Multi-modal learning, particularly among imaging and linguistic modalities, has made amazing strides in many high-level fundamental visual understanding problems, ranging from language grounding to dense event captioning. However, much of the research has been limited to approaches that either do not take audio corresponding to video into account at all, or those that model the audiovisual correlations in service of sound or sound source localization. In this paper, we present the evidence, that audio signals can carry surprising amount of information when it comes to high-level visual-lingual tasks. Specifically, we focus on the problem of weakly-supervised dense event captioning in videos and show that audio on its own can nearly rival performance of a state-of-the-art visual model and, combined with video, can improve on the state-of-theart performance. Extensive experiments on the ActivityNet Captions dataset show that our proposed multi-modal approach outperforms state-of-the-art unimodal methods, as well as validate specific feature representation and architecture design choices.

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Numerous powerful point process models have been developed to understand temporal patterns in sequential data from fields such as health-care, electronic commerce, social networks, and natural disaster forecasting. In this paper, we develop novel models for learning the temporal distribution of human activities in streaming data (e.g., videos and person trajectories). We propose an integrated framework of neural networks and temporal point processes for predicting when the next activity will happen. Because point processes are limited to taking event frames as input, we propose a simple yet effective mechanism to extract features at frames of interest while also preserving the rich information in the remaining frames. We evaluate our model on two challenging datasets. The results show that our model outperforms traditional statistical point process approaches significantly, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing the underlying temporal dynamics as well as the correlation within sequential activities. Furthermore, we also extend our model to a joint estimation framework for predicting the timing, spatial location, and category of the activity simultaneously, to answer the when, where, and what of activity prediction.

The goal of scene graph generation is to predict a graph from an input image, where nodes correspond to identified and localized objects and edges to their corresponding interaction predicates. Existing methods are trained in a fully supervised manner and focus on message passing mechanisms, loss functions, and/or bias mitigation. In this work we introduce a simple-yet-effective self-supervised relational alignment regularization designed to improve the scene graph generation performance. The proposed alignment is general and can be combined with any existing scene graph generation framework, where it is trained alongside the original model's objective. The alignment is achieved through distillation, where an auxiliary relation prediction branch, that mirrors and shares parameters with the supervised counterpart, is designed. In the auxiliary branch, relational input features are partially masked prior to message passing and predicate prediction. The predictions for masked relations are then aligned with the supervised counterparts after the message passing. We illustrate the effectiveness of this self-supervised relational alignment in conjunction with two scene graph generation architectures, SGTR [22] and Neural Motifs [51], and show that in both cases we achieve significantly improved performance.