Multimodal Grounding for Language Processing

This survey discusses how recent developments in multimodal processing facilitate conceptual grounding of language. We categorize the information flow in multimodal processing with respect to cognitive models of human information processing and analyze different methods for combining multimodal representations. Based on this methodological inventory, we discuss the benefit of multimodal grounding for a variety of language processing tasks and the challenges that arise. We particularly focus on multimodal grounding of verbs which play a crucial role for the compositional power of language.Comment: The paper has been published in the Proceedings of the 27 Conference of Computational Linguistics. Please refer to this version for citations: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/papers/C/C18/C18-1197

Online Distillation-enhanced Multi-modal Transformer for Sequential Recommendation

Multi-modal recommendation systems, which integrate diverse types of information, have gained widespread attention in recent years. However, compared to traditional collaborative filtering-based multi-modal recommendation systems, research on multi-modal sequential recommendation is still in its nascent stages. Unlike traditional sequential recommendation models that solely rely on item identifier (ID) information and focus on network structure design, multi-modal recommendation models need to emphasize item representation learning and the fusion of heterogeneous data sources. This paper investigates the impact of item representation learning on downstream recommendation tasks and examines the disparities in information fusion at different stages. Empirical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the need to design a framework suitable for collaborative learning and fusion of diverse information. Based on this, we propose a new model-agnostic framework for multi-modal sequential recommendation tasks, called Online Distillation-enhanced Multi-modal Transformer (ODMT), to enhance feature interaction and mutual learning among multi-source input (ID, text, and image), while avoiding conflicts among different features during training, thereby improving recommendation accuracy. To be specific, we first introduce an ID-aware Multi-modal Transformer module in the item representation learning stage to facilitate information interaction among different features. Secondly, we employ an online distillation training strategy in the prediction optimization stage to make multi-source data learn from each other and improve prediction robustness. Experimental results on a video content recommendation dataset and three e-commerce recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two modules, which is approximately 10% improvement in performance compared to baseline models.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Leveraging Historical Medical Records as a Proxy via Multimodal Modeling and Visualization to Enrich Medical Diagnostic Learning

Simulation-based Medical Education (SBME) has been developed as a cost-effective means of enhancing the diagnostic skills of novice physicians and interns, thereby mitigating the need for resource-intensive mentor-apprentice training. However, feedback provided in most SBME is often directed towards improving the operational proficiency of learners, rather than providing summative medical diagnoses that result from experience and time. Additionally, the multimodal nature of medical data during diagnosis poses significant challenges for interns and novice physicians, including the tendency to overlook or over-rely on data from certain modalities, and difficulties in comprehending potential associations between modalities. To address these challenges, we present DiagnosisAssistant, a visual analytics system that leverages historical medical records as a proxy for multimodal modeling and visualization to enhance the learning experience of interns and novice physicians. The system employs elaborately designed visualizations to explore different modality data, offer diagnostic interpretive hints based on the constructed model, and enable comparative analyses of specific patients. Our approach is validated through two case studies and expert interviews, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing medical training.Comment: Accepted by IEEE VIS 202

A Multi-modal Approach to Fine-grained Opinion Mining on Video Reviews

Despite the recent advances in opinion mining for written reviews, few works have tackled the problem on other sources of reviews. In light of this issue, we propose a multi-modal approach for mining fine-grained opinions from video reviews that is able to determine the aspects of the item under review that are being discussed and the sentiment orientation towards them. Our approach works at the sentence level without the need for time annotations and uses features derived from the audio, video and language transcriptions of its contents. We evaluate our approach on two datasets and show that leveraging the video and audio modalities consistently provides increased performance over text-only baselines, providing evidence these extra modalities are key in better understanding video reviews.Comment: Second Grand Challenge and Workshop on Multimodal Language ACL 202

NMTPY: A Flexible Toolkit for Advanced Neural Machine Translation Systems

In this paper, we present nmtpy, a flexible Python toolkit based on Theano for training Neural Machine Translation and other neural sequence-to-sequence architectures. nmtpy decouples the specification of a network from the training and inference utilities to simplify the addition of a new architecture and reduce the amount of boilerplate code to be written. nmtpy has been used for LIUM's top-ranked submissions to WMT Multimodal Machine Translation and News Translation tasks in 2016 and 2017.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Composed Image Retrieval using Contrastive Learning and Task-oriented CLIP-based Features

Given a query composed of a reference image and a relative caption, the Composed Image Retrieval goal is to retrieve images visually similar to the reference one that integrates the modifications expressed by the caption. Given that recent research has demonstrated the efficacy of large-scale vision and language pre-trained (VLP) models in various tasks, we rely on features from the OpenAI CLIP model to tackle the considered task. We initially perform a task-oriented fine-tuning of both CLIP encoders using the element-wise sum of visual and textual features. Then, in the second stage, we train a Combiner network that learns to combine the image-text features integrating the bimodal information and providing combined features used to perform the retrieval. We use contrastive learning in both stages of training. Starting from the bare CLIP features as a baseline, experimental results show that the task-oriented fine-tuning and the carefully crafted Combiner network are highly effective and outperform more complex state-of-the-art approaches on FashionIQ and CIRR, two popular and challenging datasets for composed image retrieval. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ABaldrati/CLIP4CirComment: Accepted in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications (TOMM