Polar Relative Positional Encoding for Video-Language Segmentation

In this paper, we tackle a challenging task named video-language segmentation. Given a video and a sentence in natural language, the goal is to segment the object or actor described by the sentence in video frames. To accurately denote a target object, the given sentence usually refers to multiple attributes, such as nearby objects with spatial relations, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel Polar Relative Positional Encoding (PRPE) mechanism that represents spatial relations in a ``linguistic'' way, i.e., in terms of direction and range. Sentence feature can interact with positional embeddings in a more direct way to extract the implied relative positional relations. We also propose parameterized functions for these positional embeddings to adapt real-value directions and ranges. With PRPE, we design a Polar Attention Module (PAM) as the basic module for vision-language fusion. Our method outperforms previous best method by a large margin of 11.4% absolute improvement in terms of mAP on the challenging A2D Sentences dataset. Our method also achieves competitive performances on the J-HMDB Sentences dataset.