Cross-modal Multi-task Learning for Multimedia Event Extraction

Multimedia event extraction aims to jointly extract event structural knowledge from multiple modalities, thus improving the comprehension and utilization of events in the growing multimedia content (e.g., multimedia news). A key challenge in multimedia event extraction is to establish cross-modal correlations during training without multimedia event annotations. Considering the complexity and cost of annotation across modalities, the multimedia event extraction task only provides parallel annotated data for evaluation. Previous works attempt to learn implicit correlations directly from unlabeled image-text pairs, but do not yield substantially better performance for event-centric tasks. To address this problem, we propose a cross-modal multi-task learning framework X-MTL to establish cross-modal correlations at the task level, which can simultaneously address four key tasks of multimedia event extraction: trigger detection, argument extraction, verb classification, and role classification. Specifically, to process inputs from different modalities and tasks, we utilize two separate modality-specific encoders and a modality-shared encoder to learn joint task representations, and introduce textual and visual prompt learning methods to enrich and unify task inputs. To resolve task conflict in cross-modal multi-task learning, we propose a pseudo label based knowledge distillation method, combined with dynamic weight adjustment method, which can effectively lift the performance to surpass the separately-trained models. On the Multimedia Event Extraction benchmark M2E2, experimental results show that X-MTL surpasses the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by 4.1% for multimedia event mention and 8.2% for multimedia argument role.