Previous studies on visual customization primarily rely on the objective alignment between various control signals (e.g., language, layout and canny) and the edited images, which largely ignore the subjective emotional contents, and more importantly lack general-purpose foundation models for affective visual customization. With this in mind, this paper proposes an LLM-centric Affective Visual Customization (L-AVC) task, which focuses on generating images within modifying their subjective emotions via Multimodal LLM. Further, this paper contends that how to make the model efficiently align emotion conversion in semantic (named inter-emotion semantic conversion) and how to precisely retain emotion-agnostic contents (named exter-emotion semantic retaining) are rather important and challenging in this L-AVC task. To this end, this paper proposes an Efficient and Precise Emotion Manipulating (EPEM) approach for editing subjective emotions in images. Specifically, an Efficient Inter-emotion Converting (EIC) module is tailored to make the LLM efficiently align emotion conversion in semantics before and after editing, followed by a Precise Extra-emotion Retaining (PER) module to precisely retain the emotion-agnostic contents. Comprehensive experimental evaluations on our constructed L-AVC dataset demonstrate the great advantage of the proposed EPEM approach to the L-AVC task over several state-of-the-art baselines. This justifies the importance of emotion information for L-AVC and the effectiveness of EPEM in efficiently and precisely manipulating such information.

Prior studies on Visual Sentiment Understanding (VSU) primarily rely on the explicit scene information (e.g., facial expression) to judge visual sentiments, which largely ignore implicit scene information (e.g., human action, objection relation and visual background), while such information is critical for precisely discovering visual sentiments. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a new Omni-scene driven visual Sentiment Identifying, Locating and Attributing in videos (Omni-SILA) task, aiming to interactively and precisely identify, locate and attribute visual sentiments through both explicit and implicit scene information. Furthermore, this paper believes that this Omni-SILA task faces two key challenges: modeling scene and highlighting implicit scene beyond explicit. To this end, this paper proposes an Implicit-enhanced Causal MoE (ICM) approach for addressing the Omni-SILA task. Specifically, a Scene-Balanced MoE (SBM) and an Implicit-Enhanced Causal (IEC) blocks are tailored to model scene information and highlight the implicit scene information beyond explicit, respectively. Extensive experimental results on our constructed explicit and implicit Omni-SILA datasets demonstrate the great advantage of the proposed ICM approach over advanced Video-LLMs.

Prior studies on Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) mainly focus on detecting whether each video frame is abnormal or not in the video, which largely ignore the structured video semantic information (i.e., what, when, and where does the abnormal event happen). With this in mind, this paper propose a new chat-paradigm Multi-scene Video Abnormal Event Extraction and Localization (M-VAE) task, aiming to extract the abnormal event quadruples (i.e., subject, event type, object, scene) and localize such event. Further, this paper believes that this new task faces two key challenges, i.e., global-local spatial modeling and global-local spatial balancing. To this end, this paper proposes a Global-local Spatial-sensitive Large Language Model (LLM) named Sherlock, i.e., acting like Sherlock Holmes to track down the criminal events, for this M-VAE task. Specifically, this model designs a Global-local Spatial-enhanced MoE (GSM) module and a Spatial Imbalance Regulator (SIR) to address the two challenges respectively. Extensive experiments on our M-VAE instruction dataset show the significant advantages of Sherlock over several advanced Video-LLMs. This justifies the importance of global-local spatial information for the M-VAE task and the effectiveness of Sherlock in capturing such information.

Aspect Sentiment Understanding (ASU) in interactive scenarios (e.g., Question-Answering and Dialogue) has attracted ever-more interest in recent years and achieved important progresses. However, existing studies on interactive ASU largely ignore the coreference issue for opinion targets (i.e., aspects), while this phenomenon is ubiquitous in interactive scenarios especially dialogues, limiting the ASU performance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) shows the powerful ability to integrate various NLP tasks with the chat paradigm. In this way, this paper proposes a new Chat-based Aspect Sentiment Understanding (ChatASU) task, aiming to explore LLMs’ ability in understanding aspect sentiments in dialogue scenarios. Particularly, this ChatASU task introduces a sub-task, i.e., Aspect Chain Reasoning (ACR) task, to address the aspect coreference issue. On this basis, we propose a Trusted Self-reflexion Approach (TSA) with ChatGLM as backbone to ChatASU. Specifically, this TSA treats the ACR task as an auxiliary task to boost the performance of the primary ASU task, and further integrates trusted learning into reflexion mechanisms to alleviate the LLMs-intrinsic factual hallucination problem in TSA. Furthermore, a high-quality ChatASU dataset is annotated to evaluate TSA, and extensive experiments show that our proposed TSA can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art baselines, justifying the effectiveness of TSA to ChatASU and the importance of considering the coreference and hallucination issues in ChatASU.

Multimodal Conversational Emotion (MCE) detection, generally spanning across the acoustic, vision and language modalities, has attracted increasing interest in the multimedia community. Previous studies predominantly focus on learning contextual information in conversations with only a few considering the topic information in single language modality, while always neglecting the acoustic and vision topic information. On this basis, we propose a model-agnostic Topic-enriched Diffusion (TopicDiff) approach for capturing multimodal topic information in MCE tasks. Particularly, we integrate the diffusion model into neural topic model to alleviate the diversity deficiency problem of neural topic model in capturing topic information. Detailed evaluations demonstrate the significant improvements of TopicDiff over the state-of-the-art MCE baselines, justifying the importance of multimodal topic information to MCE and the effectiveness of TopicDiff in capturing such information. Furthermore, we observe an interesting finding that the topic information in acoustic and vision is more discriminative and robust compared to the language.

Weakly-supervised Phrase Grounding (WPG) is an emerging task of inferring the fine-grained phrase-region matching, while merely leveraging the coarse-grained sentence-image pairs for training. However, existing studies on WPG largely ignore the implicit phrase-region matching relations, which are crucial for evaluating the capability of models in understanding the deep multimodal semantics. To this end, this paper proposes an Implicit-Enhanced Causal Inference (IECI) approach to address the challenges of modeling the implicit relations and highlighting them beyond the explicit. Specifically, this approach leverages both the intervention and counterfactual techniques to tackle the above two challenges respectively. Furthermore, a high-quality implicit-enhanced dataset is annotated to evaluate IECI and detailed evaluations show the great advantages of IECI over the state-of-the-art baselines. Particularly, we observe an interesting finding that IECI outperforms the advanced multimodal LLMs by a large margin on this implicit-enhanced dataset, which may facilitate more research to evaluate the multimodal LLMs in this direction.

In the literature, existing studies on text-to-motion generation (TMG) routinely focus on exploring the objective alignment of text and motion, which largely ignore the subjective emotion information, especially the limb-level emotion information. With this in mind, this paper proposes a new Emotion-enriched Text-to-Motion Generation (ETMG) task, aiming to generate motions with the subjective emotion information. Further, this paper believes that injecting emotions into limbs (named intra-limb emotion injection) and ensuring the coordination and coherence of emotional motions after injecting emotion information (named inter-limb emotion disturbance) is rather important and challenging in this ETMG task. To this end, this paper proposes an LL M-guided Limb-level Emotion Manipulating ( L3 EM) approach to ETMG. Specifically, this approach designs an LLM-guided intra-limb emotion modeling block to inject emotion into limbs, followed by a graph-structured inter-limb relation modeling block to ensure the coordination and coherence of emotional motions. Particularly, this paper constructs a coarse-grained Emotional Text-to-Motion (EmotionalT2M) dataset and a fine-grained Limb -level Emotional Text-to-Motion (Limb-ET2M) dataset to justify the effectiveness of the proposed L3EM approach. Detailed evaluation demonstrates the significant advantage of our L3EM approach to ETMG over the state-of-the-art baselines. This justifies the importance of the limb-level emotion information for ETMG and the effectiveness of our L3EM approach in coherently manipulating such information.

In real-world recon-videos such as surveillance and drone reconnaissance videos, commonly used explicit language, acoustic and facial expressions information is often missing. However, these videos are always rich in anomalous sentiments (e.g., criminal tendencies), which urgently requires the implicit scene information (e.g., actions and object relations) to fast and precisely identify these anomalous sentiments. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a new chat-paradigm Implicit anomalous sentiment Discovering and grounding (IasDig) task, aiming to interactively, fast discovering and grounding anomalous sentiments in recon-videos via leveraging the implicit scene information (i.e., actions and object relations). Furthermore, this paper believes that this IasDig task faces two key challenges, i.e., scene modeling and scene balancing. To this end, this paper proposes a new Scene-enhanced Video Large Language Model named Hawkeye, i.e., acting like a raptor (e.g., a Hawk) to discover and locate prey, for the IasDig task. Specifically, this approach designs a graph-structured scene modeling module and a balanced heterogeneous MoE module to address the above two challenges, respectively. Extensive experimental results on our constructed scene-sparsity and scene-density IasDig datasets demonstrate the great advantage of Hawkeye to IasDig over the advanced Video-LLM baselines, especially on the metric of false negative rates. This justifies the importance of the scene information for identifying implicit anomalous sentiments and the impressive practicality of Hawkeye for real-world applications.