Looking Beyond a Clever Narrative: Visual Context and Attention are Primary Drivers of Affect in Video Advertisements

Emotion evoked by an advertisement plays a key role in influencing brand recall and eventual consumer choices. Automatic ad affect recognition has several useful applications. However, the use of content-based feature representations does not give insights into how affect is modulated by aspects such as the ad scene setting, salient object attributes and their interactions. Neither do such approaches inform us on how humans prioritize visual information for ad understanding. Our work addresses these lacunae by decomposing video content into detected objects, coarse scene structure, object statistics and actively attended objects identified via eye-gaze. We measure the importance of each of these information channels by systematically incorporating related information into ad affect prediction models. Contrary to the popular notion that ad affect hinges on the narrative and the clever use of linguistic and social cues, we find that actively attended objects and the coarse scene structure better encode affective information as compared to individual scene objects or conspicuous background elements.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of 20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Boulder, CO, US

Expected exponential loss for gaze-based video and volume ground truth annotation

Many recent machine learning approaches used in medical imaging are highly reliant on large amounts of image and ground truth data. In the context of object segmentation, pixel-wise annotations are extremely expensive to collect, especially in video and 3D volumes. To reduce this annotation burden, we propose a novel framework to allow annotators to simply observe the object to segment and record where they have looked at with a \$200 eye gaze tracker. Our method then estimates pixel-wise probabilities for the presence of the object throughout the sequence from which we train a classifier in semi-supervised setting using a novel Expected Exponential loss function. We show that our framework provides superior performances on a wide range of medical image settings compared to existing strategies and that our method can be combined with current crowd-sourcing paradigms as well.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figues, MICCAI 2017 - LABELS Worksho

Learn to Interpret Atari Agents

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DeepRL) agents surpass human-level performances in a multitude of tasks. However, the direct mapping from states to actions makes it hard to interpret the rationale behind the decision making of agents. In contrast to previous a-posteriori methods of visualizing DeepRL policies, we propose an end-to-end trainable framework based on Rainbow, a representative Deep Q-Network (DQN) agent. Our method automatically learns important regions in the input domain, which enables characterizations of the decision making and interpretations for non-intuitive behaviors. Hence we name it Region Sensitive Rainbow (RS-Rainbow). RS-Rainbow utilizes a simple yet effective mechanism to incorporate visualization ability into the learning model, not only improving model interpretability, but leading to improved performance. Extensive experiments on the challenging platform of Atari 2600 demonstrate the superiority of RS-Rainbow. In particular, our agent achieves state of the art at just 25% of the training frames. Demonstrations and code are available at https://github.com/yz93/Learn-to-Interpret-Atari-Agents