Document denoising and binarization are fundamental problems in the document processing space, but current datasets are often too small and lack sufficient complexity to effectively train and benchmark modern data-driven machine learning models. To fill this gap, we introduce ShabbyPages, a new document image dataset designed for training and benchmarking document denoisers and binarizers. ShabbyPages contains over 6,000 clean "born digital" images with synthetically-noised counterparts ("shabby pages") that were augmented using the Augraphy document augmentation tool to appear as if they have been printed and faxed, photocopied, or otherwise altered through physical processes. In this paper, we discuss the creation process of ShabbyPages and demonstrate the utility of ShabbyPages by training convolutional denoisers which remove real noise features with a high degree of human-perceptible fidelity, establishing baseline performance for a new ShabbyPages benchmark.
This research aims to explore various methods for assessing user feedback in mixed-initiative conversational search (CS) systems. While CS systems enjoy profuse advancements across multiple aspects, recent research fails to successfully incorporate feedback from the users. One of the main reasons for that is the lack of system-user conversational interaction data. To this end, we propose a user simulator-based framework for multi-turn interactions with a variety of mixed-initiative CS systems. Specifically, we develop a user simulator, dubbed ConvSim, that, once initialized with an information need description, is capable of providing feedback to a system's responses, as well as answering potential clarifying questions. Our experiments on a wide variety of state-of-the-art passage retrieval and neural re-ranking models show that effective utilization of user feedback can lead to 16% retrieval performance increase in terms of nDCG@3. Moreover, we observe consistent improvements as the number of feedback rounds increases (35% relative improvement in terms of nDCG@3 after three rounds). This points to a research gap in the development of specific feedback processing modules and opens a potential for significant advancements in CS. To support further research in the topic, we release over 30,000 transcripts of system-simulator interactions based on well-established CS datasets.
While strides have been made in deep learning based Bengali Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in the past decade, the absence of large Document Layout Analysis (DLA) datasets has hindered the application of OCR in document transcription, e.g., transcribing historical documents and newspapers. Moreover, rule-based DLA systems that are currently being employed in practice are not robust to domain variations and out-of-distribution layouts. To this end, we present the first multidomain large Bengali Document Layout Analysis Dataset: BaDLAD. This dataset contains 33,695 human annotated document samples from six domains - i) books and magazines, ii) public domain govt. documents, iii) liberation war documents, iv) newspapers, v) historical newspapers, and vi) property deeds, with 710K polygon annotations for four unit types: text-box, paragraph, image, and table. Through preliminary experiments benchmarking the performance of existing state-of-the-art deep learning architectures for English DLA, we demonstrate the efficacy of our dataset in training deep learning based Bengali document digitization models.
We present a neural network-based simulation super-resolution framework that can efficiently and realistically enhance a facial performance produced by a low-cost, realtime physics-based simulation to a level of detail that closely approximates that of a reference-quality off-line simulator with much higher resolution (26x element count in our examples) and accurate physical modeling. Our approach is rooted in our ability to construct - via simulation - a training set of paired frames, from the low- and high-resolution simulators respectively, that are in semantic correspondence with each other. We use face animation as an exemplar of such a simulation domain, where creating this semantic congruence is achieved by simply dialing in the same muscle actuation controls and skeletal pose in the two simulators. Our proposed neural network super-resolution framework generalizes from this training set to unseen expressions, compensates for modeling discrepancies between the two simulations due to limited resolution or cost-cutting approximations in the real-time variant, and does not require any semantic descriptors or parameters to be provided as input, other than the result of the real-time simulation. We evaluate the efficacy of our pipeline on a variety of expressive performances and provide comparisons and ablation experiments for plausible variations and alternatives to our proposed scheme.
We present methods for conditional and residual coding in the context of scalable coding for humans and machines. Our focus is on optimizing the rate-distortion performance of the reconstruction task using the information available in the computer vision task. We include an information analysis of both approaches to provide baselines and also propose an entropy model suitable for conditional coding with increased modelling capacity and similar tractability as previous work. We apply these methods to image reconstruction, using, in one instance, representations created for semantic segmentation on the Cityscapes dataset, and in another instance, representations created for object detection on the COCO dataset. In both experiments, we obtain similar performance between the conditional and residual methods, with the resulting rate-distortion curves contained within our baselines.
Large multimodal datasets have been instrumental in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion, and GPT-4. At the same time, datasets rarely receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce DataComp, a benchmark where the training code is fixed and researchers innovate by proposing new training sets. We provide a testbed for dataset experiments centered around a new candidate pool of 12.8B image-text pairs from Common Crawl. Participants in our benchmark design new filtering techniques or curate new data sources and then evaluate their new dataset by running our standardized CLIP training code and testing on 38 downstream test sets. Our benchmark consists of multiple scales, with four candidate pool sizes and associated compute budgets ranging from 12.8M to 12.8B samples seen during training. This multi-scale design facilitates the study of scaling trends and makes the benchmark accessible to researchers with varying resources. Our baseline experiments show that the DataComp workflow is a promising way of improving multimodal datasets. We introduce DataComp-1B, a dataset created by applying a simple filtering algorithm to the 12.8B candidate pool. The resulting 1.4B subset enables training a CLIP ViT-L/14 from scratch to 79.2% zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet. Our new ViT-L/14 model outperforms a larger ViT-g/14 trained on LAION-2B by 0.7 percentage points while requiring 9x less training compute. We also outperform OpenAI's CLIP ViT-L/14 by 3.7 percentage points, which is trained with the same compute budget as our model. These gains highlight the potential for improving model performance by carefully curating training sets. We view DataComp-1B as only the first step and hope that DataComp paves the way toward the next generation of multimodal datasets.
Multimodal learning helps to comprehensively understand the world, by integrating different senses. Accordingly, multiple input modalities are expected to boost model performance, but we actually find that they are not fully exploited even when the multimodal model outperforms its uni-modal counterpart. Specifically, in this paper we point out that existing multimodal discriminative models, in which uniform objective is designed for all modalities, could remain under-optimized uni-modal representations, caused by another dominated modality in some scenarios, e.g., sound in blowing wind event, vision in drawing picture event, etc. To alleviate this optimization imbalance, we propose on-the-fly gradient modulation to adaptively control the optimization of each modality, via monitoring the discrepancy of their contribution towards the learning objective. Further, an extra Gaussian noise that changes dynamically is introduced to avoid possible generalization drop caused by gradient modulation. As a result, we achieve considerable improvement over common fusion methods on different multimodal tasks, and this simple strategy can also boost existing multimodal methods, which illustrates its efficacy and versatility. The source code is available at \url{//github.com/GeWu-Lab/OGM-GE_CVPR2022}.
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular paradigm for addressing sequential decision tasks in which the agent has only limited environmental feedback. Despite many advances over the past three decades, learning in many domains still requires a large amount of interaction with the environment, which can be prohibitively expensive in realistic scenarios. To address this problem, transfer learning has been applied to reinforcement learning such that experience gained in one task can be leveraged when starting to learn the next, harder task. More recently, several lines of research have explored how tasks, or data samples themselves, can be sequenced into a curriculum for the purpose of learning a problem that may otherwise be too difficult to learn from scratch. In this article, we present a framework for curriculum learning (CL) in reinforcement learning, and use it to survey and classify existing CL methods in terms of their assumptions, capabilities, and goals. Finally, we use our framework to find open problems and suggest directions for future RL curriculum learning research.
Pre-training techniques have been verified successfully in a variety of NLP tasks in recent years. Despite the widespread of pre-training models for NLP applications, they almost focused on text-level manipulation, while neglecting the layout and style information that is vital for document image understanding. In this paper, we propose the LayoutLM to jointly model the interaction between text and layout information across scanned document images, which is beneficial for a great number of real-world document image understanding tasks such as information extraction from scanned documents. Furthermore, we also leverage the image features to incorporate the visual information of words into LayoutLM. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that text and layout are jointly learned in a single framework for document-level pre-training. It achieves new state-of-the-art results in several downstream tasks, including form understanding (from 70.72 to 79.27), receipt understanding (from 94.02 to 95.24) and document image classification (from 93.07 to 94.42). The code and pre-trained LayoutLM models are publicly available at //github.com/microsoft/unilm/tree/master/layoutlm.
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails to reveal the underlying structure, and the practitioner has to custom-design their own variation. In this work we take an intrinsically different approach to clustering: rather than fitting a dataset to a specific clustering loss, we train a recurrent model that learns how to cluster. The model uses as training pairs examples of datasets (as input) and its corresponding cluster identities (as output). By providing multiple types of training datasets as inputs, our model has the ability to generalize well on unseen datasets (new clustering tasks). Our experiments reveal that by training on simple synthetically generated datasets or on existing real datasets, we can achieve better clustering performance on unseen real-world datasets when compared with standard benchmark clustering techniques. Our meta clustering model works well even for small datasets where the usual deep learning models tend to perform worse.
Model-agnostic meta-learners aim to acquire meta-learned parameters from similar tasks to adapt to novel tasks from the same distribution with few gradient updates. With the flexibility in the choice of models, those frameworks demonstrate appealing performance on a variety of domains such as few-shot image classification and reinforcement learning. However, one important limitation of such frameworks is that they seek a common initialization shared across the entire task distribution, substantially limiting the diversity of the task distributions that they are able to learn from. In this paper, we augment MAML with the capability to identify the mode of tasks sampled from a multimodal task distribution and adapt quickly through gradient updates. Specifically, we propose a multimodal MAML (MMAML) framework, which is able to modulate its meta-learned prior parameters according to the identified mode, allowing more efficient fast adaptation. We evaluate the proposed model on a diverse set of few-shot learning tasks, including regression, image classification, and reinforcement learning. The results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in modulating the meta-learned prior in response to the characteristics of tasks but also show that training on a multimodal distribution can produce an improvement over unimodal training.