In supervised learning, low quality annotations lead to poorly performing classification and detection models, while also rendering evaluation unreliable. This is particularly apparent on temporal data, where annotation quality is affected by multiple factors. For example, in the post-hoc self-reporting of daily activities, cognitive biases are one of the most common ingredients. In particular, reporting the start and duration of an activity after its finalisation may incorporate biases introduced by personal time perceptions, as well as the imprecision and lack of granularity due to time rounding. Here we propose a method to model human biases on temporal annotations and argue for the use of soft labels. Experimental results in synthetic data show that soft labels provide a better approximation of the ground truth for several metrics. We showcase the method on a real dataset of daily activities.
The appearance of an object can be fleeting when it transforms. As eggs are broken or paper is torn, their color, shape and texture can change dramatically, preserving virtually nothing of the original except for the identity itself. Yet, this important phenomenon is largely absent from existing video object segmentation (VOS) benchmarks. In this work, we close the gap by collecting a new dataset for Video Object Segmentation under Transformations (VOST). It consists of more than 700 high-resolution videos, captured in diverse environments, which are 21 seconds long on average and densely labeled with instance masks. A careful, multi-step approach is adopted to ensure that these videos focus on complex object transformations, capturing their full temporal extent. We then extensively evaluate state-of-the-art VOS methods and make a number of important discoveries. In particular, we show that existing methods struggle when applied to this novel task and that their main limitation lies in over-reliance on static appearance cues. This motivates us to propose a few modifications for the top-performing baseline that improve its capabilities by better modeling spatio-temporal information. But more broadly, the hope is to stimulate discussion on learning more robust video object representations.
Language models have been shown to perform remarkably well on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel system that uses language models to perform multi-step logical reasoning. Our system incorporates explicit planning into its inference procedure, thus able to make more informed reasoning decisions at each step by looking ahead into their future effects. In our experiments, our full system significantly outperforms other competing systems. On a multiple-choice question answering task, our system performs competitively compared to GPT-3-davinci despite having only around 1.5B parameters. We conduct several ablation studies to demonstrate that explicit planning plays a crucial role in the system's performance.
Curated knowledge graphs encode domain expertise and improve the performance of recommendation, segmentation, ad targeting, and other machine learning systems in several domains. As new concepts emerge in a domain, knowledge graphs must be expanded to preserve machine learning performance. Manually expanding knowledge graphs, however, is infeasible at scale. In this work, we propose a method for knowledge graph expansion with humans-in-the-loop. Concretely, given a knowledge graph, our method predicts the "parents" of new concepts to be added to this graph for further verification by human experts. We show that our method is both accurate and provably "human-friendly". Specifically, we prove that our method predicts parents that are "near" concepts' true parents in the knowledge graph, even when the predictions are incorrect. We then show, with a controlled experiment, that satisfying this property increases both the speed and the accuracy of the human-algorithm collaboration. We further evaluate our method on a knowledge graph from Pinterest and show that it outperforms competing methods on both accuracy and human-friendliness. Upon deployment in production at Pinterest, our method reduced the time needed for knowledge graph expansion by ~400% (compared to manual expansion), and contributed to a subsequent increase in ad revenue of 20%.
Using generated data to improve the performance of downstream discriminative models has recently gained popularity due to the great development of pre-trained language models. In most previous studies, generative models and discriminative models are trained separately and thus could not adapt to any changes in each other. As a result, the generated samples can easily deviate from the real data distribution, while the improvement of the discriminative model quickly reaches saturation. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) train generative models via an adversarial process with discriminative models to achieve joint training. However, the training of standard GANs is notoriously unstable and often falls short of convergence. In this paper, to address these issues, we propose a $\textit{self-consistent learning}$ framework, in which a discriminator and a generator are cooperatively trained in a closed-loop form. The discriminator and the generator enhance each other during multiple rounds of alternating training until a scoring consensus is reached. This framework proves to be easy to train and free from instabilities such as mode collapse and non-convergence. Extensive experiments on sentence semantic matching demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework: the discriminator achieves 10+ AP of improvement on the zero-shot setting and new state-of-the-art performance on the full-data setting.
GPT-3 models are very powerful, achieving high performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. However, there is a relative lack of detailed published analysis on how well they perform on the task of grammatical error correction (GEC). To address this, we perform experiments testing the capabilities of a GPT-3 model (text-davinci-003) against major GEC benchmarks, comparing the performance of several different prompts, including a comparison of zero-shot and few-shot settings. We analyze intriguing or problematic outputs encountered with different prompt formats. We report the performance of our best prompt on the BEA-2019 and JFLEG datasets using a combination of automatic metrics and human evaluations, revealing interesting differences between the preferences of human raters and the reference-based automatic metrics.
We introduce Structured 3D Features, a model based on a novel implicit 3D representation that pools pixel-aligned image features onto dense 3D points sampled from a parametric, statistical human mesh surface. The 3D points have associated semantics and can move freely in 3D space. This allows for optimal coverage of the person of interest, beyond just the body shape, which in turn, additionally helps modeling accessories, hair, and loose clothing. Owing to this, we present a complete 3D transformer-based attention framework which, given a single image of a person in an unconstrained pose, generates an animatable 3D reconstruction with albedo and illumination decomposition, as a result of a single end-to-end model, trained semi-supervised, and with no additional postprocessing. We show that our S3F model surpasses the previous state-of-the-art on various tasks, including monocular 3D reconstruction, as well as albedo and shading estimation. Moreover, we show that the proposed methodology allows novel view synthesis, relighting, and re-posing the reconstruction, and can naturally be extended to handle multiple input images (e.g. different views of a person, or the same view, in different poses, in video). Finally, we demonstrate the editing capabilities of our model for 3D virtual try-on applications.
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.
In structure learning, the output is generally a structure that is used as supervision information to achieve good performance. Considering the interpretation of deep learning models has raised extended attention these years, it will be beneficial if we can learn an interpretable structure from deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) whose inner mechanism is still not clearly understood. We find that Finite State Automaton (FSA) that processes sequential data has more interpretable inner mechanism and can be learned from RNNs as the interpretable structure. We propose two methods to learn FSA from RNN based on two different clustering methods. We first give the graphical illustration of FSA for human beings to follow, which shows the interpretability. From the FSA's point of view, we then analyze how the performance of RNNs are affected by the number of gates, as well as the semantic meaning behind the transition of numerical hidden states. Our results suggest that RNNs with simple gated structure such as Minimal Gated Unit (MGU) is more desirable and the transitions in FSA leading to specific classification result are associated with corresponding words which are understandable by human beings.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.