arXiv subjects

Necati Cihan Camgoz

Publications and source records attributed to Necati Cihan Camgoz.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

D'ya like DAGs? A Survey on Structure Learning and Causal Discovery

Causal reasoning is a crucial part of science and human intelligence. In order to discover causal relationships from data, we need structure discovery methods. We provide a review of background theory and a survey of methods for structure discovery. We primarily focus on modern, continuous optimization methods, and provide reference to further resources such as benchmark datasets and software packages. Finally, we discuss the assumptive leap required to take us from structure to causality.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Everybody Sign Now: Translating Spoken Language to Photo Realistic Sign Language Video

To be truly understandable and accepted by Deaf communities, an automatic Sign Language Production (SLP) system must generate a photo-realistic signer. Prior approaches based on graphical avatars have proven unpopular, whereas recent neural SLP works that produce skeleton pose sequences have been shown to be not understandable to Deaf viewers. In this paper, we propose SignGAN, the first SLP model to produce photo-realistic continuous sign language videos directly from spoken language. We employ a transformer architecture with a Mixture Density Network (MDN) formulation to handle the translation from spoken language to skeletal pose. A pose-conditioned human synthesis model is then introduced to generate a photo-realistic sign language video from the skeletal pose sequence. This allows the photo-realistic production of sign videos directly translated from written text. We further propose a novel keypoint-based loss function, which significantly improves the quality of synthesized hand images, operating in the keypoint space to avoid issues caused by motion blur. In addition, we introduce a method for controllable video generation, enabling training on large, diverse sign language datasets and providing the ability to control the signer appearance at inference. Using a dataset of eight different sign language interpreters extracted from broadcast footage, we show that SignGAN significantly outperforms all baseline methods for quantitative metrics and human perceptual studies.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Multi-channel Transformers for Multi-articulatory Sign Language Translation

Sign languages use multiple asynchronous information channels (articulators), not just the hands but also the face and body, which computational approaches often ignore. In this paper we tackle the multi-articulatory sign language translation task and propose a novel multi-channel transformer architecture. The proposed architecture allows both the inter and intra contextual relationships between different sign articulators to be modelled within the transformer network itself, while also maintaining channel specific information. We evaluate our approach on the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T dataset and report competitive translation performance. Importantly, we overcome the reliance on gloss annotations which underpin other state-of-the-art approaches, thereby removing future need for expensive curated datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Adversarial Training for Multi-Channel Sign Language Production

Sign Languages are rich multi-channel languages, requiring articulation of both manual (hands) and non-manual (face and body) features in a precise, intricate manner. Sign Language Production (SLP), the automatic translation from spoken to sign languages, must embody this full sign morphology to be truly understandable by the Deaf community. Previous work has mainly focused on manual feature production, with an under-articulated output caused by regression to the mean. In this paper, we propose an Adversarial Multi-Channel approach to SLP. We frame sign production as a minimax game between a transformer-based Generator and a conditional Discriminator. Our adversarial discriminator evaluates the realism of sign production conditioned on the source text, pushing the generator towards a realistic and articulate output. Additionally, we fully encapsulate sign articulators with the inclusion of non-manual features, producing facial features and mouthing patterns. We evaluate on the challenging RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T (PHOENIX14T) dataset, and report state-of-the art SLP back-translation performance for manual production. We set new benchmarks for the production of multi-channel sign to underpin future research into realistic SLP.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Progressive Transformers for End-to-End Sign Language Production

The goal of automatic Sign Language Production (SLP) is to translate spoken language to a continuous stream of sign language video at a level comparable to a human translator. If this was achievable, then it would revolutionise Deaf hearing communications. Previous work on predominantly isolated SLP has shown the need for architectures that are better suited to the continuous domain of full sign sequences. In this paper, we propose Progressive Transformers, a novel architecture that can translate from discrete spoken language sentences to continuous 3D skeleton pose outputs representing sign language. We present two model configurations, an end-to-end network that produces sign direct from text and a stacked network that utilises a gloss intermediary. Our transformer network architecture introduces a counter that enables continuous sequence generation at training and inference. We also provide several data augmentation processes to overcome the problem of drift and improve the performance of SLP models. We propose a back translation evaluation mechanism for SLP, presenting benchmark quantitative results on the challenging RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T(PHOENIX14T) dataset and setting baselines for future research.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Sign Language Transformers: Joint End-to-end Sign Language Recognition and Translation

Prior work on Sign Language Translation has shown that having a mid-level sign gloss representation (effectively recognizing the individual signs) improves the translation performance drastically. In fact, the current state-of-the-art in translation requires gloss level tokenization in order to work. We introduce a novel transformer based architecture that jointly learns Continuous Sign Language Recognition and Translation while being trainable in an end-to-end manner. This is achieved by using a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss to bind the recognition and translation problems into a single unified architecture. This joint approach does not require any ground-truth timing information, simultaneously solving two co-dependant sequence-to-sequence learning problems and leads to significant performance gains. We evaluate the recognition and translation performances of our approaches on the challenging RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T (PHOENIX14T) dataset. We report state-of-the-art sign language recognition and translation results achieved by our Sign Language Transformers. Our translation networks outperform both sign video to spoken language and gloss to spoken language translation models, in some cases more than doubling the performance (9.58 vs. 21.80 BLEU-4 Score). We also share new baseline translation results using transformer networks for several other text-to-text sign language translation tasks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

NestedVAE: Isolating Common Factors via Weak Supervision

Fair and unbiased machine learning is an important and active field of research, as decision processes are increasingly driven by models that learn from data. Unfortunately, any biases present in the data may be learned by the model, thereby inappropriately transferring that bias into the decision making process. We identify the connection between the task of bias reduction and that of isolating factors common between domains whilst encouraging domain specific invariance. To isolate the common factors we combine the theory of deep latent variable models with information bottleneck theory for scenarios whereby data may be naturally paired across domains and no additional supervision is required. The result is the Nested Variational AutoEncoder (NestedVAE). Two outer VAEs with shared weights attempt to reconstruct the input and infer a latent space, whilst a nested VAE attempts to reconstruct the latent representation of one image, from the latent representation of its paired image. In so doing, the nested VAE isolates the common latent factors/causes and becomes invariant to unwanted factors that are not shared between paired images. We also propose a new metric to provide a balanced method of evaluating consistency and classifier performance across domains which we refer to as the Adjusted Parity metric. An evaluation of NestedVAE on both domain and attribute invariance, change detection, and learning common factors for the prediction of biological sex demonstrates that NestedVAE significantly outperforms alternative methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Gated Variational AutoEncoders: Incorporating Weak Supervision to Encourage Disentanglement

Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) provide a means to generate representational latent embeddings. Previous research has highlighted the benefits of achieving representations that are disentangled, particularly for downstream tasks. However, there is some debate about how to encourage disentanglement with VAEs and evidence indicates that existing implementations of VAEs do not achieve disentanglement consistently. The evaluation of how well a VAE's latent space has been disentangled is often evaluated against our subjective expectations of which attributes should be disentangled for a given problem. Therefore, by definition, we already have domain knowledge of what should be achieved and yet we use unsupervised approaches to achieve it. We propose a weakly-supervised approach that incorporates any available domain knowledge into the training process to form a Gated-VAE. The process involves partitioning the representational embedding and gating backpropagation. All partitions are utilised on the forward pass but gradients are backpropagated through different partitions according to selected image/target pairings. The approach can be used to modify existing VAE models such as beta-VAE, InfoVAE and DIP-VAE-II. Experiments demonstrate that using gated backpropagation, latent factors are represented in their intended partition. The approach is applied to images of faces for the purpose of disentangling head-pose from facial expression. Quantitative metrics show that using Gated-VAE improves average disentanglement, completeness and informativeness, as compared with un-gated implementations. Qualitative assessment of latent traversals demonstrate its disentanglement of head-pose from expression, even when only weak/noisy supervision is available.

cs.CV↗