including two diagnostic and one from natural videos with human-labeled text. Extensive experimental results show that M$^3$L-Transformer is effective for video editing and that LBVE can lead to a new field toward vision-and-language research.
Traditional video summarization methods generate fixed video representations regardless of user interest. Therefore such methods limit users expectations in content search and exploration scenarios. Multi-modal video summarization is one of the methods utilized to address this problem. When multi-modal video summarization is used to help video exploration, a text-based query is considered as one of the main drivers of video summary generation, as it is user-defined. Thus, encoding the text-based query and the video effectively are both important for the task of multi-modal video summarization. In this work, a new method is proposed that uses a specialized attention network and contextualized word representations to tackle this task. The proposed model consists of a contextualized video summary controller, multi-modal attention mechanisms, an interactive attention network, and a video summary generator. Based on the evaluation of the existing multi-modal video summarization benchmark, experimental results show that the proposed model is effective with the increase of +5.88% in accuracy and +4.06% increase of F1-score, compared with the state-of-the-art method.
Identifying a short segment in a long video that semantically matches a text query is a challenging task that has important application potentials in language-based video search, browsing, and navigation. Typical retrieval systems respond to a query with either a whole video or a pre-defined video segment, but it is challenging to localize undefined segments in untrimmed and unsegmented videos where exhaustively searching over all possible segments is intractable. The outstanding challenge is that the representation of a video must account for different levels of granularity in the temporal domain. To tackle this problem, we propose the HierArchical Multi-Modal EncodeR (HAMMER) that encodes a video at both the coarse-grained clip level and the fine-grained frame level to extract information at different scales based on multiple subtasks, namely, video retrieval, segment temporal localization, and masked language modeling. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our model on moment localization in video corpus on ActivityNet Captions and TVR datasets. Our approach outperforms the previous methods as well as strong baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art for this task.
Given an input video, its associated audio, and a brief caption, the audio-visual scene aware dialog (AVSD) task requires an agent to indulge in a question-answer dialog with a human about the audio-visual content. This task thus poses a challenging multi-modal representation learning and reasoning scenario, advancements into which could influence several human-machine interaction applications. To solve this task, we introduce a semantics-controlled multi-modal shuffled Transformer reasoning framework, consisting of a sequence of Transformer modules, each taking a modality as input and producing representations conditioned on the input question. Our proposed Transformer variant uses a shuffling scheme on their multi-head outputs, demonstrating better regularization. To encode fine-grained visual information, we present a novel dynamic scene graph representation learning pipeline that consists of an intra-frame reasoning layer producing spatio-semantic graph representations for every frame, and an inter-frame aggregation module capturing temporal cues. Our entire pipeline is trained end-to-end. We present experiments on the benchmark AVSD dataset, both on answer generation and selection tasks. Our results demonstrate state-of-the-art performances on all evaluation metrics.