Music signals are difficult to interpret from their low-level features, perhaps even more than images: e.g. highlighting part of a spectrogram or an image is often insufficient to convey high-level ideas that are genuinely relevant to humans. In computer vision, concept learning was therein proposed to adjust explanations to the right abstraction level (e.g. detect clinical concepts from radiographs). These methods have yet to be used for MIR. In this paper, we adapt concept learning to the realm of music, with its particularities. For instance, music concepts are typically non-independent and of mixed nature (e.g. genre, instruments, mood), unlike previous work that assumed disentangled concepts. We propose a method to learn numerous music concepts from audio and then automatically hierarchise them to expose their mutual relationships. We conduct experiments on datasets of playlists from a music streaming service, serving as a few annotated examples for diverse concepts. Evaluations show that the mined hierarchies are aligned with both ground-truth hierarchies of concepts -- when available -- and with proxy sources of concept similarity in the general case.
Vision guided navigation requires processing complex visual information to inform task-orientated decisions. Applications include autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and assistive vision for humans. A key element is the extraction and selection of relevant features in pixel space upon which to base action choices, for which Machine Learning techniques are well suited. However, Deep Reinforcement Learning agents trained in simulation often exhibit unsatisfactory results when deployed in the real-world due to perceptual differences known as the $\textit{reality gap}$. An approach that is yet to be explored to bridge this gap is self-attention. In this paper we (1) perform a systematic exploration of the hyperparameter space for self-attention based navigation of 3D environments and qualitatively appraise behaviour observed from different hyperparameter sets, including their ability to generalise; (2) present strategies to improve the agents' generalisation abilities and navigation behaviour; and (3) show how models trained in simulation are capable of processing real world images meaningfully in real time. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a self-attention based agent successfully trained in navigating a 3D action space, using less than 4000 parameters.
Subgraphs are rich substructures in graphs, and their nodes and edges can be partially observed in real-world tasks. Under partial observation, existing node- or subgraph-level message-passing produces suboptimal representations. In this paper, we formulate a novel task of learning representations of partially observed subgraphs. To solve this problem, we propose Partial Subgraph InfoMax (PSI) framework and generalize existing InfoMax models, including DGI, InfoGraph, MVGRL, and GraphCL, into our framework. These models maximize the mutual information between the partial subgraph's summary and various substructures from nodes to full subgraphs. In addition, we suggest a novel two-stage model with $k$-hop PSI, which reconstructs the representation of the full subgraph and improves its expressiveness from different local-global structures. Under training and evaluation protocols designed for this problem, we conduct experiments on three real-world datasets and demonstrate that PSI models outperform baselines.
In natural language, referencing objects at different levels of specificity is a fundamental pragmatic mechanism for efficient communication in context. We develop a novel communication game, the hierarchical reference game, to study the emergence of such reference systems in artificial agents. We consider a simplified world, in which concepts are abstractions over a set of primitive attributes (e.g., color, style, shape). Depending on how many attributes are combined, concepts are more general ("circle") or more specific ("red dotted circle"). Based on the context, the agents have to communicate at different levels of this hierarchy. Our results show that the agents learn to play the game successfully and can even generalize to novel concepts. To achieve abstraction, they use implicit (omitting irrelevant information) and explicit (indicating that attributes are irrelevant) strategies. In addition, the compositional structure underlying the concept hierarchy is reflected in the emergent protocols, indicating that the need to develop hierarchical reference systems supports the emergence of compositionality.
Hierarchical structures are popular in recent vision transformers, however, they require sophisticated designs and massive datasets to work well. In this paper, we explore the idea of nesting basic local transformers on non-overlapping image blocks and aggregating them in a hierarchical way. We find that the block aggregation function plays a critical role in enabling cross-block non-local information communication. This observation leads us to design a simplified architecture that requires minor code changes upon the original vision transformer. The benefits of the proposed judiciously-selected design are threefold: (1) NesT converges faster and requires much less training data to achieve good generalization on both ImageNet and small datasets like CIFAR; (2) when extending our key ideas to image generation, NesT leads to a strong decoder that is 8$\times$ faster than previous transformer-based generators; and (3) we show that decoupling the feature learning and abstraction processes via this nested hierarchy in our design enables constructing a novel method (named GradCAT) for visually interpreting the learned model. Source code is available //github.com/google-research/nested-transformer.
Multi-label text classification refers to the problem of assigning each given document its most relevant labels from the label set. Commonly, the metadata of the given documents and the hierarchy of the labels are available in real-world applications. However, most existing studies focus on only modeling the text information, with a few attempts to utilize either metadata or hierarchy signals, but not both of them. In this paper, we bridge the gap by formalizing the problem of metadata-aware text classification in a large label hierarchy (e.g., with tens of thousands of labels). To address this problem, we present the MATCH solution -- an end-to-end framework that leverages both metadata and hierarchy information. To incorporate metadata, we pre-train the embeddings of text and metadata in the same space and also leverage the fully-connected attentions to capture the interrelations between them. To leverage the label hierarchy, we propose different ways to regularize the parameters and output probability of each child label by its parents. Extensive experiments on two massive text datasets with large-scale label hierarchies demonstrate the effectiveness of MATCH over state-of-the-art deep learning baselines.
We present a new method to learn video representations from large-scale unlabeled video data. Ideally, this representation will be generic and transferable, directly usable for new tasks such as action recognition and zero or few-shot learning. We formulate unsupervised representation learning as a multi-modal, multi-task learning problem, where the representations are shared across different modalities via distillation. Further, we introduce the concept of loss function evolution by using an evolutionary search algorithm to automatically find optimal combination of loss functions capturing many (self-supervised) tasks and modalities. Thirdly, we propose an unsupervised representation evaluation metric using distribution matching to a large unlabeled dataset as a prior constraint, based on Zipf's law. This unsupervised constraint, which is not guided by any labeling, produces similar results to weakly-supervised, task-specific ones. The proposed unsupervised representation learning results in a single RGB network and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it is also more effective than several label-based methods (e.g., ImageNet), with the exception of large, fully labeled video datasets.
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.
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have revolutionized the field of graph representation learning through effectively learned node embeddings, and achieved state-of-the-art results in tasks such as node classification and link prediction. However, current GNN methods are inherently flat and do not learn hierarchical representations of graphs---a limitation that is especially problematic for the task of graph classification, where the goal is to predict the label associated with an entire graph. Here we propose DiffPool, a differentiable graph pooling module that can generate hierarchical representations of graphs and can be combined with various graph neural network architectures in an end-to-end fashion. DiffPool learns a differentiable soft cluster assignment for nodes at each layer of a deep GNN, mapping nodes to a set of clusters, which then form the coarsened input for the next GNN layer. Our experimental results show that combining existing GNN methods with DiffPool yields an average improvement of 5-10% accuracy on graph classification benchmarks, compared to all existing pooling approaches, achieving a new state-of-the-art on four out of five benchmark data sets.
Video captioning is the task of automatically generating a textual description of the actions in a video. Although previous work (e.g. sequence-to-sequence model) has shown promising results in abstracting a coarse description of a short video, it is still very challenging to caption a video containing multiple fine-grained actions with a detailed description. This paper aims to address the challenge by proposing a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for video captioning, where a high-level Manager module learns to design sub-goals and a low-level Worker module recognizes the primitive actions to fulfill the sub-goal. With this compositional framework to reinforce video captioning at different levels, our approach significantly outperforms all the baseline methods on a newly introduced large-scale dataset for fine-grained video captioning. Furthermore, our non-ensemble model has already achieved the state-of-the-art results on the widely-used MSR-VTT dataset.