Media
Analyzing movies to predict their commercial viability for producers
Swami, Devendra, Phogat, Yash, Batlaw, Aadiraj, Goyal, Ashwin
Upon film premiere, a major form of speculation concerns the relative success of the film. This relativity is in particular regards to the film's original budget, as many a time have big-budget blockbusters been met with exceptional success as met with abject failure. So how does one predict the success of an upcoming film? In this paper, we explored a vast array of film data in an attempt to develop a model that could predict the expected return of an upcoming film. The approach to this development is as follows: First, we began with the MovieLens dataset having common movie attributes along with genome tags per each film. Genome tags give insight into what particular characteristics of the film are most salient. We then included additional features regarding film content, cast/crew, audience perception, budget, and earnings from TMDB, IMDB, and Metacritic websites. Next, we performed exploratory data analysis and engineered a wide range of new features capturing historical information for the available features. Thereafter, we used singular value decomposition (SVD) for dimensionality reduction of the high dimensional features (ex. genome tags). Finally, we built a Random Forest Classifier and performed hyper-parameter tuning to optimize for model accuracy. A future application of our model could be seen in the film industry, allowing production companies to better predict the expected return of their projects based on their envisioned outline for their production procedure, thereby allowing them to revise their plan in an attempt to achieve optimal returns.
Off-Policy Evaluation of Slate Policies under Bayes Risk
Vlassis, Nikos, Gil, Fernando Amat, Chandrashekar, Ashok
We study the problem of off-policy evaluation for slate bandits, for the typical case in which the logging policy factorizes over the slots of the slate. We slightly depart from the existing literature by taking Bayes risk as the criterion by which to evaluate estimators, and we analyze the family of 'additive' estimators that includes the pseudoinverse (PI) estimator of Swaminathan et al.\ (2017; arXiv:1605.04812). Using a control variate approach, we identify a new estimator in this family that is guaranteed to have lower risk than PI in the above class of problems. In particular, we show that the risk improvement over PI grows linearly with the number of slots, and linearly with the gap between the arithmetic and the harmonic mean of a set of slot-level divergences between the logging and the target policy. In the typical case of a uniform logging policy and a deterministic target policy, each divergence corresponds to slot size, showing that maximal gains can be obtained for slate problems with diverse numbers of actions per slot.
Transformer-based Conditional Variational Autoencoder for Controllable Story Generation
Fang, Le, Zeng, Tao, Liu, Chaochun, Bo, Liefeng, Dong, Wen, Chen, Changyou
We investigate large-scale latent variable models (LVMs) for neural story generation -- an under-explored application for open-domain long text -- with objectives in two threads: generation effectiveness and controllability. LVMs, especially the variational autoencoder (VAE), have achieved both effective and controllable generation through exploiting flexible distributional latent representations. Recently, Transformers and its variants have achieved remarkable effectiveness without explicit latent representation learning, thus lack satisfying controllability in generation. In this paper, we advocate to revive latent variable modeling, essentially the power of representation learning, in the era of Transformers to enhance controllability without hurting state-of-the-art generation effectiveness. Specifically, we integrate latent representation vectors with a Transformer-based pre-trained architecture to build conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE). Model components such as encoder, decoder and the variational posterior are all built on top of pre-trained language models -- GPT2 specifically in this paper. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art conditional generation ability of our model, as well as its excellent representation learning capability and controllability.
Newt Gingrich: My predictions for next 10 years -- I expect these big changes
Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Every once in a while, it's crucial to step back from the immediate mess and gossip and all the little things we tend to focus on each day to look at our world from a 30,000-foot view, to project what we should expect moving forward. As we enter a new decade, this seems like the perfect time to think about and prepare for what may come over the next 10 years both at home and abroad. To state the obvious, this is not an exact science.
Retrieving and Reading: A Comprehensive Survey on Open-domain Question Answering
Zhu, Fengbin, Lei, Wenqiang, Wang, Chao, Zheng, Jianming, Poria, Soujanya, Chua, Tat-Seng
Open-domain Question Answering (OpenQA) is an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which aims to answer a question in the form of natural language based on large-scale unstructured documents. Recently, there has been a surge in the amount of research literature on OpenQA, particularly on techniques that integrate with neural Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). While these research works have advanced performance to new heights on benchmark datasets, they have been rarely covered in existing surveys on QA systems. In this work, we review the latest research trends in OpenQA, with particular attention to systems that incorporate neural MRC techniques. Specifically, we begin with revisiting the origin and development of OpenQA systems. We then introduce modern OpenQA architecture named ``Retriever-Reader'' and analyze the various systems that follow this architecture as well as the specific techniques adopted in each of the components. We then discuss key challenges to developing OpenQA systems and offer an analysis of benchmarks that are commonly used. We hope our work would enable researchers to be informed of the recent advancement and also the open challenges in OpenQA research, so as to stimulate further progress in this field.
Humanity Is in Danger of Becoming Obsolete in LX 2048
A fatally ill man tries to secure the future of his family in a near-future world where the toxicity of the sun forces people to stay inside during the daytime in LX 2048, starring James D'Arcy (Agent Carter, Homeland). It's a flawed yet thought-provoking, surreal science-fiction film, chock-full of big ideas on our relationship to technology and what it means to be human, all beautifully anchored by D'Arcy's fantastic performance. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. D'Arcy plays Adam Bird, a married father of three on the brink of divorce from his wife, Reena (Anna Brewster). The year is 2048, and people are largely living indoors during the day because the sunlight is powerful enough to scald human skin instantly.