Foundation Models and Adaptive Feature Selection: A Synergistic Approach to Video Question Answering

This paper tackles the intricate challenge of video question-answering (VideoQA). Despite notable progress, current methods fall short of effectively integrating questions with video frames and semantic object-level abstractions to create question-aware video representations. We introduce Local-Global Question Aware Video Embedding (LGQAVE), which incorporates three major innovations to integrate multi-modal knowledge better and emphasize semantic visual concepts relevant to specific questions. LGQAVE moves beyond traditional ad-hoc frame sampling by utilizing a cross-attention mechanism that precisely identifies the most relevant frames concerning the questions. It captures the dynamics of objects within these frames using distinct graphs, grounding them in question semantics with the miniGPT model. These graphs are processed by a question-aware dynamic graph transformer (Q-DGT), which refines the outputs to develop nuanced global and local video representations. An additional cross-attention module integrates these local and global embeddings to generate the final video embeddings, which a language model uses to generate answers. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that LGQAVE significantly outperforms existing models in delivering accurate multi-choice and open-ended answers.

CDAD-Net: Bridging Domain Gaps in Generalized Category Discovery

In Generalized Category Discovery (GCD), we cluster unlabeled samples of known and novel classes, leveraging a training dataset of known classes. A salient challenge arises due to domain shifts between these datasets. To address this, we present a novel setting: Across Domain Generalized Category Discovery (AD-GCD) and bring forth CDAD-NET (Class Discoverer Across Domains) as a remedy. CDAD-NET is architected to synchronize potential known class samples across both the labeled (source) and unlabeled (target) datasets, while emphasizing the distinct categorization of the target data. To facilitate this, we propose an entropy-driven adversarial learning strategy that accounts for the distance distributions of target samples relative to source-domain class prototypes. Parallelly, the discriminative nature of the shared space is upheld through a fusion of three metric learning objectives. In the source domain, our focus is on refining the proximity between samples and their affiliated class prototypes, while in the target domain, we integrate a neighborhood-centric contrastive learning mechanism, enriched with an adept neighborsmining approach. To further accentuate the nuanced feature interrelation among semantically aligned images, we champion the concept of conditional image inpainting, underscoring the premise that semantically analogous images prove more efficacious to the task than their disjointed counterparts. Experimentally, CDAD-NET eclipses existing literature with a performance increment of 8-15% on three AD-GCD benchmarks we present.