Graph neural networks (GNN) has been successfully applied to operate on the graph-structured data. Given a specific scenario, rich human expertise and tremendous laborious trials are usually required to identify a suitable GNN architecture. It is because the performance of a GNN architecture is significantly affected by the choice of graph convolution components, such as aggregate function and hidden dimension. Neural architecture search (NAS) has shown its potential in discovering effective deep architectures for learning tasks in image and language modeling. However, existing NAS algorithms cannot be directly applied to the GNN search problem. First, the search space of GNN is different from the ones in existing NAS work. Second, the representation learning capacity of GNN architecture changes obviously with slight architecture modifications. It affects the search efficiency of traditional search methods. Third, widely used techniques in NAS such as parameter sharing might become unstable in GNN. To bridge the gap, we propose the automated graph neural networks (AGNN) framework, which aims to find an optimal GNN architecture within a predefined search space. A reinforcement learning based controller is designed to greedily validate architectures via small steps. AGNN has a novel parameter sharing strategy that enables homogeneous architectures to share parameters, based on a carefully-designed homogeneity definition. Experiments on real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the GNN architecture identified by AGNN achieves the best performance, comparing with existing handcrafted models and tradistional search methods.

-- In this paper we propose a deep neural network model with an encoder-decoder architecture that translates images of math formulas into their LaTeX markup sequences. The enc oder is a convolutional neural network (CNN) that transforms images into a group of feature maps. To better capture the spatia l relationships of math symbols, the feature maps are augmented with 2D positional encoding before being unfolded into a vector. The d ecoder is a stacked bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) model integrated with the soft attention mechanism, which works as a language model to translate the encoder output into a sequence of LaTeX tokens. The neural network is trained in two steps. The first step is token-level training using the Maximum-Like lihood Estimation (MLE) as the objective function. At comp letion of the token-level training, the sequence-level training objective function is employed to optimize the overall model based on the policy gradient algorithm from reinforcement learning. Our design a lso overcomes the exposure bias problem by closing the feedback l oop in the decoder during sequence-level training, i.e., feedi ng in the predicted token instead of the ground truth token at every time step. The model is trained and evaluated on the IM2LATEX-100K dataset and shows state-of-the-art performance on both sequence-based and image-based evaluation metrics. Math formulas often carry the most significant tech nical substances in many science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Being able to extract the math formulas from digital documents and translate them into markup la nguages is very useful for a wide range of information retriev al tasks. Portable Document Format (PDF) is the de facto standard publication format, which makes document distributi on very easy and reliable.

Representation learning over graph structured data has been mostly studied in static graph settings while efforts for modeling dynamic graphs are still scant. In this paper, we develop a novel hierarchical variational model that introduces additional latent random variables to jointly model the hidden states of a graph recurrent neural network (GRNN) to capture both topology and node attribute changes in dynamic graphs. We argue that the use of high-level latent random variables in this variational GRNN (VGRNN) can better capture potential variability observed in dynamic graphs as well as the uncertainty of node latent representation. With semi-implicit variational inference developed for this new VGRNN architecture (SI-VGRNN), we show that flexible non-Gaussian latent representations can further help dynamic graph analytic tasks. Our experiments with multiple real-world dynamic graph datasets demonstrate that SI-VGRNN and VGRNN consistently outperform the existing baseline and state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in dynamic link prediction.

In this paper, we address the automatic sentence generation of fetching instructions for domestic service robots. Typical fetching commands such as "bring me the yellow toy from the upper part of the white shelf" includes referring expressions, i.e., "from the white upper part of the white shelf". To solve this task, we propose a multimodal attention branch network (Multi-ABN) which generates natural sentences in an end-to-end manner. Multi-ABN uses multiple images of the same fixed scene to generate sentences that are not tied to a particular viewpoint. This approach combines a linguistic attention branch mechanism with several attention branch mechanisms. We evaluated our approach, which outperforms the state-of-the-art method on a standard metrics. Our method also allows us to visualize the alignment between the linguistic input and the visual features.

Visualization refers to our ability to create an image in our head based on the text we read or the words we hear. It is one of the many skills that makes reading comprehension possible. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are an excellent tool for recognizing and classifying text documents. In addition, it can generate images conditioned on natural language. In this work, we utilize CNNs capabilities to generate realistic images representative of the text illustrating the semantic concept. We conducted various experiments to highlight the capacity of the proposed model to generate representative images of the text descriptions used as input to the proposed model.

Countering online hate speech is a critical yet challenging task, but one which can be aided by the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Previous research has primarily focused on the development of NLP methods to automatically and effectively detect online hate speech while disregarding further action needed to calm and discourage individuals from using hate speech in the future. In addition, most existing hate speech datasets treat each post as an isolated instance, ignoring the conversational context. In this paper, we propose a novel task of generative hate speech intervention, where the goal is to automatically generate responses to intervene during online conversations that contain hate speech. As a part of this work, we introduce two fully-labeled large-scale hate speech intervention datasets collected from Gab and Reddit. These datasets provide conversation segments, hate speech labels, as well as intervention responses written by Mechanical Turk Workers. In this paper, we also analyze the datasets to understand the common intervention strategies and explore the performance of common automatic response generation methods on these new datasets to provide a benchmark for future research.

Current training regimes for deep learning usually involve exposure to a single task / dataset at a time. Here we start from the observation that in this context the trained model is not given any knowledge of anything outside its (single) training distribution, and has thus no way to learn parameters (i.e., feature detectors or policies) that could be helpful to solve other tasks, and to limit future interference on the acquired knowledge, and thus catastrophic forgetting. Here we show that catastrophic forgetting can be mitigated in a meta-learning context, by exposing a neural network to multiple tasks in a sequential manner during training. Finally, we present SeqFOMAML, a meta-learning algorithm that implements these principles, and we evaluate it on a sequential learning problem composed by Omniglot classification tasks.

Deep learning has been widely utilized in many computer vision applications and achieved remarkable commercial success. However, running deep learning models on mobile devices is generally challenging due to limitation of the available computing resources. It is common to let the users send their service requests to cloud servers that run the large-scale deep learning models to process. Sending the data associated with the service requests to the cloud, however, impose risks on the user data privacy. Some prior arts proposed sending the features extracted from raw data (e.g., images) to the cloud. Unfortunately, these extracted features can still be exploited by attackers to recover raw images and to infer embedded private attributes (e.g., age, gender, etc.). In this paper, we propose an adversarial training framework DeepObfuscator that can prevent extracted features from being utilized to reconstruct raw images and infer private attributes, while retaining the useful information for the intended cloud service (i.e., image classification). DeepObfuscator includes a learnable encoder, namely, obfuscator that is designed to hide privacy-related sensitive information from the features by performingour proposed adversarial training algorithm. Our experiments on CelebAdataset show that the quality of the reconstructed images fromthe obfuscated features of the raw image is dramatically decreased from 0.9458 to 0.3175 in terms of multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM). The person in the reconstructed image, hence, becomes hardly to be re-identified. The classification accuracy of the inferred private attributes that can be achieved by the attacker drops down to a random-guessing level, e.g., the accuracy of gender is reduced from 97.36% to 58.85%. As a comparison, the accuracy of the intended classification tasks performed via the cloud service drops by only 2%

Owing to the susceptibility of deep learning systems to adversarial attacks, there has been a great deal of work in developing (both empirically and certifiably) robust classifiers, but the vast majority has defended against single types of attacks. Recent work has looked at defending against multiple attacks, specifically on the MNIST dataset, yet this approach used a relatively complex architecture, claiming that standard adversarial training can not apply because it "overfits" to a particular norm. In this work, we show that it is indeed possible to adversarially train a robust model against a union of norm-bounded attacks, by using a natural generalization of the standard PGD-based procedure for adversarial training to multiple threat models. With this approach, we are able to train standard architectures which are robust against $\ell_\infty$, $\ell_2$, and $\ell_1$ attacks, outperforming past approaches on the MNIST dataset and providing the first CIFAR10 network trained to be simultaneously robust against $(\ell_{\infty}, \ell_{2},\ell_{1})$ threat models, which achieves adversarial accuracy rates of $(47.6\%, 64.8\%, 53.4\%)$ for $(\ell_{\infty}, \ell_{2},\ell_{1})$ perturbations with radius $\epsilon = (0.03,0.5,12)$.

Traditional recommendation systems produce static rather than interactive recommendations invariant to a user's specific requests, clarifications, or current mood, and can suffer from the cold-start problem if their tastes are unknown. These issues can be alleviated by treating recommendation as an interactive dialogue task instead, where an expert recommender can sequentially ask about someone's preferences, react to their requests, and recommend more appropriate items. In this work, we collect a goal-driven recommendation dialogue dataset (GoRecDial), which consists of 9,125 dialogue games and 81,260 conversation turns between pairs of human workers recommending movies to each other. The task is specifically designed as a cooperative game between two players working towards a quantifiable common goal. We leverage the dataset to develop an end-to-end dialogue system that can simultaneously converse and recommend. Models are first trained to imitate the behavior of human players without considering the task goal itself (supervised training). We then finetune our models on simulated bot-bot conversations between two paired pre-trained models (bot-play), in order to achieve the dialogue goal. Our experiments show that models finetuned with bot-play learn improved dialogue strategies, reach the dialogue goal more often when paired with a human, and are rated as more consistent by humans compared to models trained without bot-play. The dataset and code are publicly available through the ParlAI framework.