Linguistics-Vision Monotonic Consistent Network for Sign Language Production

Sign Language Production (SLP) aims to generate sign videos corresponding to spoken language sentences, where the conversion of sign Glosses to Poses (G2P) is the key step. Due to the cross-modal semantic gap and the lack of word-action correspondence labels for strong supervision alignment, the SLP suffers huge challenges in linguistics-vision consistency. In this work, we propose a Transformer-based Linguistics-Vision Monotonic Consistent Network (LVMCN) for SLP, which constrains fine-grained cross-modal monotonic alignment and coarse-grained multimodal semantic consistency in language-visual cues through Cross-modal Semantic Aligner (CSA) and Multimodal Semantic Comparator (MSC). In the CSA, we constrain the implicit alignment between corresponding gloss and pose sequences by computing the cosine similarity association matrix between cross-modal feature sequences (i.e., the order consistency of fine-grained sign glosses and actions). As for MSC, we construct multimodal triplets based on paired and unpaired samples in batch data. By pulling closer the corresponding text-visual pairs and pushing apart the non-corresponding text-visual pairs, we constrain the semantic co-occurrence degree between corresponding gloss and pose sequences (i.e., the semantic consistency of coarse-grained textual sentences and sign videos). Extensive experiments on the popular PHOENIX14T benchmark show that the LVMCN outperforms the state-of-the-art.

Temporal-Frequency State Space Duality: An Efficient Paradigm for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) plays a critical role in enhancing user experience within human-computer interaction. However, existing methods are overwhelmed by temporal domain analysis, overlooking the valuable envelope structures of the frequency domain that are equally important for robust emotion recognition. To overcome this limitation, we propose TF-Mamba, a novel multi-domain framework that captures emotional expressions in both temporal and frequency dimensions.Concretely, we propose a temporal-frequency mamba block to extract temporal- and frequency-aware emotional features, achieving an optimal balance between computational efficiency and model expressiveness. Besides, we design a Complex Metric-Distance Triplet (CMDT) loss to enable the model to capture representative emotional clues for SER. Extensive experiments on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets show that TF-Mamba surpasses existing methods in terms of model size and latency, providing a more practical solution for future SER applications.

Sign-IDD: Iconicity Disentangled Diffusion for Sign Language Production

Sign Language Production (SLP) aims to generate semantically consistent sign videos from textual statements, where the conversion from textual glosses to sign poses (G2P) is a crucial step. Existing G2P methods typically treat sign poses as discrete three-dimensional coordinates and directly fit them, which overlooks the relative positional relationships among joints. To this end, we provide a new perspective, constraining joint associations and gesture details by modeling the limb bones to improve the accuracy and naturalness of the generated poses. In this work, we propose a pioneering iconicity disentangled diffusion framework, termed Sign-IDD, specifically designed for SLP. Sign-IDD incorporates a novel Iconicity Disentanglement (ID) module to bridge the gap between relative positions among joints. The ID module disentangles the conventional 3D joint representation into a 4D bone representation, comprising the 3D spatial direction vector and 1D spatial distance vector between adjacent joints. Additionally, an Attribute Controllable Diffusion (ACD) module is introduced to further constrain joint associations, in which the attribute separation layer aims to separate the bone direction and length attributes, and the attribute control layer is designed to guide the pose generation by leveraging the above attributes. The ACD module utilizes the gloss embeddings as semantic conditions and finally generates sign poses from noise embeddings. Extensive experiments on PHOENIX14T and USTC-CSL datasets validate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at: https://github.com/NaVi-start/Sign-IDD.

Dense Audio-Visual Event Localization under Cross-Modal Consistency and Multi-Temporal Granularity Collaboration

In the field of audio-visual learning, most research tasks focus exclusively on short videos. This paper focuses on the more practical Dense Audio-Visual Event Localization (DAVEL) task, advancing audio-visual scene understanding for longer, {untrimmed} videos. This task seeks to identify and temporally pinpoint all events simultaneously occurring in both audio and visual streams. Typically, each video encompasses dense events of multiple classes, which may overlap on the timeline, each exhibiting varied durations. Given these challenges, effectively exploiting the audio-visual relations and the temporal features encoded at various granularities becomes crucial. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel \ul{CC}Net, comprising two core modules: the Cross-Modal Consistency \ul{C}ollaboration (CMCC) and the Multi-Temporal Granularity \ul{C}ollaboration (MTGC). Specifically, the CMCC module contains two branches: a cross-modal interaction branch and a temporal consistency-gated branch. The former branch facilitates the aggregation of consistent event semantics across modalities through the encoding of audio-visual relations, while the latter branch guides one modality's focus to pivotal event-relevant temporal areas as discerned in the other modality. The MTGC module includes a coarse-to-fine collaboration block and a fine-to-coarse collaboration block, providing bidirectional support among coarse- and fine-grained temporal features. Extensive experiments on the UnAV-100 dataset validate our module design, resulting in a new state-of-the-art performance in dense audio-visual event localization. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/zzhhfut/CCNet-AAAI2025}.

Patch-level Sounding Object Tracking for Audio-Visual Question Answering

Answering questions related to audio-visual scenes, i.e., the AVQA task, is becoming increasingly popular. A critical challenge is accurately identifying and tracking sounding objects related to the question along the timeline. In this paper, we present a new Patch-level Sounding Object Tracking (PSOT) method. It begins with a Motion-driven Key Patch Tracking (M-KPT) module, which relies on visual motion information to identify salient visual patches with significant movements that are more likely to relate to sounding objects and questions. We measure the patch-wise motion intensity map between neighboring video frames and utilize it to construct and guide a motion-driven graph network. Meanwhile, we design a Sound-driven KPT (S-KPT) module to explicitly track sounding patches. This module also involves a graph network, with the adjacency matrix regularized by the audio-visual correspondence map. The M-KPT and S-KPT modules are performed in parallel for each temporal segment, allowing balanced tracking of salient and sounding objects. Based on the tracked patches, we further propose a Question-driven KPT (Q-KPT) module to retain patches highly relevant to the question, ensuring the model focuses on the most informative clues. The audio-visual-question features are updated during the processing of these modules, which are then aggregated for final answer prediction. Extensive experiments on standard datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving competitive performance even compared to recent large-scale pretraining-based approaches.

Towards Pixel-Level Prediction for Gaze Following: Benchmark and Approach

Following the gaze of other people and analyzing the target they are looking at can help us understand what they are thinking, and doing, and predict the actions that may follow. Existing methods for gaze following struggle to perform well in natural scenes with diverse objects, and focus on gaze points rather than objects, making it difficult to deliver clear semantics and accurate scope of the targets. To address this shortcoming, we propose a novel gaze target prediction solution named GazeSeg, that can fully utilize the spatial visual field of the person as guiding information and lead to a progressively coarse-to-fine gaze target segmentation and recognition process. Specifically, a prompt-based visual foundation model serves as the encoder, working in conjunction with three distinct decoding modules (e.g. FoV perception, heatmap generation, and segmentation) to form the framework for gaze target prediction. Then, with the head bounding box performed as an initial prompt, GazeSeg obtains the FoV map, heatmap, and segmentation map progressively, leading to a unified framework for multiple tasks (e.g. direction estimation, gaze target segmentation, and recognition). In particular, to facilitate this research, we construct and release a new dataset, comprising 72k images with pixel-level annotations and 270 categories of gaze targets, built upon the GazeFollow dataset. The quantitative evaluation shows that our approach achieves the Dice of 0.325 in gaze target segmentation and 71.7% top-5 recognition. Meanwhile, our approach also outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving 0.953 in AUC on the gaze-following task. The dataset and code will be released.

Discrete to Continuous: Generating Smooth Transition Poses from Sign Language Observation

Generating continuous sign language videos from discrete segments is challenging due to the need for smooth transitions that preserve natural flow and meaning. Traditional approaches that simply concatenate isolated signs often result in abrupt transitions, disrupting video coherence. To address this, we propose a novel framework, Sign-D2C, that employs a conditional diffusion model to synthesize contextually smooth transition frames, enabling the seamless construction of continuous sign language sequences. Our approach transforms the unsupervised problem of transition frame generation into a supervised training task by simulating the absence of transition frames through random masking of segments in long-duration sign videos. The model learns to predict these masked frames by denoising Gaussian noise, conditioned on the surrounding sign observations, allowing it to handle complex, unstructured transitions. During inference, we apply a linearly interpolating padding strategy that initializes missing frames through interpolation between boundary frames, providing a stable foundation for iterative refinement by the diffusion model. Extensive experiments on the PHOENIX14T, USTC-CSL100, and USTC-SLR500 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in producing continuous, natural sign language videos.

Modality Alignment Meets Federated Broadcasting

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a powerful approach to safeguard data privacy by training models across distributed edge devices without centralizing local data. Despite advancements in homogeneous data scenarios, maintaining performance between the global and local clients in FL over heterogeneous data remains challenging due to data distribution variations that degrade model convergence and increase computational costs. This paper introduces a novel FL framework leveraging modality alignment, where a text encoder resides on the server, and image encoders operate on local devices. Inspired by multi-modal learning paradigms like CLIP, this design aligns cross-client learning by treating server-client communications akin to multi-modal broadcasting. We initialize with a pre-trained model to mitigate overfitting, updating select parameters through low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to meet computational demand and performance efficiency. Local models train independently and communicate updates to the server, which aggregates parameters via a query-based method, facilitating cross-client knowledge sharing and performance improvement under extreme heterogeneity. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy in maintaining generalization and robustness, even in highly heterogeneous settings.

Dataset Distillers Are Good Label Denoisers In the Wild

Learning from noisy data has become essential for adapting deep learning models to real-world applications. Traditional methods often involve first evaluating the noise and then applying strategies such as discarding noisy samples, re-weighting, or re-labeling. However, these methods can fall into a vicious cycle when the initial noise evaluation is inaccurate, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a novel approach that leverages dataset distillation for noise removal. This method avoids the feedback loop common in existing techniques and enhances training efficiency, while also providing strong privacy protection through offline processing. We rigorously evaluate three representative dataset distillation methods (DATM, DANCE, and RCIG) under various noise conditions, including symmetric noise, asymmetric noise, and real-world natural noise. Our empirical findings reveal that dataset distillation effectively serves as a denoising tool in random noise scenarios but may struggle with structured asymmetric noise patterns, which can be absorbed into the distilled samples. Additionally, clean but challenging samples, such as those from tail classes in imbalanced datasets, may undergo lossy compression during distillation. Despite these challenges, our results highlight that dataset distillation holds significant promise for robust model training, especially in high-privacy environments where noise is prevalent.

Shaping a Stabilized Video by Mitigating Unintended Changes for Concept-Augmented Video Editing

Text-driven video editing utilizing generative diffusion models has garnered significant attention due to their potential applications. However, existing approaches are constrained by the limited word embeddings provided in pre-training, which hinders nuanced editing targeting open concepts with specific attributes. Directly altering the keywords in target prompts often results in unintended disruptions to the attention mechanisms. To achieve more flexible editing easily, this work proposes an improved concept-augmented video editing approach that generates diverse and stable target videos flexibly by devising abstract conceptual pairs. Specifically, the framework involves concept-augmented textual inversion and a dual prior supervision mechanism. The former enables plug-and-play guidance of stable diffusion for video editing, effectively capturing target attributes for more stylized results. The dual prior supervision mechanism significantly enhances video stability and fidelity. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that our approach generates more stable and lifelike videos, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.