Pretrained Transformer-based language models (LMs) display remarkable natural language generation capabilities. With their immense potential, controlling text generation of such LMs is getting attention. While there are studies that seek to control high-level attributes (such as sentiment and topic) of generated text, there is still a lack of more precise control over its content at the word- and phrase-level. Here, we propose Content-Conditioner (CoCon) to control an LM's output text with a content input, at a fine-grained level. In our self-supervised approach, the CoCon block learns to help the LM complete a partially-observed text sequence by conditioning with content inputs that are withheld from the LM. Through experiments, we show that CoCon can naturally incorporate target content into generated texts and control high-level text attributes in a zero-shot manner.
Recently, Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) techniques have greatly benefited various vision-language tasks by jointly learning visual and textual representations, which intuitively helps in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tasks due to the rich visual and textual information in scene text images. However, these methods cannot well cope with OCR tasks because of the difficulty in both instance-level text encoding and image-text pair acquisition (i.e. images and captured texts in them). This paper presents a weakly supervised pre-training method, oCLIP, which can acquire effective scene text representations by jointly learning and aligning visual and textual information. Our network consists of an image encoder and a character-aware text encoder that extract visual and textual features, respectively, as well as a visual-textual decoder that models the interaction among textual and visual features for learning effective scene text representations. With the learning of textual features, the pre-trained model can attend texts in images well with character awareness. Besides, these designs enable the learning from weakly annotated texts (i.e. partial texts in images without text bounding boxes) which mitigates the data annotation constraint greatly. Experiments over the weakly annotated images in ICDAR2019-LSVT show that our pre-trained model improves F-score by +2.5\% and +4.8\% while transferring its weights to other text detection and spotting networks, respectively. In addition, the proposed method outperforms existing pre-training techniques consistently across multiple public datasets (e.g., +3.2\% and +1.3\% for Total-Text and CTW1500).
In traditional Visual Question Generation (VQG), most images have multiple concepts (e.g. objects and categories) for which a question could be generated, but models are trained to mimic an arbitrary choice of concept as given in their training data. This makes training difficult and also poses issues for evaluation -- multiple valid questions exist for most images but only one or a few are captured by the human references. We present Guiding Visual Question Generation - a variant of VQG which conditions the question generator on categorical information based on expectations on the type of question and the objects it should explore. We propose two variants: (i) an explicitly guided model that enables an actor (human or automated) to select which objects and categories to generate a question for; and (ii) an implicitly guided model that learns which objects and categories to condition on, based on discrete latent variables. The proposed models are evaluated on an answer-category augmented VQA dataset and our quantitative results show a substantial improvement over the current state of the art (over 9 BLEU-4 increase). Human evaluation validates that guidance helps the generation of questions that are grammatically coherent and relevant to the given image and objects.
Labeling a large set of data is expensive. Active learning aims to tackle this problem by asking to annotate only the most informative data from the unlabeled set. We propose a novel active learning approach that utilizes self-supervised pretext tasks and a unique data sampler to select data that are both difficult and representative. We discover that the loss of a simple self-supervised pretext task, such as rotation prediction, is closely correlated to the downstream task loss. Before the active learning iterations, the pretext task learner is trained on the unlabeled set, and the unlabeled data are sorted and split into batches by their pretext task losses. In each active learning iteration, the main task model is used to sample the most uncertain data in a batch to be annotated. We evaluate our method on various image classification and segmentation benchmarks and achieve compelling performances on CIFAR10, Caltech-101, ImageNet, and Cityscapes. We further show that our method performs well on imbalanced datasets, and can be an effective solution to the cold-start problem where active learning performance is affected by the randomly sampled initial labeled set.
Contrastive learning has shown great promise in the field of graph representation learning. By manually constructing positive/negative samples, most graph contrastive learning methods rely on the vector inner product based similarity metric to distinguish the samples for graph representation. However, the handcrafted sample construction (e.g., the perturbation on the nodes or edges of the graph) may not effectively capture the intrinsic local structures of the graph. Also, the vector inner product based similarity metric cannot fully exploit the local structures of the graph to characterize the graph difference well. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel adaptive subgraph generation based contrastive learning framework for efficient and robust self-supervised graph representation learning, and the optimal transport distance is utilized as the similarity metric between the subgraphs. It aims to generate contrastive samples by capturing the intrinsic structures of the graph and distinguish the samples based on the features and structures of subgraphs simultaneously. Specifically, for each center node, by adaptively learning relation weights to the nodes of the corresponding neighborhood, we first develop a network to generate the interpolated subgraph. We then construct the positive and negative pairs of subgraphs from the same and different nodes, respectively. Finally, we employ two types of optimal transport distances (i.e., Wasserstein distance and Gromov-Wasserstein distance) to construct the structured contrastive loss. Extensive node classification experiments on benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our graph contrastive learning method.
High-end vehicles have been furnished with a number of electronic control units (ECUs), which provide upgrading functions to enhance the driving experience. The controller area network (CAN) is a well-known protocol that connects these ECUs because of its modesty and efficiency. However, the CAN bus is vulnerable to various types of attacks. Although the intrusion detection system (IDS) is proposed to address the security problem of the CAN bus, most previous studies only provide alerts when attacks occur without knowing the specific type of attack. Moreover, an IDS is designed for a specific car model due to diverse car manufacturers. In this study, we proposed a novel deep learning model called supervised contrastive (SupCon) ResNet, which can handle multiple attack identification on the CAN bus. Furthermore, the model can be used to improve the performance of a limited-size dataset using a transfer learning technique. The capability of the proposed model is evaluated on two real car datasets. When tested with the car hacking dataset, the experiment results show that the SupCon ResNet model improves the overall false-negative rates of four types of attack by four times on average, compared to other models. In addition, the model achieves the highest F1 score at 0.9994 on the survival dataset by utilizing transfer learning. Finally, the model can adapt to hardware constraints in terms of memory size and running time.
Deep supervised learning has achieved great success in the last decade. However, its deficiencies of dependence on manual labels and vulnerability to attacks have driven people to explore a better solution. As an alternative, self-supervised learning attracts many researchers for its soaring performance on representation learning in the last several years. Self-supervised representation learning leverages input data itself as supervision and benefits almost all types of downstream tasks. In this survey, we take a look into new self-supervised learning methods for representation in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph learning. We comprehensively review the existing empirical methods and summarize them into three main categories according to their objectives: generative, contrastive, and generative-contrastive (adversarial). We further investigate related theoretical analysis work to provide deeper thoughts on how self-supervised learning works. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and future directions for self-supervised learning. An outline slide for the survey is provided.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
Joint image-text embedding is the bedrock for most Vision-and-Language (V+L) tasks, where multimodality inputs are jointly processed for visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we introduce UNITER, a UNiversal Image-TExt Representation, learned through large-scale pre-training over four image-text datasets (COCO, Visual Genome, Conceptual Captions, and SBU Captions), which can power heterogeneous downstream V+L tasks with joint multimodal embeddings. We design three pre-training tasks: Masked Language Modeling (MLM), Image-Text Matching (ITM), and Masked Region Modeling (MRM, with three variants). Different from concurrent work on multimodal pre-training that apply joint random masking to both modalities, we use conditioned masking on pre-training tasks (i.e., masked language/region modeling is conditioned on full observation of image/text). Comprehensive analysis shows that conditioned masking yields better performance than unconditioned masking. We also conduct a thorough ablation study to find an optimal setting for the combination of pre-training tasks. Extensive experiments show that UNITER achieves new state of the art across six V+L tasks (over nine datasets), including Visual Question Answering, Image-Text Retrieval, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Entailment, and NLVR2.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the difference between the actions committed by the expert (or ground truth) and the agent among complicated states in the environment. EE task benefits from these dynamic rewards because instances and labels yield to various extents of difficulty and the gains are expected to be diverse -- e.g., an ambiguous but correctly detected trigger or argument should receive high gains -- while the traditional RL models usually neglect such differences and pay equal attention on all instances. Moreover, our experiments also demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods, without explicit feature engineering.