Abstract: Major advances have recently been made in merging language and vision representations. Most tasks considered so far have confined themselves to the processing of objects and lexicalised relations amongst objects (content words). We know, however, that humans (even pre-school children) can abstract over raw multimodal data to perform certain types of higher level reasoning, expressed in natural language by function words. A case in point is given by their ability to learn quantifiers, i.e. expressions like few, some and all. From formal semantics and cognitive linguistics, we know that quantifiers are relations over sets which, as a simplification, we can see as proportions. For instance, in most fish are red, most encodes the proportion of fish which are red fish. In this paper, we study how well current neural network strategies model such relations. We propose a task where, given an image and a query expressed by an object–property pair, the system must return a quantifier expressing which proportions of the queried object have the queried property. Our contributions are twofold. First, we show that the best performance on this task involves coupling state-of-the-art attention mechanisms with a network architecture mirroring the logical structure assigned to quantifiers by classic linguistic formalisation. Second, we introduce a new balanced dataset of image scenarios associated with quantification queries, which we hope will foster further research in this area.

Abstract: This paper proposes a technique for RGB-D scene segmentation using Multi-class
Multi-scale Stacked Sequential Learning (MMSSL) paradigm. Following recent trends in state-of-the-art, a base classifier uses an initial SLIC segmentation to obtain superpixels which provide a diminution of data while retaining object boundaries. A series of color and depth features are extracted from the superpixels, and are used in a Conditional Random Field (CRF) to predict superpixel labels. Furthermore, a Random Forest (RF) classifier using random offset features is also used as an input to the CRF, acting as an initial prediction. As a stacked classifier, another Random Forest is used acting on a spatial multi-scale decomposition of the CRF confidence map to correct the erroneous labels assigned by the previous classifier. The model is tested on the popular NYU-v2 dataset.
The approach shows that simple multi-modal features with the power of the MMSSL
paradigm can achieve better performance than state of the art results on the same dataset.

Abstract: Food plays an important role in several aspects of our daily life. Several computer vision approaches have been proposed for tackling food analysis problems, but very little effort has been done in developing methodologies that could take profit of the existent correlation between tasks. In this paper, we propose a new multi-task model that is able to simultaneously predict different food-related tasks, e.g. dish, cuisine and food categories. Here, we extend the homoscedastic uncertainty modeling to allow single-label and multi-label classification and propose a regularization term, which jointly weighs the tasks as well as their correlations. Furthermore, we propose a new Multi-Attribute Food dataset and a new metric, Multi-Task Accuracy. We prove that using both our uncertainty-based loss and the class regularization term, we are able to improve the coherence of outputs between different tasks. Moreover, we outperform the use of task-specific models on classical measures like accuracy or .