Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims to retrieve temporal segments in untrimmed videos corresponding to a given language query by constructing cross-modal alignment strategies. However, these existing strategies are often sub-optimal since they ignore the modality imbalance problem, \textit{i.e.}, the semantic richness inherent in videos far exceeds that of a given limited-length sentence. Therefore, in pursuit of better alignment, a natural idea is enhancing the video modality to filter out query-irrelevant semantics, and enhancing the text modality to capture more segment-relevant knowledge. In this paper, we introduce Modal-Enhanced Semantic Modeling (MESM), a novel framework for more balanced alignment through enhancing features at two levels. First, we enhance the video modality at the frame-word level through word reconstruction. This strategy emphasizes the portions associated with query words in frame-level features while suppressing irrelevant parts. Therefore, the enhanced video contains less redundant semantics and is more balanced with the textual modality. Second, we enhance the textual modality at the segment-sentence level by learning complementary knowledge from context sentences and ground-truth segments. With the knowledge added to the query, the textual modality thus maintains more meaningful semantics and is more balanced with the video modality. By implementing two levels of MESM, the semantic information from both modalities is more balanced to align, thereby bridging the modality gap. Experiments on three widely used benchmarks, including the out-of-distribution settings, show that the proposed framework achieves a new start-of-the-art performance with notable generalization ability (e.g., 4.42% and 7.69% average gains of R1@0.7 on Charades-STA and Charades-CG). The code will be available at https://github.com/lntzm/MESM.
Although neural networks could achieve state-of-the-art performance while recongnizing images, they often suffer a tremendous defeat from adversarial examples--inputs generated by utilizing imperceptible but intentional perturbation to clean samples from the datasets. How to defense against adversarial examples is an important problem which is well worth researching. So far, very few methods have provided a significant defense to adversarial examples. In this paper, a novel idea is proposed and an effective framework based Generative Adversarial Nets named APE-GAN is implemented to defense against the adversarial examples. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets including MNIST, CIFAR10 and ImageNet indicate that APE-GAN is effective to resist adversarial examples generated from five attacks.