Meta-Learn Unimodal Signals with Weak Supervision for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to effectively integrate information from various sources to infer sentiment, where in many cases there are no annotations for unimodal labels. Therefore, most works rely on multimodal labels for training. However, there exists the noisy label problem for the learning of unimodal signals as multimodal annotations are not always the ideal substitutes for the unimodal ones, failing to achieve finer optimization for individual modalities. In this paper, we explore the learning of unimodal labels under the weak supervision from the annotated multimodal labels. Specifically, we propose a novel meta uni-label generation (MUG) framework to address the above problem, which leverages the available multimodal labels to learn the corresponding unimodal labels by the meta uni-label correction network (MUCN). We first design a contrastive-based projection module to bridge the gap between unimodal and multimodal representations, so as to use multimodal annotations to guide the learning of MUCN. Afterwards, we propose unimodal and multimodal denoising tasks to train MUCN with explicit supervision via a bi-level optimization strategy. We then jointly train unimodal and multimodal learning tasks to extract discriminative unimodal features for multimodal inference. Experimental results suggest that MUG outperforms competitive baselines and can learn accurate unimodal labels.

End-to-end Semantic-centric Video-based Multimodal Affective Computing

In the pathway toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), understanding human's affection is essential to enhance machine's cognition abilities. For achieving more sensual human-AI interaction, Multimodal Affective Computing (MAC) in human-spoken videos has attracted increasing attention. However, previous methods are mainly devoted to designing multimodal fusion algorithms, suffering from two issues: semantic imbalance caused by diverse pre-processing operations and semantic mismatch raised by inconsistent affection content contained in different modalities comparing with the multimodal ground truth. Besides, the usage of manual features extractors make they fail in building end-to-end pipeline for multiple MAC downstream tasks. To address above challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end framework named SemanticMAC to compute multimodal semantic-centric affection for human-spoken videos. We firstly employ pre-trained Transformer model in multimodal data pre-processing and design Affective Perceiver module to capture unimodal affective information. Moreover, we present a semantic-centric approach to unify multimodal representation learning in three ways, including gated feature interaction, multi-task pseudo label generation, and intra-/inter-sample contrastive learning. Finally, SemanticMAC effectively learn specific- and shared-semantic representations in the guidance of semantic-centric labels. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach surpass the state-of-the-art methods on 7 public datasets in four MAC downstream tasks.

Curriculum Learning Meets Weakly Supervised Modality Correlation Learning

In the field of multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA), a few studies have leveraged the inherent modality correlation information stored in samples for self-supervised learning. However, they feed the training pairs in a random order without consideration of difficulty. Without human annotation, the generated training pairs of self-supervised learning often contain noise. If noisy or hard pairs are used for training at the easy stage, the model might be stuck in bad local optimum. In this paper, we inject curriculum learning into weakly supervised modality correlation learning. The weakly supervised correlation learning leverages the label information to generate scores for negative pairs to learn a more discriminative embedding space, where negative pairs are defined as two unimodal embeddings from different samples. To assist the correlation learning, we feed the training pairs to the model according to difficulty by the proposed curriculum learning, which consists of elaborately designed scoring and feeding functions. The scoring function computes the difficulty of pairs using pre-trained and current correlation predictors, where the pairs with large losses are defined as hard pairs. Notably, the hardest pairs are discarded in our algorithm, which are assumed as noisy pairs. Moreover, the feeding function takes the difference of correlation losses as feedback to determine the feeding actions (`stay', `step back', or `step forward'). The proposed method reaches state-of-the-art performance on MSA.

Relation-dependent Contrastive Learning with Cluster Sampling for Inductive Relation Prediction

Relation prediction is a task designed for knowledge graph completion which aims to predict missing relationships between entities. Recent subgraph-based models for inductive relation prediction have received increasing attention, which can predict relation for unseen entities based on the extracted subgraph surrounding the candidate triplet. However, they are not completely inductive because of their disability of predicting unseen relations. Moreover, they fail to pay sufficient attention to the role of relation as they only depend on the model to learn parameterized relation embedding, which leads to inaccurate prediction on long-tail relations. In this paper, we introduce Relation-dependent Contrastive Learning (ReCoLe) for inductive relation prediction, which adapts contrastive learning with a novel sampling method based on clustering algorithm to enhance the role of relation and improve the generalization ability to unseen relations. Instead of directly learning embedding for relations, ReCoLe allocates a pre-trained GNN-based encoder to each relation to strengthen the influence of relation. The GNN-based encoder is optimized by contrastive learning, which ensures satisfactory performance on long-tail relations. In addition, the cluster sampling method equips ReCoLe with the ability to handle both unseen relations and entities. Experimental results suggest that ReCoLe outperforms state-of-the-art methods on commonly used inductive datasets.

Multimodal Information Bottleneck: Learning Minimal Sufficient Unimodal and Multimodal Representations

Learning effective joint embedding for cross-modal data has always been a focus in the field of multimodal machine learning. We argue that during multimodal fusion, the generated multimodal embedding may be redundant, and the discriminative unimodal information may be ignored, which often interferes with accurate prediction and leads to a higher risk of overfitting. Moreover, unimodal representations also contain noisy information that negatively influences the learning of cross-modal dynamics. To this end, we introduce the multimodal information bottleneck (MIB), aiming to learn a powerful and sufficient multimodal representation that is free of redundancy and to filter out noisy information in unimodal representations. Specifically, inheriting from the general information bottleneck (IB), MIB aims to learn the minimal sufficient representation for a given task by maximizing the mutual information between the representation and the target and simultaneously constraining the mutual information between the representation and the input data. Different from general IB, our MIB regularizes both the multimodal and unimodal representations, which is a comprehensive and flexible framework that is compatible with any fusion methods. We develop three MIB variants, namely, early-fusion MIB, late-fusion MIB, and complete MIB, to focus on different perspectives of information constraints. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method reaches state-of-the-art performance on the tasks of multimodal sentiment analysis and multimodal emotion recognition across three widely used datasets. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/TmacMai/Multimodal-Information-Bottleneck}.

Communicative Subgraph Representation Learning for Multi-Relational Inductive Drug-Gene Interaction Prediction

Illuminating the interconnections between drugs and genes is an important topic in drug development and precision medicine. Currently, computational predictions of drug-gene interactions mainly focus on the binding interactions without considering other relation types like agonist, antagonist, etc. In addition, existing methods either heavily rely on high-quality domain features or are intrinsically transductive, which limits the capacity of models to generalize to drugs/genes that lack external information or are unseen during the training process. To address these problems, we propose a novel Communicative Subgraph representation learning for Multi-relational Inductive drug-Gene interactions prediction (CoSMIG), where the predictions of drug-gene relations are made through subgraph patterns, and thus are naturally inductive for unseen drugs/genes without retraining or utilizing external domain features. Moreover, the model strengthened the relations on the drug-gene graph through a communicative message passing mechanism. To evaluate our method, we compiled two new benchmark datasets from DrugBank and DGIdb. The comprehensive experiments on the two datasets showed that our method outperformed state-of-the-art baselines in the transductive scenarios and achieved superior performance in the inductive ones. Further experimental analysis including LINCS experimental validation and literature verification also demonstrated the value of our model.

Which is Making the Contribution: Modulating Unimodal and Cross-modal Dynamics for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) draws increasing attention with the availability of multimodal data. The boost in performance of MSA models is mainly hindered by two problems. On the one hand, recent MSA works mostly focus on learning cross-modal dynamics, but neglect to explore an optimal solution for unimodal networks, which determines the lower limit of MSA models. On the other hand, noisy information hidden in each modality interferes the learning of correct cross-modal dynamics. To address the above-mentioned problems, we propose a novel MSA framework \textbf{M}odulation \textbf{M}odel for \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{S}entiment \textbf{A}nalysis ({$ M^3SA $}) to identify the contribution of modalities and reduce the impact of noisy information, so as to better learn unimodal and cross-modal dynamics. Specifically, modulation loss is designed to modulate the loss contribution based on the confidence of individual modalities in each utterance, so as to explore an optimal update solution for each unimodal network. Besides, contrary to most existing works which fail to explicitly filter out noisy information, we devise a modality filter module to identify and filter out modality noise for the learning of correct cross-modal embedding. Extensive experiments on publicly datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Hybrid Contrastive Learning of Tri-Modal Representation for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

The wide application of smart devices enables the availability of multimodal data, which can be utilized in many tasks. In the field of multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA), most previous works focus on exploring intra- and inter-modal interactions. However, training a network with cross-modal information (language, visual, audio) is still challenging due to the modality gap, and existing methods still cannot ensure to sufficiently learn intra-/inter-modal dynamics. Besides, while learning dynamics within each sample draws great attention, the learning of inter-class relationships is neglected. Moreover, the size of datasets limits the generalization ability of existing methods. To address the afore-mentioned issues, we propose a novel framework HyCon for hybrid contrastive learning of tri-modal representation. Specifically, we simultaneously perform intra-/inter-modal contrastive learning and semi-contrastive learning (that is why we call it hybrid contrastive learning), with which the model can fully explore cross-modal interactions, preserve inter-class relationships and reduce the modality gap. Besides, a refinement term is devised to prevent the model falling into a sub-optimal solution. Moreover, HyCon can naturally generate a large amount of training pairs for better generalization and reduce the negative effect of limited datasets. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing works.

Graph Capsule Aggregation for Unaligned Multimodal Sequences

Humans express their opinions and emotions through multiple modalities which mainly consist of textual, acoustic and visual modalities. Prior works on multimodal sentiment analysis mostly apply Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to model aligned multimodal sequences. However, it is unpractical to align multimodal sequences due to different sample rates for different modalities. Moreover, RNN is prone to the issues of gradient vanishing or exploding and it has limited capacity of learning long-range dependency which is the major obstacle to model unaligned multimodal sequences. In this paper, we introduce Graph Capsule Aggregation (GraphCAGE) to model unaligned multimodal sequences with graph-based neural model and Capsule Network. By converting sequence data into graph, the previously mentioned problems of RNN are avoided. In addition, the aggregation capability of Capsule Network and the graph-based structure enable our model to be interpretable and better solve the problem of long-range dependency. Experimental results suggest that GraphCAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets with representations refined by Capsule Network and interpretation provided.

Subgraph-aware Few-Shot Inductive Link Prediction via Meta-Learning

Link prediction for knowledge graphs aims to predict missing connections between entities. Prevailing methods are limited to a transductive setting and hard to process unseen entities. The recent proposed subgraph-based models provided alternatives to predict links from the subgraph structure surrounding a candidate triplet. However, these methods require abundant known facts of training triplets and perform poorly on relationships that only have a few triplets. In this paper, we propose Meta-iKG, a novel subgraph-based meta-learner for few-shot inductive relation reasoning. Meta-iKG utilizes local subgraphs to transfer subgraph-specific information and learn transferable patterns faster via meta gradients. In this way, we find the model can quickly adapt to few-shot relationships using only a handful of known facts with inductive settings. Moreover, we introduce a large-shot relation update procedure to traditional meta-learning to ensure that our model can generalize well both on few-shot and large-shot relations. We evaluate Meta-iKG on inductive benchmarks sampled from NELL and Freebase, and the results show that Meta-iKG outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods both in few-shot scenarios and standard inductive settings.