Pose-Guided Multi-Granularity Attention Network for Text-Based Person Search

Text-based person search aims to retrieve the corresponding person images in an image database by virtue of a describing sentence about the person, which poses great potential for various applications such as video surveillance. Extracting visual contents corresponding to the human description is the key to this cross-modal matching problem. Moreover, correlated images and descriptions involve different granularities of semantic relevance, which is usually ignored in previous methods. To exploit the multilevel corresponding visual contents, we propose a pose-guided multi-granularity attention network (PMA). Firstly, we propose a coarse alignment network (CA) to select the related image regions to the global description by a similarity-based attention. To further capture the phrase-related visual body part, a fine-grained alignment network (FA) is proposed, which employs pose information to learn latent semantic alignment between visual body part and textual noun phrase. To verify the effectiveness of our model, we perform extensive experiments on the CUHK Person Description Dataset (CUHK-PEDES) which is currently the only available dataset for text-based person search. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 15 \% in terms of the top-1 metric.Comment: published in AAAI2020(oral

Attentive Convolution: Equipping CNNs with RNN-style Attention Mechanisms

In NLP, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have benefited less than recurrent neural networks (RNNs) from attention mechanisms. We hypothesize that this is because the attention in CNNs has been mainly implemented as attentive pooling (i.e., it is applied to pooling) rather than as attentive convolution (i.e., it is integrated into convolution). Convolution is the differentiator of CNNs in that it can powerfully model the higher-level representation of a word by taking into account its local fixed-size context in the input text t^x. In this work, we propose an attentive convolution network, ATTCONV. It extends the context scope of the convolution operation, deriving higher-level features for a word not only from local context, but also information extracted from nonlocal context by the attention mechanism commonly used in RNNs. This nonlocal context can come (i) from parts of the input text t^x that are distant or (ii) from extra (i.e., external) contexts t^y. Experiments on sentence modeling with zero-context (sentiment analysis), single-context (textual entailment) and multiple-context (claim verification) demonstrate the effectiveness of ATTCONV in sentence representation learning with the incorporation of context. In particular, attentive convolution outperforms attentive pooling and is a strong competitor to popular attentive RNNs.Comment: Camera-ready for TACL. 16 page