United States

When describing an image, reading text in the visual scene is crucial to understand the key information. Recent work explores the TextCaps task, i.e. image captioning with reading Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tokens, which requires models to read text and cover them in generated captions. Existing approaches fail to generate accurate descriptions because of their (1) poor reading ability; (2) inability to choose the crucial words among all extracted OCR tokens; (3) repetition of words in predicted captions. To this end, we propose a Confidence-aware Non-repetitive Multimodal Transformers (CNMT) to tackle the above challenges. Our CNMT consists of a reading, a reasoning and a generation modules, in which Reading Module employs better OCR systems to enhance text reading ability and a confidence embedding to select the most noteworthy tokens. To address the issue of word redundancy in captions, our Generation Module includes a repetition mask to avoid predicting repeated word in captions. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on TextCaps dataset, improving from 81.0 to 93.0 in CIDEr. Our source code is publicly available.

AAAI 2021

Confidence-Aware Non-Repetitive Multimodal Transformers for TextCaps

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

The goal of few-shot learning is to learn a classifier that can recognize unseen classes from limited support data with labels. A common practice for this task is to train a model on the base set first and then transfer to novel classes through fine-tuning or meta-learning. However, as the base classes have no overlap to the novel set, simply transferring whole knowledge from base data is not an optimal solution since some knowledge in the base model may be biased or even harmful to the novel class. In this paper, we propose to transfer partial knowledge by freezing or fine-tuning particular layer(s) in the base model. Specifically, layers will be imposed different learning rates if they are chosen to be fine-tuned, to control the extent of preserved transferability. To determine which layers to be recast and what values of learning rates for them, we introduce an evolutionary search based method that is efficient to simultaneously locate the target layers and determine their individual learning rates. We conduct extensive experiments on CUB and mini-ImageNet to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both meta-learning and non-meta based frameworks. Furthermore, we extend our method to the conventional pre-training + fine-tuning paradigm and obtain consistent improvement.

Partial Is Better Than All: Revisiting Fine-Tuning Strategy for Few-Shot Learning

Spherical signals exist in many applications, e.g., planetary data, LiDAR scans and digitalization of 3D objects, calling for models that can process spherical data effectively. It does not perform well when simply projecting spherical data into the 2D plane and then using planar convolution neural networks (CNNs), because of the distortion from projection and ineffective translation equivariance. 
Actually, good principles of designing spherical CNNs are avoiding distortions and converting the shift equivariance property in planar CNNs to rotation equivariance in the spherical domain. In this work, we use partial differential operators (PDOs) to design a spherical equivariant CNN, PDO-eS2CNN, which is exactly rotation equivariant in the continuous domain. We then discretize PDO-eS2CNNs, and analyze the equivariance error resulted from discretization. This is the first time that the equivariance error is theoretically analyzed in the spherical domain.  In experiments, PDO-eS2CNNs show greater parameter efficiency and outperform other spherical CNNs significantly on several tasks.

PDO-eS2CNNs: Partial Differential Operator Based Equivariant Spherical CNNs

As Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) usually are overparameterized and have millions of weight parameters, it is challenging to deploy these large DNN models on resource-constrained hardware platforms, e.g., smartphones. Numerous network compression methods such as pruning and quantization are proposed to reduce the model size significantly, of which the key is to find suitable compression allocation (e.g., pruning sparsity and quantization codebook) of each layer.  Existing solutions obtain the compression allocation in an iterative/manual fashion while finetuning the compressed model, thus suffering from the efficiency issue. Different from the prior art, we propose a novel One-shot Pruning-Quantization (OPQ) in this paper, which analytically solves the compression allocation with pre-trained weight parameters only. During finetuning, the compression module is fixed and only weight parameters are updated. To our knowledge, OPQ is the first work that reveals pre-trained model is sufficient for solving pruning and quantization simultaneously, without any complex iterative/manual optimization at the finetuning stage. Furthermore, we propose a unified channel-wise quantization method that enforces all channels of each layer to share a common codebook, which leads to low bit-rate allocation without introducing extra overhead brought by traditional channel-wise quantization. Comprehensive experiments on ImageNet with AlexNet/MobileNet-V1/ResNet-50 show that our method improves accuracy and training efficiency while obtains significantly higher compression rates compared to the state-of-the-art.

OPQ: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with One-Shot Pruning-Quantization

Recently deep neural networks have been successfully applied in channel coding to improve the decoding performance.
However, the state-of-the-art neural channel decoders cannot achieve high decoding performance and low complexity simultaneously. To overcome this challenge, in this paper we propose doubly residual neural (DRN) decoder. By integrating both the residual input and residual learning to the design of neural channel decoder, DRN enables significant decoding performance improvement while maintaining low complexity. Extensive experiment results show that on different types of channel codes, our DRN decoder consistently outperform the state-of-the-art decoders in terms of decoding performance, model sizes and computational cost.

Doubly Residual Neural Decoder: Towards Low-Complexity High-Performance Channel Decoding

Recent developments in pre-trained neural language modeling have led to leaps in accuracy on common-sense question-answering benchmarks. However,  there is increasing concern that models overfit to specific tasks, without learning to utilize external knowledge or perform general semantic reasoning. In contrast, zero-shot evaluations have shown promise as a more robust measure of a modelâ€™s general reasoning abilities. In this paper, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic framework for zero-shot question answering across commonsense tasks. Guided by a set of hypotheses,  the framework studies how to transform various pre-existing knowledge resources into a form that is most effective for pre-training models. We vary the set of language models, training regimes, knowledge sources, and data generation strategies, and measure their impact across tasks. Extending on prior work, we devise and compare four constrained distractor-sampling strategies. We provide empirical results across five commonsense question-answering tasks with data generated from five external knowledge resources. We show that, while an individual knowledge graph is better suited for specific tasks, a global knowledge graph brings consistent gains across different tasks. In addition, both preserving the structure of the task as well as generating fair and informative questions help language models learn more effectively.

Knowledge-Driven Data Construction for Zero-Shot Evaluation in Commonsense Question Answering

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a highly celebrated algorithm for matrix decomposition that guarantees non-negative factors. The underlying optimization problem is computationally intractable, yet in practice, gradient-descent-based methods often find good solutions. In this paper, we revisit the NMF optimization problem and analyze its loss landscape in non-worst-case settings. It has recently been observed that gradients in deep networks tend to point towards the final minimizer throughout the optimization procedure. We show that a similar property holds (with high probability) for NMF, provably in a non-worst case model with a planted solution, and empirically across an extensive suite of real-world NMF problems. Our analysis predicts that this property becomes more likely with growing number of parameters, and experiments suggest that a similar trend might also hold for deep neural networks---turning increasing dataset sizes and model sizes into a blessing from an optimization perspective.

Characterizing the Loss Landscape in Non-Negative Matrix Factorization

We propose a novel high-performance and interpretable canonical deep tabular data learning architecture, TabNet. TabNet uses sequential attention to choose which features to reason from at each decision step, enabling interpretability and more efficient learning as the learning capacity is used for the most salient features. We demonstrate that TabNet outperforms other variants on a wide range of non-performance-saturated tabular datasets and yields interpretable feature attributions plus insights into its global behavior. Finally, we demonstrate self-supervised learning for tabular data, significantly improving performance when unlabeled data is abundant.

TabNet: Attentive Interpretable Tabular Learning

In this paper, we study the computational complexity of the Maximum Satisfiability problem in terms of the length L of a given formula. We present an algorithm with running time O(1.0927^L), hence, improving the previously known best upper bound O(1.1058^L) developed more than 20 years ago by Bansal and Raman.  Theoretically speaking, our algorithm increases the length of solvable formulas by 13.3% (compare this to the recent breakthrough result for Maximum Satisfiability problem with respect to the number of clauses by Xu et al. in 2019 giving a 7.5% improvement). Besides, we propose a significantly simpler algorithm with running time O(1.1049^L). The algorithm outperforms Bansal's and Raman's algorithm in simplicity and running time.

New Length Dependent Algorithm for Maximum Satisfiability Problem

Neural sequence-to-sequence models are finding increasing use in editing of documents, for example in correcting a text document or repairing source code. In this paper, we argue that common seq2seq models (with a facility to copy single tokens) are not a natural fit for such tasks, as they have to explicitly copy each unchanged token. We present an extension of seq2seq models capable of copying entire spans of the input to the output in one step, greatly reducing the number of decisions required during inference. This extension means that there are now many ways of generating the same output, which we handle by deriving a new objective for training and a variation of beam search for inference that explicitly handles this problem. In our experiments on a range of editing tasks of natural language and source code, we show that our new model consistently outperforms simpler baselines.

Copy That! Editing Sequences by Copying Spans

Forecasting on sparse multivariate time series (MTS) aims to model the predictors of future values of time series given their incomplete past, which is important for many emerging applications. However, most existing methods process MTSâ€™s individually, and do not leverage the dynamic distributions underlying the MTSâ€™s, leading to sub-optimal results when the sparsity is high. To address this challenge, we propose a novel generative model, which tracks the transition of latent clusters, instead of isolated feature representations, to achieve robust modeling. It is characterized by a newly designed dynamic Gaussian mixture distribution, which captures the dynamics of clustering structures, and is used for emitting time series. The generative model is parameterized by neural networks. A structured inference network is also designed for enabling inductive analysis.  A gating mechanism is further introduced to dynamically tune the Gaussian mixture distributions. Extensive experimental results on a variety of real-life datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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