Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN), as a widely discussed research direction in embodied intelligence, aims to enable embodied agents to navigate in complicated visual environments through natural language commands. Most existing VLN methods focus on indoor ground robot scenarios. However, when applied to UAV VLN in outdoor urban scenes, it faces two significant challenges. First, urban scenes contain numerous objects, which makes it challenging to match fine-grained landmarks in images with complex textual descriptions of these landmarks. Second, overall environmental information encompasses multiple modal dimensions, and the diversity of representations significantly increases the complexity of the encoding process. To address these challenges, we propose NavAgent, the first urban UAV embodied navigation model driven by a large Vision-Language Model. NavAgent undertakes navigation tasks by synthesizing multi-scale environmental information, including topological maps (global), panoramas (medium), and fine-grained landmarks (local). Specifically, we utilize GLIP to build a visual recognizer for landmark capable of identifying and linguisticizing fine-grained landmarks. Subsequently, we develop dynamically growing scene topology map that integrate environmental information and employ Graph Convolutional Networks to encode global environmental data. In addition, to train the visual recognizer for landmark, we develop NavAgent-Landmark2K, the first fine-grained landmark dataset for real urban street scenes. In experiments conducted on the Touchdown and Map2seq datasets, NavAgent outperforms strong baseline models. The code and dataset will be released to the community to facilitate the exploration and development of outdoor VLN.

Counter-narratives, which are direct responses consisting of non-aggressive fact-based arguments, have emerged as a highly effective approach to combat the proliferation of hate speech. Previous methodologies have primarily focused on fine-tuning and post-editing techniques to ensure the fluency of generated contents, while overlooking the critical aspects of individualization and relevance concerning the specific hatred targets, such as LGBT groups, immigrants, etc. This research paper introduces a novel framework based on contrastive optimal transport, which effectively addresses the challenges of maintaining target interaction and promoting diversification in generating counter-narratives. Firstly, an Optimal Transport Kernel (OTK) module is leveraged to incorporate hatred target information in the token representations, in which the comparison pairs are extracted between original and transported features. Secondly, a self-contrastive learning module is employed to address the issue of model degeneration. This module achieves this by generating an anisotropic distribution of token representations. Finally, a target-oriented search method is integrated as an improved decoding strategy to explicitly promote domain relevance and diversification in the inference process. This strategy modifies the model's confidence score by considering both token similarity and target relevance. Quantitative and qualitative experiments have been evaluated on two benchmark datasets, which demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms current methods evaluated by metrics from multiple aspects.

Multimodal hate detection, which aims to identify harmful content online such as memes, is crucial for building a wholesome internet environment. Previous work has made enlightening exploration in detecting explicit hate remarks. However, most of their approaches neglect the analysis of implicit harm, which is particularly challenging as explicit text markers and demographic visual cues are often twisted or missing. The leveraged cross-modal attention mechanisms also suffer from the distributional modality gap and lack logical interpretability. To address these semantic gaps issues, we propose TOT: a topology-aware optimal transport framework to decipher the implicit harm in memes scenario, which formulates the cross-modal aligning problem as solutions for optimal transportation plans. Specifically, we leverage an optimal transport kernel method to capture complementary information from multiple modalities. The kernel embedding provides a non-linear transformation ability to reproduce a kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), which reflects significance for eliminating the distributional modality gap. Moreover, we perceive the topology information based on aligned representations to conduct bipartite graph path reasoning. The newly achieved state-of-the-art performance on two publicly available benchmark datasets, together with further visual analysis, demonstrate the superiority of TOT in capturing implicit cross-modal alignment.

Single image super-resolution is an effective way to enhance the spatial resolution of remote sensing image, which is crucial for many applications such as target detection and image classification. However, existing methods based on the neural network usually have small receptive fields and ignore the image detail. We propose a novel method named deep memory connected network (DMCN) based on a convolutional neural network to reconstruct high-quality super-resolution images. We build local and global memory connections to combine image detail with environmental information. To further reduce parameters and ease time-consuming, we propose downsampling units, shrinking the spatial size of feature maps. We test DMCN on three remote sensing datasets with different spatial resolution. Experimental results indicate that our method yields promising improvements in both accuracy and visual performance over the current state-of-the-art.

Image classification models have achieved satisfactory performance on many datasets, sometimes even better than human. However, The model attention is unclear since the lack of interpretability. This paper investigates the fidelity and interpretability of model attention. We propose an Explainable Attribute-based Multi-task (EAT) framework to concentrate the model attention on the discriminative image area and make the attention interpretable. We introduce attributes prediction to the multi-task learning network, helping the network to concentrate attention on the foreground objects. We generate attribute-based textual explanations for the network and ground the attributes on the image to show visual explanations. The multi-model explanation can not only improve user trust but also help to find the weakness of network and dataset. Our framework can be generalized to any basic model. We perform experiments on three datasets and five basic models. Results indicate that the EAT framework can give multi-modal explanations that interpret the network decision. The performance of several recognition approaches is improved by guiding network attention.