Enhancing Robustness of Multimodal Video Paragraph Captioning Models to Missing Modalities

Core Concepts

A multimodal video paragraph captioning framework (MR-VPC) that effectively utilizes available auxiliary inputs (speech, event boundaries) and maintains resilience even in the absence of certain modalities.

Abstract

The content discusses the problem of video paragraph captioning (VPC), which involves generating detailed narratives for long videos. Existing VPC models often rely on auxiliary modalities such as speech and event boundaries, but they are constrained by the assumption of constant availability of a single auxiliary modality, which is impractical in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, the authors propose the MR-VPC framework, which consists of the following key components: Multimodal VPC (MVPC) architecture: This model integrates video, speech, and event boundary inputs in a unified manner to process various auxiliary inputs. DropAM: A data augmentation strategy that randomly omits auxiliary inputs during training to reduce the model's reliance on them and improve generalization in noisy situations. DistillAM: A regularization target that distills knowledge from teacher models trained on modality-complete data, enabling efficient learning in modality-deficient environments. The authors conduct extensive experiments on the YouCook2 and ActivityNet Captions datasets, demonstrating that MR-VPC outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in both modality-complete and modality-missing test scenarios. The framework also shows superior cross-dataset generalization performance on the Charades dataset.

Stats

The performance of the previous state-of-the-art model Vid2Seq drastically declines as the percentage of ASR text missing grows, while MR-VPC consistently achieves superior performance in both modality-complete and modality-missing environments. The absence of ASR text results in a 65.36 (88.17% relatively) CIDEr drop on YouCook2 for the vanilla MVPC model, and the missing of event boundaries causes a 12.58 (29.75% relatively) CIDEr decline on ActivityNet.

Quotes

"Video Paragraph Captioning (VPC) (Park et al., 2019) is a fundamental video-language understanding task that requires the model to generate paragraph-level captions for minutes-long videos." "Besides raw video frames, there exist several auxiliary modalities that can potentially serve as supplementary inputs, such as speech inputs utilized in Vid2Seq (Yang et al., 2023b), flow features used in MART (Lei et al., 2020), and event boundaries (the start and end timestamps of the events) leveraged in various models (Zhou et al., 2018b; Yamazaki et al., 2022a,b, etc)."

Key Insights Distilled From

Towards Multimodal Video Paragraph Captioning Models Robust to Missing Modality

by Sishuo Chen,... at arxiv.org 03-29-2024

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2403.19221.pdf

Deeper Inquiries

How can the MR-VPC framework be extended to handle other forms of noisy inputs, such as video frame blurring, in addition to missing modalities

To extend the MR-VPC framework to handle other forms of noisy inputs, such as video frame blurring, in addition to missing modalities, we can incorporate additional training strategies and data augmentation techniques. One approach could be to introduce a blurring simulation mechanism during training, where the video frames are artificially blurred to mimic real-world scenarios where the video quality may be compromised. This would help the model learn to generate accurate captions even when the visual input is not clear. Additionally, techniques like image denoising and restoration could be employed to enhance the model's ability to interpret blurry frames and generate coherent captions. By training the model on a diverse range of noisy inputs, including blurred frames, the MR-VPC framework can improve its robustness to various forms of noise in the input data.

What are the potential trade-offs between the performance on modality-complete data and the robustness to missing modality, and how can they be further balanced

The potential trade-offs between performance on modality-complete data and robustness to missing modality lie in the optimization process of the model. When focusing on maximizing performance on modality-complete data, the model may become overly reliant on specific modalities during training, making it less adaptable to missing modalities during inference. On the other hand, prioritizing robustness to missing modalities may lead to a decrease in performance on modality-complete data, as the model learns to generalize to various noisy scenarios. To balance these trade-offs, techniques like curriculum learning, where the model is gradually exposed to more challenging scenarios, can be implemented. Additionally, fine-tuning the model on a diverse range of data with varying levels of noise can help strike a balance between performance and robustness. Regularization techniques that penalize overfitting to specific modalities can also aid in maintaining a balance between performance and robustness.

How can the insights from developing robust VPC models be applied to other multimodal language generation tasks, such as multimodal machine translation, to improve their real-world applicability

The insights gained from developing robust VPC models can be applied to other multimodal language generation tasks, such as multimodal machine translation, to enhance their real-world applicability. By incorporating techniques like DropAM and DistillAM, similar to the MR-VPC framework, multimodal machine translation models can learn to effectively utilize multiple modalities while remaining resilient to missing inputs. Additionally, the concept of integrating diverse auxiliary inputs in an end-to-end manner, as seen in the MVPC architecture, can be adapted to multimodal machine translation systems to improve their understanding of complex input data. By enhancing the robustness and adaptability of multimodal language generation models, they can better handle noisy and diverse input data, leading to more accurate and reliable outputs in real-world scenarios.