Both in scientific literature and in industry,, Semantic and context-aware Natural Language Processing-based solutions have been gaining importance in recent years. The possibilities and performance shown by these models when dealing with complex Language Understanding tasks is unquestionable, from conversational agents to the fight against disinformation in social networks. In addition, considerable attention is also being paid to developing multilingual models to tackle the language bottleneck. The growing need to provide more complex models implementing all these features has been accompanied by an increase in their size, without being conservative in the number of dimensions required. This paper aims to give a comprehensive account of the impact of a wide variety of dimensional reduction techniques on the performance of different state-of-the-art multilingual Siamese Transformers, including unsupervised dimensional reduction techniques such as linear and nonlinear feature extraction, feature selection, and manifold techniques. In order to evaluate the effects of these techniques, we considered the multilingual extended version of Semantic Textual Similarity Benchmark (mSTSb) and two different baseline approaches, one using the pre-trained version of several models and another using their fine-tuned STS version. The results evidence that it is possible to achieve an average reduction in the number of dimensions of $91.58\% \pm 2.59\%$ and $54.65\% \pm 32.20\%$, respectively. This work has also considered the consequences of dimensionality reduction for visualization purposes. The results of this study will significantly contribute to the understanding of how different tuning approaches affect performance on semantic-aware tasks and how dimensional reduction techniques deal with the high-dimensional embeddings computed for the STS task and their potential for highly demanding NLP tasks
Due to the importance of the lower bounding distances and the attractiveness of symbolic representations, the family of symbolic aggregate approximations (SAX) has been used extensively for encoding time series data. However, typical SAX-based methods rely on two restrictive assumptions; the Gaussian distribution and equiprobable symbols. This paper proposes two novel data-driven SAX-based symbolic representations, distinguished by their discretization steps. The first representation, oriented for general data compaction and indexing scenarios, is based on the combination of kernel density estimation and Lloyd-Max quantization to minimize the information loss and mean squared error in the discretization step. The second method, oriented for high-level mining tasks, employs the Mean-Shift clustering method and is shown to enhance anomaly detection in the lower-dimensional space. Besides, we verify on a theoretical basis a previously observed phenomenon of the intrinsic process that results in a lower than the expected variance of the intermediate piecewise aggregate approximation. This phenomenon causes an additional information loss but can be avoided with a simple modification. The proposed representations possess all the attractive properties of the conventional SAX method. Furthermore, experimental evaluation on real-world datasets demonstrates their superiority compared to the traditional SAX and an alternative data-driven SAX variant.
A long line of research about connectivity in the Massively Parallel Computation model has culminated in the seminal works of Andoni et al. [FOCS'18] and Behnezhad et al. [FOCS'19]. They provide a randomized algorithm for low-space MPC with conjectured to be optimal round complexity $O(\log D + \log \log_{\frac m n} n)$ and $O(m)$ space, for graphs on $n$ vertices with $m$ edges and diameter $D$. Surprisingly, a recent result of Coy and Czumaj [STOC'22] shows how to achieve the same deterministically. Unfortunately, however, their algorithm suffers from large local computation time. We present a deterministic connectivity algorithm that matches all the parameters of the randomized algorithm and, in addition, significantly reduces the local computation time to nearly linear. Our derandomization method is based on reducing the amount of randomness needed to allow for a simpler efficient search. While similar randomness reduction approaches have been used before, our result is not only strikingly simpler, but it is the first to have efficient local computation. This is why we believe it to serve as a starting point for the systematic development of computation-efficient derandomization approaches in low-memory MPC.
Surveillance footage can catch a wide range of realistic anomalies. This research suggests using a weakly supervised strategy to avoid annotating anomalous segments in training videos, which is time consuming. In this approach only video level labels are used to obtain frame level anomaly scores. Weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD) suffers from the wrong identification of abnormal and normal instances during the training process. Therefore it is important to extract better quality features from the available videos. WIth this motivation, the present paper uses better quality transformer-based features named Videoswin Features followed by the attention layer based on dilated convolution and self attention to capture long and short range dependencies in temporal domain. This gives us a better understanding of available videos. The proposed framework is validated on real-world dataset i.e. ShanghaiTech Campus dataset which results in competitive performance than current state-of-the-art methods. The model and the code are available at //github.com/kapildeshpande/Anomaly-Detection-in-Surveillance-Videos
Biometrics on mobile devices has attracted a lot of attention in recent years as it is considered a user-friendly authentication method. This interest has also been motivated by the success of Deep Learning (DL). Architectures based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been established to be convenient for the task, improving the performance and robustness in comparison to traditional machine learning techniques. However, some aspects must still be revisited and improved. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article that intends to explore and propose novel gait biometric recognition systems based on Transformers, which currently obtain state-of-the-art performance in many applications. Several state-of-the-art architectures (Vanilla, Informer, Autoformer, Block-Recurrent Transformer, and THAT) are considered in the experimental framework. In addition, new configurations of the Transformers are proposed to further increase the performance. Experiments are carried out using the two popular public databases whuGAIT and OU-ISIR. The results achieved prove the high ability of the proposed Transformer, outperforming state-of-the-art CNN and RNN architectures.
Knowledge enhanced pre-trained language models (K-PLMs) are shown to be effective for many public tasks in the literature but few of them have been successfully applied in practice. To address this problem, we propose K-AID, a systematic approach that includes a low-cost knowledge acquisition process for acquiring domain knowledge, an effective knowledge infusion module for improving model performance, and a knowledge distillation component for reducing the model size and deploying K-PLMs on resource-restricted devices (e.g., CPU) for real-world application. Importantly, instead of capturing entity knowledge like the majority of existing K-PLMs, our approach captures relational knowledge, which contributes to better-improving sentence-level text classification and text matching tasks that play a key role in question answering (QA). We conducted a set of experiments on five text classification tasks and three text matching tasks from three domains, namely E-commerce, Government, and Film&TV, and performed online A/B tests in E-commerce. Experimental results show that our approach is able to achieve substantial improvement on sentence-level question answering tasks and bring beneficial business value in industrial settings.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
The goal of text generation is to make machines express in human language. It is one of the most important yet challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Since 2014, various neural encoder-decoder models pioneered by Seq2Seq have been proposed to achieve the goal by learning to map input text to output text. However, the input text alone often provides limited knowledge to generate the desired output, so the performance of text generation is still far from satisfaction in many real-world scenarios. To address this issue, researchers have considered incorporating various forms of knowledge beyond the input text into the generation models. This research direction is known as knowledge-enhanced text generation. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of the research on knowledge enhanced text generation over the past five years. The main content includes two parts: (i) general methods and architectures for integrating knowledge into text generation; (ii) specific techniques and applications according to different forms of knowledge data. This survey can have broad audiences, researchers and practitioners, in academia and industry.
Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting, focusing on Transformer models for NLP tasks that are limited by compute: self-supervised pretraining and high-resource machine translation. We first show that even though smaller Transformer models execute faster per iteration, wider and deeper models converge in significantly fewer steps. Moreover, this acceleration in convergence typically outpaces the additional computational overhead of using larger models. Therefore, the most compute-efficient training strategy is to counterintuitively train extremely large models but stop after a small number of iterations. This leads to an apparent trade-off between the training efficiency of large Transformer models and the inference efficiency of small Transformer models. However, we show that large models are more robust to compression techniques such as quantization and pruning than small models. Consequently, one can get the best of both worlds: heavily compressed, large models achieve higher accuracy than lightly compressed, small models.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.