Abstractive Sentence Summarization with Guidance of Selective Multimodal Reference

Multimodal abstractive summarization with sentence output is to generate a textual summary given a multimodal triad -- sentence, image and audio, which has been proven to improve users satisfaction and convenient our life. Existing approaches mainly focus on the enhancement of multimodal fusion, while ignoring the unalignment among multiple inputs and the emphasis of different segments in feature, which has resulted in the superfluity of multimodal interaction. To alleviate these problems, we propose a Multimodal Hierarchical Selective Transformer (mhsf) model that considers reciprocal relationships among modalities (by low-level cross-modal interaction module) and respective characteristics within single fusion feature (by high-level selective routing module). In details, it firstly aligns the inputs from different sources and then adopts a divide and conquer strategy to highlight or de-emphasize multimodal fusion representation, which can be seen as a sparsely feed-forward model - different groups of parameters will be activated facing different segments in feature. We evaluate the generalism of proposed mhsf model with the pre-trained+fine-tuning and fresh training strategies. And Further experimental results on MSMO demonstrate that our model outperforms SOTA baselines in terms of ROUGE, relevance scores and human evaluation.