For unsupervised pretraining, mask-reconstruction pretraining (MRP) approaches, e.g. MAE and data2vec, randomly mask input patches and then reconstruct the pixels or semantic features of these masked patches via an auto-encoder. Then for a downstream task, supervised fine-tuning the pretrained encoder remarkably surpasses the conventional ``supervised learning'' (SL) trained from scratch. However, it is still unclear 1) how MRP performs semantic feature learning in the pretraining phase and 2) why it helps in downstream tasks. To solve these problems, we first theoretically show that on an auto-encoder of a two/one-layered convolution encoder/decoder, MRP can capture all discriminative features of each potential semantic class in the pretraining dataset. Then considering the fact that the pretraining dataset is of huge size and high diversity and thus covers most features in downstream dataset, in fine-tuning phase, the pretrained encoder can capture as much features as it can in downstream datasets, and would not lost these features with theoretical guarantees. In contrast, SL only randomly captures some features due to lottery ticket hypothesis. So MRP provably achieves better performance than SL on the classification tasks. Experimental results testify to our data assumptions and also our theoretical implications.
Our goal is to learn a video representation that is useful for downstream procedure understanding tasks in instructional videos. Due to the small amount of available annotations, a key challenge in procedure understanding is to be able to extract from unlabeled videos the procedural knowledge such as the identity of the task (e.g., 'make latte'), its steps (e.g., 'pour milk'), or the potential next steps given partial progress in its execution. Our main insight is that instructional videos depict sequences of steps that repeat between instances of the same or different tasks, and that this structure can be well represented by a Procedural Knowledge Graph (PKG), where nodes are discrete steps and edges connect steps that occur sequentially in the instructional activities. This graph can then be used to generate pseudo labels to train a video representation that encodes the procedural knowledge in a more accessible form to generalize to multiple procedure understanding tasks. We build a PKG by combining information from a text-based procedural knowledge database and an unlabeled instructional video corpus and then use it to generate training pseudo labels with four novel pre-training objectives. We call this PKG-based pre-training procedure and the resulting model Paprika, Procedure-Aware PRe-training for Instructional Knowledge Acquisition. We evaluate Paprika on COIN and CrossTask for procedure understanding tasks such as task recognition, step recognition, and step forecasting. Paprika yields a video representation that improves over the state of the art: up to 11.23% gains in accuracy in 12 evaluation settings. Implementation is available at //github.com/salesforce/paprika.
We address the problem of extracting key steps from unlabeled procedural videos, motivated by the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) headsets to revolutionize job training and performance. We decompose the problem into two steps: representation learning and key steps extraction. We propose a training objective, Bootstrapped Multi-Cue Contrastive (BMC2) loss to learn disciriminative representations for various steps without any labels. Different from prior works, we develop techniques to train a light-weight temporal module which uses off-the-shelf features for self supervision. Our approach can seamlessly leverage information from multiple cues like optical flow, depth or gaze to learn discriminative features for key-steps making it amenable for AR applications. We finally extract key steps via a tunable algorithm that clusters the representations and samples. We show significant improvements over prior works for the task of key step localization and phase classification. Qualitative results demonstrate that the extracted key steps are meaningful to succinctly represent various steps of the procedural tasks.
With the increasing dependency of daily life over computer networks, the importance of these networks security becomes prominent. Different intrusion attacks to networks have been designed and the attackers are working on improving them. Thus the ability to detect intrusion with limited number of labeled data is desirable to provide networks with higher level of security. In this paper we design an intrusion detection system based on a deep neural network. The proposed system is based on self-supervised contrastive learning where a huge amount of unlabeled data can be used to generate informative representation suitable for various downstream tasks with limited number of labeled data. Using different experiments, we have shown that the proposed system presents an accuracy of 94.05% over the UNSW-NB15 dataset, an improvement of 4.22% in comparison to previous method based on self-supervised learning. Our simulations have also shown impressive results when the size of labeled training data is limited. The performance of the resulting Encoder Block trained on UNSW-NB15 dataset has also been tested on other datasets for representation extraction which shows competitive results in downstream tasks.
Contrastive loss has been increasingly used in learning representations from multiple modalities. In the limit, the nature of the contrastive loss encourages modalities to exactly match each other in the latent space. Yet it remains an open question how the modality alignment affects the downstream task performance. In this paper, based on an information-theoretic argument, we first prove that exact modality alignment is sub-optimal in general for downstream prediction tasks. Hence we advocate that the key of better performance lies in meaningful latent modality structures instead of perfect modality alignment. To this end, we propose three general approaches to construct latent modality structures. Specifically, we design 1) a deep feature separation loss for intra-modality regularization; 2) a Brownian-bridge loss for inter-modality regularization; and 3) a geometric consistency loss for both intra- and inter-modality regularization. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular multi-modal representation learning frameworks: the CLIP-based two-tower model and the ALBEF-based fusion model. We test our model on a variety of tasks including zero/few-shot image classification, image-text retrieval, visual question answering, visual reasoning, and visual entailment. Our method achieves consistent improvements over existing methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of our proposed approach on latent modality structure regularization.
The notion of "in-domain data" in NLP is often over-simplistic and vague, as textual data varies in many nuanced linguistic aspects such as topic, style or level of formality. In addition, domain labels are many times unavailable, making it challenging to build domain-specific systems. We show that massive pre-trained language models implicitly learn sentence representations that cluster by domains without supervision -- suggesting a simple data-driven definition of domains in textual data. We harness this property and propose domain data selection methods based on such models, which require only a small set of in-domain monolingual data. We evaluate our data selection methods for neural machine translation across five diverse domains, where they outperform an established approach as measured by both BLEU and by precision and recall of sentence selection with respect to an oracle.
Graph convolution networks (GCN) are increasingly popular in many applications, yet remain notoriously hard to train over large graph datasets. They need to compute node representations recursively from their neighbors. Current GCN training algorithms suffer from either high computational costs that grow exponentially with the number of layers, or high memory usage for loading the entire graph and node embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient layer-wise training framework for GCN (L-GCN), that disentangles feature aggregation and feature transformation during training, hence greatly reducing time and memory complexities. We present theoretical analysis for L-GCN under the graph isomorphism framework, that L-GCN leads to as powerful GCNs as the more costly conventional training algorithm does, under mild conditions. We further propose L^2-GCN, which learns a controller for each layer that can automatically adjust the training epochs per layer in L-GCN. Experiments show that L-GCN is faster than state-of-the-arts by at least an order of magnitude, with a consistent of memory usage not dependent on dataset size, while maintaining comparable prediction performance. With the learned controller, L^2-GCN can further cut the training time in half. Our codes are available at //github.com/Shen-Lab/L2-GCN.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which generalize deep neural networks to graph-structured data, have drawn considerable attention and achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous graph related tasks. However, existing GNN models mainly focus on designing graph convolution operations. The graph pooling (or downsampling) operations, that play an important role in learning hierarchical representations, are usually overlooked. In this paper, we propose a novel graph pooling operator, called Hierarchical Graph Pooling with Structure Learning (HGP-SL), which can be integrated into various graph neural network architectures. HGP-SL incorporates graph pooling and structure learning into a unified module to generate hierarchical representations of graphs. More specifically, the graph pooling operation adaptively selects a subset of nodes to form an induced subgraph for the subsequent layers. To preserve the integrity of graph's topological information, we further introduce a structure learning mechanism to learn a refined graph structure for the pooled graph at each layer. By combining HGP-SL operator with graph neural networks, we perform graph level representation learning with focus on graph classification task. Experimental results on six widely used benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.
The potential of graph convolutional neural networks for the task of zero-shot learning has been demonstrated recently. These models are highly sample efficient as related concepts in the graph structure share statistical strength allowing generalization to new classes when faced with a lack of data. However, knowledge from distant nodes can get diluted when propagating through intermediate nodes, because current approaches to zero-shot learning use graph propagation schemes that perform Laplacian smoothing at each layer. We show that extensive smoothing does not help the task of regressing classifier weights in zero-shot learning. In order to still incorporate information from distant nodes and utilize the graph structure, we propose an Attentive Dense Graph Propagation Module (ADGPM). ADGPM allows us to exploit the hierarchical graph structure of the knowledge graph through additional connections. These connections are added based on a node's relationship to its ancestors and descendants and an attention scheme is further used to weigh their contribution depending on the distance to the node. Finally, we illustrate that finetuning of the feature representation after training the ADGPM leads to considerable improvements. Our method achieves competitive results, outperforming previous zero-shot learning approaches.
Most previous event extraction studies have relied heavily on features derived from annotated event mentions, thus cannot be applied to new event types without annotation effort. In this work, we take a fresh look at event extraction and model it as a grounding problem. We design a transferable neural architecture, mapping event mentions and types jointly into a shared semantic space using structural and compositional neural networks, where the type of each event mention can be determined by the closest of all candidate types . By leveraging (1)~available manual annotations for a small set of existing event types and (2)~existing event ontologies, our framework applies to new event types without requiring additional annotation. Experiments on both existing event types (e.g., ACE, ERE) and new event types (e.g., FrameNet) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. \textit{Without any manual annotations} for 23 new event types, our zero-shot framework achieved performance comparable to a state-of-the-art supervised model which is trained from the annotations of 500 event mentions.