TR2021-010

Dynamic Graph Representation Learning for Video Dialog via Multi-Modal Shuffled Transformers


    •  Geng, S., Gao, P., Chatterjee, M., Hori, C., Le Roux, J., Zhang, Y., Li, H., Cherian, A., "Dynamic Graph Representation Learning for Video Dialog via Multi-Modal Shuffled Transformers", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, February 2021, pp. 1415-1423.
      BibTeX TR2021-010 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Geng2021feb,
      • author = {Geng, Shijie and Gao, Peng and Chatterjee, Moitreya and Hori, Chiori and Le Roux, Jonathan and Zhang, Yongfeng and Li, Hongsheng and Cherian, Anoop},
      • title = {Dynamic Graph Representation Learning for Video Dialog via Multi-Modal Shuffled Transformers},
      • booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
      • year = 2021,
      • pages = {1415--1423},
      • month = feb,
      • publisher = {AAAI Press, Palo Alto, California USA},
      • isbn = {978-1-57735-866-4},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2021-010}
      • }
  • MERL Contacts:
  • Research Areas:

    Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning

Abstract:

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.

 

  • Related News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL work on scene-aware interaction featured in IEEE Spectrum
      Date: March 1, 2022
      MERL Contacts: Anoop Cherian; Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Tim K. Marks; Anthony Vetro
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL's research on scene-aware interaction was recently featured in an IEEE Spectrum article. The article, titled "At Last, A Self-Driving Car That Can Explain Itself" and authored by MERL Senior Principal Research Scientist Chiori Hori and MERL Director Anthony Vetro, gives an overview of MERL's efforts towards developing a system that can analyze multimodal sensing information for highly natural and intuitive interaction with humans through context-dependent generation of natural language. The technology recognizes contextual objects and events based on multimodal sensing information, such as images and video captured with cameras, audio information recorded with microphones, and localization information measured with LiDAR.

        Scene-Aware Interaction for car navigation, one target application that the article focuses on, will provide drivers with intuitive route guidance. Scene-Aware Interaction technology is expected to have wide applicability, including human-machine interfaces for in-vehicle infotainment, interaction with service robots in building and factory automation systems, systems that monitor the health and well-being of people, surveillance systems that interpret complex scenes for humans and encourage social distancing, support for touchless operation of equipment in public areas, and much more. MERL's Scene-Aware Interaction Technology had previously been featured in a Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Press Release.

        IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences. IEEE Spectrum has a circulation of over 400,000 engineers worldwide, making it one of the leading science and engineering magazines.
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