We propose a conditional non-autoregressive neural sequence model based on iterative refinement. The proposed model is designed based on the principles of latent variable models and denoising autoencoders, and is generally applicable to any sequence generation task. We extensively evaluate the proposed model on machine translation (En-De and En-Ro) and image caption generation, and observe that it significantly speeds up decoding while maintaining the generation quality comparable to the autoregressive counterpart.
We study open domain response generation with limited message-response pairs. The problem exists in real-world applications but is less explored by the existing work. Since the paired data now is no longer enough to train a neural generation model, we consider leveraging the large scale of unpaired data that are much easier to obtain, and propose response generation with both paired and unpaired data. The generation model is defined by an encoder-decoder architecture with templates as prior, where the templates are estimated from the unpaired data as a neural hidden semi-markov model. By this means, response generation learned from the small paired data can be aided by the semantic and syntactic knowledge in the large unpaired data. To balance the effect of the prior and the input message to response generation, we propose learning the whole generation model with an adversarial approach. Empirical studies on question response generation and sentiment response generation indicate that when only a few pairs are available, our model can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art response generation models in terms of both automatic and human evaluation.
We present open domain response generation with meta-words. A meta-word is a structured record that describes various attributes of a response, and thus allows us to explicitly model the one-to-many relationship within open domain dialogues and perform response generation in an explainable and controllable manner. To incorporate meta-words into generation, we enhance the sequence-to-sequence architecture with a goal tracking memory network that formalizes meta-word expression as a goal and manages the generation process to achieve the goal with a state memory panel and a state controller. Experimental results on two large-scale datasets indicate that our model can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art generation models in terms of response relevance, response diversity, accuracy of one-to-many modeling, accuracy of meta-word expression, and human evaluation.
Generating plausible hair image given limited guidance, such as sparse sketches or low-resolution image, has been made possible with the rise of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Traditional image-to-image translation networks can generate recognizable results, but finer textures are usually lost and blur artifacts commonly exist. In this paper, we propose a two-phase generative model for high-quality hair image synthesis. The two-phase pipeline first generates a coarse image by an existing image translation model, then applies a re-generating network with self-enhancing capability to the coarse image. The self-enhancing capability is achieved by a proposed structure extraction layer, which extracts the texture and orientation map from a hair image. Extensive experiments on two tasks, Sketch2Hair and Hair Super-Resolution, demonstrate that our approach is able to synthesize plausible hair image with finer details, and outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Automatic generation of paraphrases from a given sentence is an important yet challenging task in natural language processing (NLP), and plays a key role in a number of applications such as question answering, search, and dialogue. In this paper, we present a deep reinforcement learning approach to paraphrase generation. Specifically, we propose a new framework for the task, which consists of a \textit{generator} and an \textit{evaluator}, both of which are learned from data. The generator, built as a sequence-to-sequence learning model, can produce paraphrases given a sentence. The evaluator, constructed as a deep matching model, can judge whether two sentences are paraphrases of each other. The generator is first trained by deep learning and then further fine-tuned by reinforcement learning in which the reward is given by the evaluator. For the learning of the evaluator, we propose two methods based on supervised learning and inverse reinforcement learning respectively, depending on the type of available training data. Empirical study shows that the learned evaluator can guide the generator to produce more accurate paraphrases. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed models (the generators) outperform the state-of-the-art methods in paraphrase generation in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation.
Unpaired image-to-image translation is the problem of mapping an image in the source domain to one in the target domain, without requiring corresponding image pairs. To ensure the translated images are realistically plausible, recent works, such as Cycle-GAN, demands this mapping to be invertible. While, this requirement demonstrates promising results when the domains are unimodal, its performance is unpredictable in a multi-modal scenario such as in an image segmentation task. This is because, invertibility does not necessarily enforce semantic correctness. To this end, we present a semantically-consistent GAN framework, dubbed Sem-GAN, in which the semantics are defined by the class identities of image segments in the source domain as produced by a semantic segmentation algorithm. Our proposed framework includes consistency constraints on the translation task that, together with the GAN loss and the cycle-constraints, enforces that the images when translated will inherit the appearances of the target domain, while (approximately) maintaining their identities from the source domain. We present experiments on several image-to-image translation tasks and demonstrate that Sem-GAN improves the quality of the translated images significantly, sometimes by more than 20% on the FCN score. Further, we show that semantic segmentation models, trained with synthetic images translated via Sem-GAN, leads to significantly better segmentation results than other variants.
Despite the effectiveness of recurrent neural network language models, their maximum likelihood estimation suffers from two limitations. It treats all sentences that do not match the ground truth as equally poor, ignoring the structure of the output space. Second, it suffers from "exposure bias": during training tokens are predicted given ground-truth sequences, while at test time prediction is conditioned on generated output sequences. To overcome these limitations we build upon the recent reward augmented maximum likelihood approach \ie sequence-level smoothing that encourages the model to predict sentences close to the ground truth according to a given performance metric. We extend this approach to token-level loss smoothing, and propose improvements to the sequence-level smoothing approach. Our experiments on two different tasks, image captioning and machine translation, show that token-level and sequence-level loss smoothing are complementary, and significantly improve results.
Learning to rank has been intensively studied and widely applied in information retrieval. Typically, a global ranking function is learned from a set of labeled data, which can achieve good performance on average but may be suboptimal for individual queries by ignoring the fact that relevant documents for different queries may have different distributions in the feature space. Inspired by the idea of pseudo relevance feedback where top ranked documents, which we refer as the \textit{local ranking context}, can provide important information about the query's characteristics, we propose to use the inherent feature distributions of the top results to learn a Deep Listwise Context Model that helps us fine tune the initial ranked list. Specifically, we employ a recurrent neural network to sequentially encode the top results using their feature vectors, learn a local context model and use it to re-rank the top results. There are three merits with our model: (1) Our model can capture the local ranking context based on the complex interactions between top results using a deep neural network; (2) Our model can be built upon existing learning-to-rank methods by directly using their extracted feature vectors; (3) Our model is trained with an attention-based loss function, which is more effective and efficient than many existing listwise methods. Experimental results show that the proposed model can significantly improve the state-of-the-art learning to rank methods on benchmark retrieval corpora.
This paper proposes an approach for applying GANs to NMT. We build a conditional sequence generative adversarial net which comprises of two adversarial sub models, a generator and a discriminator. The generator aims to generate sentences which are hard to be discriminated from human-translated sentences (i.e., the golden target sentences), And the discriminator makes efforts to discriminate the machine-generated sentences from human-translated ones. The two sub models play a mini-max game and achieve the win-win situation when they reach a Nash Equilibrium. Additionally, the static sentence-level BLEU is utilized as the reinforced objective for the generator, which biases the generation towards high BLEU points. During training, both the dynamic discriminator and the static BLEU objective are employed to evaluate the generated sentences and feedback the evaluations to guide the learning of the generator. Experimental results show that the proposed model consistently outperforms the traditional RNNSearch and the newly emerged state-of-the-art Transformer on English-German and Chinese-English translation tasks.
Modeling and generating graphs is fundamental for studying networks in biology, engineering, and social sciences. However, modeling complex distributions over graphs and then efficiently sampling from these distributions is challenging due to the non-unique, high-dimensional nature of graphs and the complex, non-local dependencies that exist between edges in a given graph. Here we propose GraphRNN, a deep autoregressive model that addresses the above challenges and approximates any distribution of graphs with minimal assumptions about their structure. GraphRNN learns to generate graphs by training on a representative set of graphs and decomposes the graph generation process into a sequence of node and edge formations, conditioned on the graph structure generated so far. In order to quantitatively evaluate the performance of GraphRNN, we introduce a benchmark suite of datasets, baselines and novel evaluation metrics based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy, which measure distances between sets of graphs. Our experiments show that GraphRNN significantly outperforms all baselines, learning to generate diverse graphs that match the structural characteristics of a target set, while also scaling to graphs 50 times larger than previous deep models.
This study considers the 3D human pose estimation problem in a single RGB image by proposing a conditional random field (CRF) model over 2D poses, in which the 3D pose is obtained as a byproduct of the inference process. The unary term of the proposed CRF model is defined based on a powerful heat-map regression network, which has been proposed for 2D human pose estimation. This study also presents a regression network for lifting the 2D pose to 3D pose and proposes the prior term based on the consistency between the estimated 3D pose and the 2D pose. To obtain the approximate solution of the proposed CRF model, the N-best strategy is adopted. The proposed inference algorithm can be viewed as sequential processes of bottom-up generation of 2D and 3D pose proposals from the input 2D image based on deep networks and top-down verification of such proposals by checking their consistencies. To evaluate the proposed method, we use two large-scale datasets: Human3.6M and HumanEva. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art 3D human pose estimation performance.