Building dense retrievers requires a series of standard procedures, including training and validating neural models and creating indexes for efficient search. However, these procedures are often misaligned in that training objectives do not exactly reflect the retrieval scenario at inference time. In this paper, we explore how the gap between training and inference in dense retrieval can be reduced, focusing on dense phrase retrieval (Lee et al., 2021) where billions of representations are indexed at inference. Since validating every dense retriever with a large-scale index is practically infeasible, we propose an efficient way of validating dense retrievers using a small subset of the entire corpus. This allows us to validate various training strategies including unifying contrastive loss terms and using hard negatives for phrase retrieval, which largely reduces the training-inference discrepancy. As a result, we improve top-1 phrase retrieval accuracy by 2~3 points and top-20 passage retrieval accuracy by 2~4 points for open-domain question answering. Our work urges modeling dense retrievers with careful consideration of training and inference via efficient validation while advancing phrase retrieval as a general solution for dense retrieval.
Bi-encoders and cross-encoders are widely used in many state-of-the-art retrieval pipelines. In this work we study the generalization ability of these two types of architectures on a wide range of parameter count on both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. We find that the number of parameters and early query-document interactions of cross-encoders play a significant role in the generalization ability of retrieval models. Our experiments show that increasing model size results in marginal gains on in-domain test sets, but much larger gains in new domains never seen during fine-tuning. Furthermore, we show that cross-encoders largely outperform bi-encoders of similar size in several tasks. In the BEIR benchmark, our largest cross-encoder surpasses a state-of-the-art bi-encoder by more than 4 average points. Finally, we show that using bi-encoders as first-stage retrievers provides no gains in comparison to a simpler retriever such as BM25 on out-of-domain tasks. The code is available at //github.com/guilhermemr04/scaling-zero-shot-retrieval.git
Single-cell sequencing assay for transposase-accessible chromatin (scATAC-seq) assesses genome-wide chromatin accessibility in thousands of cells to reveal regulatory landscapes in high resolutions. However, the analysis presents challenges due to the high dimensionality and sparsity of the data. Several methods have been developed, including transformation techniques of term-frequency inverse-document frequency (TF-IDF), dimension reduction methods such as singular value decomposition (SVD), factor analysis, and autoencoders. Yet, a comprehensive study on the mentioned methods has not been fully performed. It is not clear what is the best practice when analyzing scATAC-seq data. We compared several scenarios for transformation and dimension reduction as well as the SVD-based feature analysis to investigate potential enhancements in scATAC-seq information retrieval. Additionally, we investigate if autoencoders benefit from the TF-IDF transformation. Our results reveal that the TF-IDF transformation generally leads to improved clustering and biologically relevant feature extraction.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used for modeling complex interactions between entities represented as vertices of a graph. Despite recent efforts to theoretically analyze the expressive power of GNNs, a formal characterization of their ability to model interactions is lacking. The current paper aims to address this gap. Formalizing strength of interactions through an established measure known as separation rank, we quantify the ability of certain GNNs to model interaction between a given subset of vertices and its complement, i.e. between sides of a given partition of input vertices. Our results reveal that the ability to model interaction is primarily determined by the partition's walk index -- a graph-theoretical characteristic that we define by the number of walks originating from the boundary of the partition. Experiments with common GNN architectures corroborate this finding. As a practical application of our theory, we design an edge sparsification algorithm named Walk Index Sparsification (WIS), which preserves the ability of a GNN to model interactions when input edges are removed. WIS is simple, computationally efficient, and markedly outperforms alternative methods in terms of induced prediction accuracy. More broadly, it showcases the potential of improving GNNs by theoretically analyzing the interactions they can model.
The last several years have witnessed remarkable progress in video-and-language (VidL) understanding. However, most modern VidL approaches use complex and specialized model architectures and sophisticated pretraining protocols, making the reproducibility, analysis and comparisons of these frameworks difficult. Hence, instead of proposing yet another new VidL model, this paper conducts a thorough empirical study demystifying the most important factors in the VidL model design. Among the factors that we investigate are (i) the spatiotemporal architecture design, (ii) the multimodal fusion schemes, (iii) the pretraining objectives, (iv) the choice of pretraining data, (v) pretraining and finetuning protocols, and (vi) dataset and model scaling. Our empirical study reveals that the most important design factors include: temporal modeling, video-to-text multimodal fusion, masked modeling objectives, and joint training on images and videos. Using these empirical insights, we then develop a step-by-step recipe, dubbed VindLU, for effective VidL pretraining. Our final model trained using our recipe achieves comparable or better than state-of-the-art results on several VidL tasks without relying on external CLIP pretraining. In particular, on the text-to-video retrieval task, our approach obtains 61.2% on DiDeMo, and 55.0% on ActivityNet, outperforming current SOTA by 7.8% and 6.1% respectively. Furthermore, our model also obtains state-of-the-art video question-answering results on ActivityNet-QA, MSRVTT-QA, MSRVTT-MC and TVQA. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available at: //github.com/klauscc/VindLU.
Classifying logo images is a challenging task as they contain elements such as text or shapes that can represent anything from known objects to abstract shapes. While the current state of the art for logo classification addresses the problem as a multi-class task focusing on a single characteristic, logos can have several simultaneous labels, such as different colors. This work proposes a method that allows visually similar logos to be classified and searched from a set of data according to their shape, color, commercial sector, semantics, general characteristics, or a combination of features selected by the user. Unlike previous approaches, the proposal employs a series of multi-label deep neural networks specialized in specific attributes and combines the obtained features to perform the similarity search. To delve into the classification system, different existing logo topologies are compared and some of their problems are analyzed, such as the incomplete labeling that trademark registration databases usually contain. The proposal is evaluated considering 76,000 logos (7 times more than previous approaches) from the European Union Trademarks dataset, which is organized hierarchically using the Vienna ontology. Overall, experimentation attains reliable quantitative and qualitative results, reducing the normalized average rank error of the state-of-the-art from 0.040 to 0.018 for the Trademark Image Retrieval task. Finally, given that the semantics of logos can often be subjective, graphic design students and professionals were surveyed. Results show that the proposed methodology provides better labeling than a human expert operator, improving the label ranking average precision from 0.53 to 0.68.
Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS) refers to clinician-performed and interpreted ultrasonography at the patient's bedside. Interpreting these images requires a high level of expertise, which may not be available during emergencies. In this paper, we support POCUS by developing classifiers that can aid medical professionals by diagnosing whether or not a patient has pneumothorax. We decomposed the task into multiple steps, using YOLOv4 to extract relevant regions of the video and a 3D sparse coding model to represent video features. Given the difficulty in acquiring positive training videos, we trained a small-data classifier with a maximum of 15 positive and 32 negative examples. To counteract this limitation, we leveraged subject matter expert (SME) knowledge to limit the hypothesis space, thus reducing the cost of data collection. We present results using two lung ultrasound datasets and demonstrate that our model is capable of achieving performance on par with SMEs in pneumothorax identification. We then developed an iOS application that runs our full system in less than 4 seconds on an iPad Pro, and less than 8 seconds on an iPhone 13 Pro, labeling key regions in the lung sonogram to provide interpretable diagnoses.
The core of information retrieval (IR) is to identify relevant information from large-scale resources and return it as a ranked list to respond to user's information need. Recently, the resurgence of deep learning has greatly advanced this field and leads to a hot topic named NeuIR (i.e., neural information retrieval), especially the paradigm of pre-training methods (PTMs). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model size, pre-trained models can learn universal language representations from massive textual data, which are beneficial to the ranking task of IR. Since there have been a large number of works dedicating to the application of PTMs in IR, we believe it is the right time to summarize the current status, learn from existing methods, and gain some insights for future development. In this survey, we present an overview of PTMs applied in different components of IR system, including the retrieval component, the re-ranking component, and other components. In addition, we also introduce PTMs specifically designed for IR, and summarize available datasets as well as benchmark leaderboards. Moreover, we discuss some open challenges and envision some promising directions, with the hope of inspiring more works on these topics for future research.
Deep Learning has revolutionized the fields of computer vision, natural language understanding, speech recognition, information retrieval and more. However, with the progressive improvements in deep learning models, their number of parameters, latency, resources required to train, etc. have all have increased significantly. Consequently, it has become important to pay attention to these footprint metrics of a model as well, not just its quality. We present and motivate the problem of efficiency in deep learning, followed by a thorough survey of the five core areas of model efficiency (spanning modeling techniques, infrastructure, and hardware) and the seminal work there. We also present an experiment-based guide along with code, for practitioners to optimize their model training and deployment. We believe this is the first comprehensive survey in the efficient deep learning space that covers the landscape of model efficiency from modeling techniques to hardware support. Our hope is that this survey would provide the reader with the mental model and the necessary understanding of the field to apply generic efficiency techniques to immediately get significant improvements, and also equip them with ideas for further research and experimentation to achieve additional gains.
The canonical approach to video-and-language learning (e.g., video question answering) dictates a neural model to learn from offline-extracted dense video features from vision models and text features from language models. These feature extractors are trained independently and usually on tasks different from the target domains, rendering these fixed features sub-optimal for downstream tasks. Moreover, due to the high computational overload of dense video features, it is often difficult (or infeasible) to plug feature extractors directly into existing approaches for easy finetuning. To provide a remedy to this dilemma, we propose a generic framework ClipBERT that enables affordable end-to-end learning for video-and-language tasks, by employing sparse sampling, where only a single or a few sparsely sampled short clips from a video are used at each training step. Experiments on text-to-video retrieval and video question answering on six datasets demonstrate that ClipBERT outperforms (or is on par with) existing methods that exploit full-length videos, suggesting that end-to-end learning with just a few sparsely sampled clips is often more accurate than using densely extracted offline features from full-length videos, proving the proverbial less-is-more principle. Videos in the datasets are from considerably different domains and lengths, ranging from 3-second generic domain GIF videos to 180-second YouTube human activity videos, showing the generalization ability of our approach. Comprehensive ablation studies and thorough analyses are provided to dissect what factors lead to this success. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/jayleicn/ClipBERT
We propose to pre-train a unified language model for both autoencoding and partially autoregressive language modeling tasks using a novel training procedure, referred to as a pseudo-masked language model (PMLM). Given an input text with masked tokens, we rely on conventional masks to learn inter-relations between corrupted tokens and context via autoencoding, and pseudo masks to learn intra-relations between masked spans via partially autoregressive modeling. With well-designed position embeddings and self-attention masks, the context encodings are reused to avoid redundant computation. Moreover, conventional masks used for autoencoding provide global masking information, so that all the position embeddings are accessible in partially autoregressive language modeling. In addition, the two tasks pre-train a unified language model as a bidirectional encoder and a sequence-to-sequence decoder, respectively. Our experiments show that the unified language models pre-trained using PMLM achieve new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks across several widely used benchmarks.