arXiv subjects

Yawen Zeng

Publications and source records attributed to Yawen Zeng.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Distill the Image to Nowhere: Inversion Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Machine Translation

Past works on multimodal machine translation (MMT) elevate bilingual setup by incorporating additional aligned vision information. However, an image-must requirement of the multimodal dataset largely hinders MMT's development -- namely that it demands an aligned form of [image, source text, target text]. This limitation is generally troublesome during the inference phase especially when the aligned image is not provided as in the normal NMT setup. Thus, in this work, we introduce IKD-MMT, a novel MMT framework to support the image-free inference phase via an inversion knowledge distillation scheme. In particular, a multimodal feature generator is executed with a knowledge distillation module, which directly generates the multimodal feature from (only) source texts as the input. While there have been a few prior works entertaining the possibility to support image-free inference for machine translation, their performances have yet to rival the image-must translation. In our experiments, we identify our method as the first image-free approach to comprehensively rival or even surpass (almost) all image-must frameworks, and achieved the state-of-the-art result on the often-used Multi30k benchmark. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/pengr/IKD-mmt/tree/master..

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Better Sign Language Translation with Monolingual Data

Sign language translation (SLT) systems, which are often decomposed into video-to-gloss (V2G) recognition and gloss-to-text (G2T) translation through the pivot gloss, heavily relies on the availability of large-scale parallel G2T pairs. However, the manual annotation of pivot gloss, which is a sequence of transcribed written-language words in the order in which they are signed, further exacerbates the scarcity of data for SLT. To address this issue, this paper proposes a simple and efficient rule transformation method to transcribe the large-scale target monolingual data into its pseudo glosses automatically for enhancing the SLT translation. Empirical results show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the performance of SLT, especially achieving state-of-the-art results on two SLT benchmark datasets PHEONIX-WEATHER 2014T and ASLG-PC12. Our code has been released at: https://github.com/pengr/Mono\_SLT.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

BiC-Net: Learning Efficient Spatio-Temporal Relation for Text-Video Retrieval

The task of text-video retrieval aims to understand the correspondence between language and vision, has gained increasing attention in recent years. Previous studies either adopt off-the-shelf 2D/3D-CNN and then use average/max pooling to directly capture spatial features with aggregated temporal information as global video embeddings, or introduce graph-based models and expert knowledge to learn local spatial-temporal relations. However, the existing methods have two limitations: 1) The global video representations learn video temporal information in a simple average/max pooling manner and do not fully explore the temporal information between every two frames. 2) The graph-based local video representations are handcrafted, it depends heavily on expert knowledge and empirical feedback, which may not be able to effectively mine the higher-level fine-grained visual relations. These limitations result in their inability to distinguish videos with the same visual components but with different relations. To solve this problem, we propose a novel cross-modal retrieval framework, Bi-Branch Complementary Network (BiC-Net), which modifies transformer architecture to effectively bridge text-video modalities in a complementary manner via combining local spatial-temporal relation and global temporal information. Specifically, local video representations are encoded using multiple transformer blocks and additional residual blocks to learn spatio-temporal relation features, calling the module a Spatio-Temporal Residual transformer (SRT). Meanwhile, Global video representations are encoded using a multi-layer transformer block to learn global temporal features. Finally, we align the spatio-temporal relation and global temporal features with the text feature on two embedding spaces for cross-modal text-video retrieval.

cs.CV↗