@conference {cTarresa, title = {Sign Language Translation from Instructional Videos}, booktitle = {CVPR 2023 Women in Computer Vision Workshop}, year = {2023}, month = {04/2023}, publisher = {Computer Vision Foundation / IEEE}, organization = {Computer Vision Foundation / IEEE}, address = {Vancouver, Canada}, abstract = {

The advances in automatic sign language translation (SLT) to spoken languages have been mostly benchmarked with datasets of limited size and restricted domains. Our work advances the state of the art by providing the first baseline results on How2Sign, a large and broad dataset. We train a Transformer over I3D video features, using the reduced BLEU as a reference metric for validation, instead of the widely used BLEU score. We report a result of 8.03 on the BLEU score, and publish the first open-source implementation of its kind to promote further advances.

}, author = {Laia Tarr{\'e}s and Gerard I. G{\'a}llego and Amanda Duarte and Jordi Torres and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto} } @inbook {bCampos, title = {Sentiment concept embedding for visual affect recognition}, booktitle = {Multimodal Behavior Analysis in theWild}, year = {2018}, publisher = {Elsevier}, organization = {Elsevier}, edition = {1}, chapter = {16}, abstract = {

Automatic sentiment and emotion understanding of general visual content has recently garnered much research attention. However, the large visual variance associated with\ high-level affective concepts presents a challenge when designing systems with high-performance requirements. One\ popular approach to bridge the {\textquotedblleft}affective gap{\textquotedblright} between\ low-level visual features and affective semantics consists of\ using Adjective Noun Pair (ANP) semantic constructs for\ concepts, e.g. {\textquotedblleft}beautiful landscape{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}scary face{\textquotedblright} which\ act as a mid-level representation that can be recognized by\ visual classifers while still carrying an affective bias. In\ this work, we formulate the ANP detection task in images\ over a continuous space defined over an embedding that\ captures the inter-concept relationships between ANPs. We\ show how the compact representations obtained from the\ embeddeding extend the discrete concepts in the ontology\ and can be used for improved visual sentiment and emotion\ prediction, as well as new applications such as zero-shot\ ANP detection.

}, url = {https://www.elsevier.com/books/multimodal-behavior-analysis-in-the-wild/alameda-pineda/978-0-12-814601-9}, author = {V{\'\i}ctor Campos and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto and Jou, Brendan and Jordi Torres and Chang, Shih-Fu} } @conference {cCampos18, title = {Skip RNN: Learning to Skip State Updates in Recurrent Neural Networks}, booktitle = {International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)}, year = {2018}, month = {01/2018}, abstract = {

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) continue to show\  outstanding performance in sequence modeling tasks. However, training RNNs on long sequences often face challenges like slow inference, vanishing gradients and difficulty in capturing long term dependencies. In backpropagation through time settings, these issues are tightly coupled with the large, sequential computational graph resulting from unfolding the RNN in time. We introduce the Skip RNN model which extends existing RNN models by learning to skip state updates and shortens the effective size of the computational graph. This model can also be encouraged to perform fewer state updates through a budget constraint. We evaluate the proposed model on various tasks and show how it can reduce the number of required RNN updates while preserving, and sometimes even improving, the performance of the baseline RNN models.

Skip RNN: Learning to Skip State Updates in Recurrent Neural Networks from Xavier Giro-i-Nieto
}, author = {V{\'\i}ctor Campos and Jou, Brendan and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto and Jordi Torres and Chang, Shih-Fu} } @conference {cPana, title = {SalGAN: Visual Saliency Prediction with Generative Adversarial Networks}, booktitle = {CVPR 2017 Scene Understanding Workshop (SUNw)}, year = {2017}, address = {Honolulu, Hawaii, USA}, abstract = {

We introduce SalGAN, a deep convolutional neural network for visual saliency prediction trained with adversarial examples. The first stage of the network consists of a generator model whose weights are learned by back-propagation computed from a binary cross entropy (BCE) loss over downsampled versions of the saliency maps. The resulting prediction is processed by a discriminator network trained to solve a binary classification task between the saliency maps generated by the generative stage and the ground truth ones. Our experiments show how adversarial training allows reaching state-of-the-art performance across different metrics when combined with a widely-used loss function like BCE.

}, url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01081}, author = {Pan, Junting and Cristian Canton-Ferrer and McGuinness, Kevin and O{\textquoteright}Connor, N. and Jordi Torres and Elisa Sayrol and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto} } @conference {cTorres, title = {Scaling a Convolutional Neural Network for classification of Adjective Noun Pairs with TensorFlow on GPU Clusters}, booktitle = {17th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid)}, year = {2017}, month = {05/2017}, publisher = {IEEE}, organization = {IEEE}, address = {Madrid, Spain}, abstract = {

Deep neural networks have gained popularity in recent years, obtaining outstanding results in a wide range of applications such as computer vision in both academia and multiple industry areas. The progress made in recent years cannot be understood without taking into account the technological advancements seen in key domains such as High Performance Computing, more specifically in the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) domain. These kind of deep neural networks need massive amounts of data to effectively train the millions of parameters they contain, and this training can take up to days or weeks depending on the computer hardware we are using. In this work, we present how the training of a deep neural network can be parallelized on a distributed GPU cluster. The effect of distributing the training process is addressed from two different points of view. First, the scalability of the task and its performance in the distributed setting are analyzed. Second, the impact of distributed training methods on the training times and final accuracy of the models is studied. We used TensorFlow on top of the GPU cluster of servers with 2 K80 GPU cards, at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The results show an improvement for both focused areas. On one hand, the experiments show promising results in order to train a neural network faster. The training time is decreased from 106 hours to 16 hours in our experiments. On the other hand we can observe how increasing the numbers of GPUs in one node rises the throughput, images per second, in a near-linear way. Morever an additional distributed speedup of 10.3 is achieved with 16 nodes taking as baseline the speedup of one node.

[CCGRID 2017] [Paper page]

}, url = {http://easychair.org/smart-program/CCGRID2017/2017-05-15.html$\#$session:13550}, author = {Jordi Torres and Sastre, Francesc and Yag{\"u}es, Maurici and V{\'\i}ctor Campos and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto} } @conference {cCampos, title = {Skip RNN: Learning to Skip State Updates in Recurrent Neural Networks}, booktitle = {NIPS Time Series Workshop 2017}, year = {2017}, month = {08/2017}, address = {Long Beach, CA, USA}, abstract = {

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) continue to show \ outstanding performance in sequence modeling tasks. However, training RNNs on long sequences often face challenges like slow inference, vanishing gradients and difficulty in capturing long term dependencies. In backpropagation through time settings, these issues are tightly coupled with the large, sequential computational graph resulting from unfolding the RNN in time. We introduce the Skip RNN model which extends existing RNN models by learning to skip state updates and shortens the effective size of the computational graph. This model can also be encouraged to perform fewer state updates through a budget constraint. We evaluate the proposed model on various tasks and show how it can reduce the number of required RNN updates while preserving, and sometimes even improving, the performance of the baseline RNN models.

Skip RNN: Learning to Skip State Updates in Recurrent Neural Networks from Xavier Giro-i-Nieto
}, url = {https://imatge-upc.github.io/skiprnn-2017-telecombcn/}, author = {V{\'\i}ctor Campos and Jou, Brendan and Xavier Gir{\'o}-i-Nieto and Jordi Torres and Chang, Shih-Fu} }