Our experience of the world is multimodal - we see objects, hear sounds, feel texture, smell odors, and taste flavors. Modality refers to the way in which something happens or is experienced and a research problem is characterized as multimodal when it includes multiple such modalities. In order for Artificial Intelligence to make progress in understanding the world around us, it needs to be able to interpret such multimodal signals together. Multimodal machine learning} aims to build models that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. It is a vibrant multi-disciplinary field of increasing importance and with extraordinary potential. Instead of focusing on specific multimodal applications, this paper surveys the recent advances in multimodal machine learning itself and presents them in a common taxonomy. We go beyond the typical early and late fusion categorization and identify broader challenges that are faced by multimodal machine learning, namely: representation, translation, alignment, fusion, and co-learning. This new taxonomy will enable researchers to better understand the state of the field and identify directions for future research.

Figure 1: Overview of our model which uses joint multimodal space of language and pose to generate an animation conditioned on the input sentence. AbstractGenerating animations from natural language sentences finds its applications in a a number of domains such as movie script visualization, virtual human animation and, robot motion planning. These sentences can describe different kinds of actions, speeds and direction of these actions, and possibly a target destination. The core modeling challenge in this language-to-pose application is how to map linguistic concepts to motion animations.In this paper, we address this multimodal problem by introducing a neural architecture called Joint Language-to-Pose (or JL2P), which learns a joint embedding of language and pose. This joint embedding space is learned end-toend using a curriculum learning approach which emphasizes shorter and easier sequences first before moving to longer and harder ones. We evaluate our proposed model on a publicly available corpus of 3D pose data and humanannotated sentences. Both objective metrics and human judgment evaluation confirm that our proposed approach is able to generate more accurate animations and are deemed visually more representative by humans than other data driven approaches.

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Non verbal behaviours such as gestures, facial expressions, body posture, and para-linguistic cues have been shown to complement or clarify verbal messages. Hence to improve telepresence, in form of an avatar, it is important to model these behaviours, especially in dyadic interactions. Creating such personalized avatars not only requires to model intrapersonal dynamics between a avatar's speech and their body pose, but it also needs to model interpersonal dynamics with the interlocutor present in the conversation. In this paper, we introduce a neural architecture named Dyadic Residual-Attention Model (DRAM), which integrates intrapersonal (monadic) and interpersonal (dyadic) dynamics using selective attention to generate sequences of body pose conditioned on audio and body pose of the interlocutor and audio of the human operating the avatar. We evaluate our proposed model on dyadic conversational data consisting of pose and audio of both participants, confirming the importance of adaptive attention between monadic and dyadic dynamics when predicting avatar pose. We also conduct a user study to analyze judgments of human observers. Our results confirm that the generated body pose is more natural, models intrapersonal dynamics and interpersonal dynamics better than non-adaptive monadic/dyadic models.

We study relationships between spoken language and co-speech gestures in context of two key challenges. First, distributions of text and gestures are inherently skewed making it important to model the long tail. Second, gesture predictions are made at a subword level, making it important to learn relationships between language and acoustic cues. We introduce Adversarial Importance Sampled Learning (or AISLe), which combines adversarial learning with importance sampling to strike a balance between precision and coverage. We propose the use of a multimodal multiscale attention block to perform subword alignment without the need of explicit alignment between language and acoustic cues. Finally, to empirically study the importance of language in this task, we extend the dataset proposed in Ahuja et al. (2020) with automatically extracted transcripts for audio signals. We substantiate the effectiveness of our approach through large-scale quantitative and user studies, which show that our proposed methodology significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches for gesture generation. Link to code, data and videos: https: //github.com/chahuja/aisle

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To realize natural-looking virtual agents, one key technical challenge is to automatically generate nonverbal behaviors from spoken language. Since nonverbal behavior varies depending on personality, it is important to generate these nonverbal behaviors to match the expected personality of a virtual agent. In this work, we study how personality traits relate to the process of generating individual nonverbal behaviors from the whole body, including the head, eye gaze, arms, and posture. To study this, we first created a dialogue corpus including transcripts, a broad range of labelled nonverbal behaviors, and the Big Five personality scores of participants in dyad interactions. We constructed models that can predict each nonverbal behavior label given as an input language representation from the participants' spoken sentences. Our experimental results show that personality can help improve the prediction of nonverbal behaviors.