Africa
Chunk-aware Alignment and Lexical Constraint for Visual Entailment with Natural Language Explanations
Yang, Qian, Li, Yunxin, Hu, Baotian, Ma, Lin, Ding, Yuxing, Zhang, Min
Visual Entailment with natural language explanations aims to infer the relationship between a text-image pair and generate a sentence to explain the decision-making process. Previous methods rely mainly on a pre-trained vision-language model to perform the relation inference and a language model to generate the corresponding explanation. However, the pre-trained vision-language models mainly build token-level alignment between text and image yet ignore the high-level semantic alignment between the phrases (chunks) and visual contents, which is critical for vision-language reasoning. Moreover, the explanation generator based only on the encoded joint representation does not explicitly consider the critical decision-making points of relation inference. Thus the generated explanations are less faithful to visual-language reasoning. To mitigate these problems, we propose a unified Chunk-aware Alignment and Lexical Constraint based method, dubbed as CALeC. It contains a Chunk-aware Semantic Interactor (arr. CSI), a relation inferrer, and a Lexical Constraint-aware Generator (arr. LeCG). Specifically, CSI exploits the sentence structure inherent in language and various image regions to build chunk-aware semantic alignment. Relation inferrer uses an attention-based reasoning network to incorporate the token-level and chunk-level vision-language representations. LeCG utilizes lexical constraints to expressly incorporate the words or chunks focused by the relation inferrer into explanation generation, improving the faithfulness and informativeness of the explanations. We conduct extensive experiments on three datasets, and experimental results indicate that CALeC significantly outperforms other competitor models on inference accuracy and quality of generated explanations.
GitHub - ARM-software/ComputeLibrary: The Compute Library is a set of computer vision and machine learning functions optimised for both Arm CPUs and GPUs using SIMD technologies.
Important From release 22.05: 'master' branch has been replaced with'main' following our inclusive language update, more information here. Important From release 22.08: armv7a with Android build will no longer be tested or maintained. The Compute Library is a collection of low-level machine learning functions optimized for Arm Cortex -A, Arm Neoverse and Arm Mali GPUs architectures. The library provides superior performance to other open source alternatives and immediate support for new Arm technologies e.g. Note: The documentation includes the reference API, changelogs, build guide, contribution guide, errata, etc.
Subspace clustering in high-dimensions: Phase transitions & Statistical-to-Computational gap
Pesce, Luca, Loureiro, Bruno, Krzakala, Florent, Zdeborová, Lenka
With the growing size of modern data, clustering techniques play an important role in reducing the dimensionality of the features used in modern Machine Learning pipelines. Indeed, in many tasks of interest ranging from DNA sequence analysis to image classification, the relevant features are known to live in a lower-dimensional space (intrinsic dimension) than their raw acquisition format (extrinsic dimension) [1]. In these cases, identifying these features can help saving computational resources while significantly improving on learning performance. But given a corrupted embedding of low-dimensional features in a high-dimensional space, is it always statistically possible to retrieve them? And if yes - how can reconstruction be achieved efficiently in practice? In this manuscript we address these two fundamental questions in a simple model for subspace clustering: a k-cluster Gaussian mixture model with sparse centroids. In this model, the low-dimensional hidden features are given by the sparse centroids, which are embedded in a higher dimensional space and corrupted by additive Gaussian noise. We assume that the number of non-zero components of the centroids as well as the number of samples scales linearly with the dimension of the embedding space. Given a finite sample from the mixture, the goal of the statistician is to cluster the data, i.e. estimate the centroids (or features) as well as possible.
Sub-quadratic Algorithms for Kernel Matrices via Kernel Density Estimation
Bakshi, Ainesh, Indyk, Piotr, Kacham, Praneeth, Silwal, Sandeep, Zhou, Samson
Kernel matrices, as well as weighted graphs represented by them, are ubiquitous objects in machine learning, statistics and other related fields. The main drawback of using kernel methods (learning and inference using kernel matrices) is efficiency -- given $n$ input points, most kernel-based algorithms need to materialize the full $n \times n$ kernel matrix before performing any subsequent computation, thus incurring $\Omega(n^2)$ runtime. Breaking this quadratic barrier for various problems has therefore, been a subject of extensive research efforts. We break the quadratic barrier and obtain $\textit{subquadratic}$ time algorithms for several fundamental linear-algebraic and graph processing primitives, including approximating the top eigenvalue and eigenvector, spectral sparsification, solving linear systems, local clustering, low-rank approximation, arboricity estimation and counting weighted triangles. We build on the recent Kernel Density Estimation framework, which (after preprocessing in time subquadratic in $n$) can return estimates of row/column sums of the kernel matrix. In particular, we develop efficient reductions from $\textit{weighted vertex}$ and $\textit{weighted edge sampling}$ on kernel graphs, $\textit{simulating random walks}$ on kernel graphs, and $\textit{importance sampling}$ on matrices to Kernel Density Estimation and show that we can generate samples from these distributions in $\textit{sublinear}$ (in the support of the distribution) time. Our reductions are the central ingredient in each of our applications and we believe they may be of independent interest. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms on low-rank approximation (LRA) and spectral sparsification, where we observe a $\textbf{9x}$ decrease in the number of kernel evaluations over baselines for LRA and a $\textbf{41x}$ reduction in the graph size for spectral sparsification.
Long-Document Cross-Lingual Summarization
Zheng, Shaohui, Li, Zhixu, Wang, Jiaan, Qu, Jianfeng, Liu, An, Zhao, Lei, Chen, Zhigang
Cross-Lingual Summarization (CLS) aims at generating summaries in one language for the given documents in another language. CLS has attracted wide research attention due to its practical significance in the multi-lingual world. Though great contributions have been made, existing CLS works typically focus on short documents, such as news articles, short dialogues and guides. Different from these short texts, long documents such as academic articles and business reports usually discuss complicated subjects and consist of thousands of words, making them non-trivial to process and summarize. To promote CLS research on long documents, we construct Perseus, the first long-document CLS dataset which collects about 94K Chinese scientific documents paired with English summaries. The average length of documents in Perseus is more than two thousand tokens. As a preliminary study on long-document CLS, we build and evaluate various CLS baselines, including pipeline and end-to-end methods. Experimental results on Perseus show the superiority of the end-to-end baseline, outperforming the strong pipeline models equipped with sophisticated machine translation systems. Furthermore, to provide a deeper understanding, we manually analyze the model outputs and discuss specific challenges faced by current approaches. We hope that our work could benchmark long-document CLS and benefit future studies.
Analyzing the State of Computer Science Research with the DBLP Discovery Dataset
The number of scientific publications continues to rise exponentially, especially in Computer Science (CS). However, current solutions to analyze those publications restrict access behind a paywall, offer no features for visual analysis, limit access to their data, only focus on niches or sub-fields, and/or are not flexible and modular enough to be transferred to other datasets. In this thesis, we conduct a scientometric analysis to uncover the implicit patterns hidden in CS metadata and to determine the state of CS research. Specifically, we investigate trends of the quantity, impact, and topics for authors, venues, document types (conferences vs. journals), and fields of study (compared to, e.g., medicine). To achieve this we introduce the CS-Insights system, an interactive web application to analyze CS publications with various dashboards, filters, and visualizations. The data underlying this system is the DBLP Discovery Dataset (D3), which contains metadata from 5 million CS publications. Both D3 and CS-Insights are open-access, and CS-Insights can be easily adapted to other datasets in the future. The most interesting findings of our scientometric analysis include that i) there has been a stark increase in publications, authors, and venues in the last two decades, ii) many authors only recently joined the field, iii) the most cited authors and venues focus on computer vision and pattern recognition, while the most productive prefer engineering-related topics, iv) the preference of researchers to publish in conferences over journals dwindles, v) on average, journal articles receive twice as many citations compared to conference papers, but the contrast is much smaller for the most cited conferences and journals, and vi) journals also get more citations in all other investigated fields of study, while only CS and engineering publish more in conferences than journals.
Non-Deterministic Approximation Fixpoint Theory and Its Application in Disjunctive Logic Programming
Heyninck, Jesse, Arieli, Ofer, Bogaerts, Bart
Semantics of various formalisms for knowledge representation can often be described by fixpoints of corresponding operators. For example, in many logics theories of a set of formulas can be seen as fixpoints of the underlying consequence operator [52]. Likewise, in logic programming, default logic or formal argumentation, all the major semantics can be formulated as different types of fixpoints of the same operator (see [22]). Such operators are usually non-monotonic, and so one cannot always be sure whether their fixpoints exist, and how they can be constructed. In order to deal with this'illusive nature' of the fixpoints, Denecker, Marek and Truszczyński [22] introduced a method for approximating each value z of the underlying operator by a pair of elements (x, y). These elements intuitively represent lower and upper bounds on z, and so a corresponding approximation operator for the original, non-monotonic operator, is constructed. If the approximating operator that is obtained is precision-monotonic, intuitively meaning that more precise inputs of the operator give rise to more precise outputs, then by Tarski and Knaster's Fixpoint Theorem the approximating operator has fixpoints that can be constructively computed, and which in turn approximate the fixpoints of the approximated operator, if such fixpoints exist. The usefulness of the algebraic theory that underlies the computation process described above was demonstrated on several knowledge representation formalisms, such as propositional logic programming [20], default logic [23], autoepistemic logic [23], abstract argumentation and abstract dialectical frameworks [50], hybrid MKNF [39], the graph description language SCHACL [11], and active integrity constraints [10], each one of which was shown to be an instantiation of this abstract theory of approximation.
Visual Classification via Description from Large Language Models
Vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP have shown promising performance on a variety of recognition tasks using the standard zero-shot classification procedure - computing similarity between the query image and the embedded words for each category. By only using the category name, they neglect to make use of the rich context of additional information that language affords. The procedure gives no intermediate understanding of why a category is chosen, and furthermore provides no mechanism for adjusting the criteria used towards this decision. We present an alternative framework for classification with VLMs, which we call classification by description. We ask VLMs to check for descriptive features rather than broad categories: to find a tiger, look for its stripes; its claws; and more. By basing decisions on these descriptors, we can provide additional cues that encourage using the features we want to be used. In the process, we can get a clear idea of what features the model uses to construct its decision; it gains some level of inherent explainability. We query large language models (e.g., GPT-3) for these descriptors to obtain them in a scalable way. Extensive experiments show our framework has numerous advantages past interpretability. We show improvements in accuracy on ImageNet across distribution shifts; demonstrate the ability to adapt VLMs to recognize concepts unseen during training; and illustrate how descriptors can be edited to effectively mitigate bias compared to the baseline. Why does a person recognize a hen in Fig.1?
Language Model Pre-training on True Negatives
Zhang, Zhuosheng, Zhao, Hai, Utiyama, Masao, Sumita, Eiichiro
Discriminative pre-trained language models (PLMs) learn to predict original texts from intentionally corrupted ones. Taking the former text as positive and the latter as negative samples, the PLM can be trained effectively for contextualized representation. However, the training of such a type of PLMs highly relies on the quality of the automatically constructed samples. Existing PLMs simply treat all corrupted texts as equal negative without any examination, which actually lets the resulting model inevitably suffer from the false negative issue where training is carried out on pseudo-negative data and leads to less efficiency and less robustness in the resulting PLMs. In this work, on the basis of defining the false negative issue in discriminative PLMs that has been ignored for a long time, we design enhanced pre-training methods to counteract false negative predictions and encourage pre-training language models on true negatives by correcting the harmful gradient updates subject to false negative predictions. Experimental results on GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks show that our counter-false-negative pre-training methods indeed bring about better performance together with stronger robustness.
GrannGAN: Graph annotation generative adversarial networks
Boget, Yoann, Gregorova, Magda, Kalousis, Alexandros
We consider the problem of modelling high-dimensional distributions and generating new examples of data with complex relational feature structure coherent with a graph skeleton. The model we propose tackles the problem of generating the data features constrained by the specific graph structure of each data point by splitting the task into two phases. In the first it models the distribution of features associated with the nodes of the given graph, in the second it complements the edge features conditionally on the node features. We follow the strategy of implicit distribution modelling via generative adversarial network (GAN) combined with permutation equivariant message passing architecture operating over the sets of nodes and edges. This enables generating the feature vectors of all the graph objects in one go (in 2 phases) as opposed to a much slower one-by-one generations of sequential models, prevents the need for expensive graph matching procedures usually needed for likelihood-based generative models, and uses efficiently the network capacity by being insensitive to the particular node ordering in the graph representation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method that models the feature distribution along the graph skeleton allowing for generations of annotated graphs with user specified structures. Our experiments demonstrate the ability of our model to learn complex structured distributions through quantitative evaluation over three annotated graph datasets.