This paper focuses on analyzing and improving the commonsense ability of recent popular vision-language (VL) models. Despite the great success, we observe that existing VL-models still lack commonsense knowledge/reasoning ability (e.g., "Lemons are sour"), which is a vital component towards artificial general intelligence. Through our analysis, we find one important reason is that existing large-scale VL datasets do not contain much commonsense knowledge, which motivates us to improve the commonsense of VL-models from the data perspective. Rather than collecting a new VL training dataset, we propose a more scalable strategy, i.e., "Data Augmentation with kNowledge graph linearization for CommonsensE capability" (DANCE). It can be viewed as one type of data augmentation technique, which can inject commonsense knowledge into existing VL datasets on the fly during training. More specifically, we leverage the commonsense knowledge graph (e.g., ConceptNet) and create variants of text description in VL datasets via bidirectional sub-graph sequentialization. For better commonsense evaluation, we further propose the first retrieval-based commonsense diagnostic benchmark. By conducting extensive experiments on some representative VL-models, we demonstrate that our DANCE technique is able to significantly improve the commonsense ability while maintaining the performance on vanilla retrieval tasks. The code and data are available at https://github.com/pleaseconnectwifi/DANCE

Over the past years, fashion-related challenges have gained a lot of attention in the research community. Outfit generation and recommendation, i.e., the composition of a set of items of different types (e.g., tops, bottom, shoes, accessories) that go well together, are among the most challenging ones. That is because items have to be both compatible amongst each other and also personalized to match the taste of the customer. Recently there has been a plethora of work targeted at tackling these problems by adopting various techniques and algorithms from the machine learning literature. However, to date, there is no extensive comparison of the performance of the different algorithms for outfit generation and recommendation. In this paper, we close this gap by providing a broad evaluation and comparison of various algorithms, including both personalized and non-personalized approaches, using online, real-world user data from one of Europe's largest fashion stores. We present the adaptations we made to some of those models to make them suitable for personalized outfit generation. Moreover, we provide insights for models that have not yet been evaluated on this task, specifically, GPT, BERT and Seq-to-Seq LSTM.

Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) is a class of popular state-of-the-art Imitation Learning algorithms commonly used in robotics. In AIL, an artificial adversary's misclassification is used as a reward signal that is optimized by any standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm. Unlike most RL settings, the reward in AIL is $differentiable$ but current model-free RL algorithms do not make use of this property to train a policy. The reward is AIL is also shaped since it comes from an adversary. We leverage the differentiability property of the shaped AIL reward function and formulate a class of Actor Residual Critic (ARC) RL algorithms. ARC algorithms draw a parallel to the standard Actor-Critic (AC) algorithms in RL literature and uses a residual critic, $C$ function (instead of the standard $Q$ function) to approximate only the discounted future return (excluding the immediate reward). ARC algorithms have similar convergence properties as the standard AC algorithms with the additional advantage that the gradient through the immediate reward is exact. For the discrete (tabular) case with finite states, actions, and known dynamics, we prove that policy iteration with $C$ function converges to an optimal policy. In the continuous case with function approximation and unknown dynamics, we experimentally show that ARC aided AIL outperforms standard AIL in simulated continuous-control and real robotic manipulation tasks. ARC algorithms are simple to implement and can be incorporated into any existing AIL implementation with an AC algorithm. Video and link to code are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/actor-residual-critic.

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) facilitates the open-domain discovery of textual facts. However, the prevailing solutions evaluate OpenIE models on in-domain test sets aside from the training corpus, which certainly violates the initial task principle of domain-independence. In this paper, we propose to advance OpenIE towards a more realistic scenario: generalizing over unseen target domains with different data distributions from the source training domains, termed Generalized OpenIE. For this purpose, we first introduce GLOBE, a large-scale human-annotated multi-domain OpenIE benchmark, to examine the robustness of recent OpenIE models to domain shifts, and the relative performance degradation of up to 70% implies the challenges of generalized OpenIE. Then, we propose DragonIE, which explores a minimalist graph expression of textual fact: directed acyclic graph, to improve the OpenIE generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DragonIE beats the previous methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings by as much as 6.0% in F1 score absolutely, but there is still ample room for improvement.

In this study, we investigate the generalization of LSTM, ReLU and GRU models on counting tasks over long sequences. Previous theoretical work has established that RNNs with ReLU activation and LSTMs have the capacity for counting with suitable configuration, while GRUs have limitations that prevent correct counting over longer sequences. Despite this and some positive empirical results for LSTMs on Dyck-1 languages, our experimental results show that LSTMs fail to learn correct counting behavior for sequences that are significantly longer than in the training data. ReLUs show much larger variance in behavior and in most cases worse generalization. The long sequence generalization is empirically related to validation loss, but reliable long sequence generalization seems not practically achievable through backpropagation with current techniques. We demonstrate different failure modes for LSTMs, GRUs and ReLUs. In particular, we observe that the saturation of activation functions in LSTMs and the correct weight setting for ReLUs to generalize counting behavior are not achieved in standard training regimens. In summary, learning generalizable counting behavior is still an open problem and we discuss potential approaches for further research.

Place recognition is a fundamental component of robotics, and has seen tremendous improvements through the use of deep learning models in recent years. Networks can experience significant drops in performance when deployed in unseen or highly dynamic environments, and require additional training on the collected data. However naively fine-tuning on new training distributions can cause severe degradation of performance on previously visited domains, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper we address the problem of incremental learning for point cloud place recognition and introduce InCloud, a structure-aware distillation-based approach which preserves the higher-order structure of the network's embedding space. We introduce several challenging new benchmarks on four popular and large-scale LiDAR datasets (Oxford, MulRan, In-house and KITTI) showing broad improvements in point cloud place recognition performance over a variety of network architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to effectively apply incremental learning for point cloud place recognition. Data pre-processing, training and evaluation code for this paper can be found at https://github.com/csiro-robotics/InCloud.

We are interested in neurosymbolic systems consisting of a high-level symbolic layer for explainable prediction in terms of human-intelligible concepts; and a low-level neural layer for extracting symbols required to generate the symbolic explanation. Real data is often imperfect meaning that even if the symbolic theory remains unchanged, we may still need to address the problem of mapping raw data to high-level symbols, each time there is a change in the data acquisition environment or equipment. Manual (re-)annotation of the raw data each time this happens is laborious and expensive; and automated labelling methods are often imperfect, especially for complex problems. NEUROLOG proposed the use of a semantic loss function that allows an existing feature-based symbolic model to guide the extraction of feature-values from raw data, using `abduction'. However, the experiments demonstrating the use of semantic loss through abduction appear to rely heavily on a domain-specific pre-processing step that enables a prior delineation of feature locations in the raw data. We examine the use of semantic loss in domains where such pre-processing is not possible, or is not obvious. We show that without any prior information about the features, the NEUROLOG approach can continue to predict accurately even with substantially incorrect feature predictions. We show also that prior information about the features in the form of even imperfect pre-training can help correct this situation. These findings are replicated on the original problem considered by NEUROLOG, without the use of feature-delineation. This suggests that symbolic explanations constructed for data in a domain could be re-used in a related domain, by `feature-adaptation' of pre-trained neural extractors using the semantic loss function constrained by abductive feedback.

The behaviour of statistical relational representations across differently sized domains has become a focal area of research from both a modelling and a complexity viewpoint.Recently, projectivity of a family of distributions emerged as a key property, ensuring that marginal probabilities are independent of the domain size. However, the formalisation used currently assumes that the domain is characterised only by its size. This contribution extends the notion of projectivity from families of distributions indexed by domain size to functors taking extensional data from a database. This makes projectivity available for the large range of applications taking structured input. We transfer key known results on projective families of distributions to the new setting. This includes a characterisation of projective fragments in different statistical relational formalisms as well as a general representation theorem for projective families of distributions. Furthermore, we prove a correspondence between projectivity and distributions on countably infinite domains, which we use to unify and generalise earlier work on statistical relational representations in infinite domains. Finally, we use the extended notion of projectivity to define a further strengthening, which we call $\sigma$-projectivity, and which allows the use of the same representation in different modes while retaining projectivity.

Multilingual pretrained models are effective for machine translation and cross-lingual processing because they contain multiple languages in one model. However, they are pretrained after their tokenizers are fixed; therefore it is difficult to change the vocabulary after pretraining. When we extend the pretrained models to new languages, we must modify the tokenizers simultaneously. In this paper, we add new subwords to the SentencePiece tokenizer to apply a multilingual pretrained model to new languages (Inuktitut in this paper). In our experiments, we segmented Inuktitut sentences into subwords without changing the segmentation of already pretrained languages, and applied the mBART-50 pretrained model to English-Inuktitut translation.

The instrumental variable (IV) approach is a widely used way to estimate the causal effects of a treatment on an outcome of interest from observational data with latent confounders. A standard IV is expected to be related to the treatment variable and independent of all other variables in the system. However, it is challenging to search for a standard IV from data directly due to the strict conditions. The conditional IV (CIV) method has been proposed to allow a variable to be an instrument conditioning on a set of variables, allowing a wider choice of possible IVs and enabling broader practical applications of the IV approach. Nevertheless, there is not a data-driven method to discover a CIV and its conditioning set directly from data. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose to learn the representations of the information of a CIV and its conditioning set from data with latent confounders for average causal effect estimation. By taking advantage of deep generative models, we develop a novel data-driven approach for simultaneously learning the representation of a CIV from measured variables and generating the representation of its conditioning set given measured variables. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that our method outperforms the existing IV methods.