Research Area:  Machine Learning
Human language is often multimodal, which comprehends a mixture of natural language, facial gestures, and acoustic behaviors. However, two major challenges in modeling such multimodal human language time-series data exist: 1) inherent data non-alignment due to variable sampling rates for the sequences from each modality; and 2) long-range dependencies between elements across modalities. In this paper, we introduce the Multimodal Transformer (MulT) to generically address the above issues in an end-to-end manner without explicitly aligning the data. At the heart of our model is the directional pairwise cross-modal attention, which attends to interactions between multimodal sequences across distinct time steps and latently adapt streams from one modality to another. Comprehensive experiments on both aligned and non-aligned multimodal time-series show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. In addition, empirical analysis suggests that correlated crossmodal signals are able to be captured by the proposed crossmodal attention mechanism in MulT.
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Author(s) Name:  Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Shaojie Bai, Paul Pu Liang, J. Zico Kolter, Louis-Philippe Morency, and Ruslan Salakhutdinov
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Conferrence name:  Proc Conf Assoc Comput Linguist Meet
Publisher name:  PubMed central
DOI:  10.18653/v1/p19-1656
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Paper Link:   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7195022/