To address this shortcoming, we introduce'Graph Structured Prediction Energy Networks,' for which we develop inference techniques that allow to both model explicit local and implicit

Post-feedback update: Thank you for your update. Your additional results will strengthen this paper, and I still think it should be accepted. Specifically, it combines the basic overall framework for SPEN training using a reward signal introduced by [1] with the idea of adding in random search to find reward scoring violations, which has been used in the past by various papers (which are cited appropriately in this work). However, this exact combination is novel. Quality: The motivation behind using random search to augment the generation of labels to use for training the model is sound and verified empirically. Numerous appropriate baselines are included, ranging from beam search-type approaches to more directly comparable approaches such as [1], and the introduced approach outperforms all of them.

All the reviewers support this paper after the authors' response clarified the raised issues. I recommend the authors to update the paper according to the suggestions.

In structured output prediction tasks, labeling ground-truth training output is often expensive. However, for many tasks, even when the true output is unknown, we can evaluate predictions using a scalar reward function, which may be easily assembled from human knowledge or non-differentiable pipelines. But searching through the entire output space to find the best output with respect to this reward function is typically intractable. In this paper, we instead use efficient truncated randomized search in this reward function to train structured prediction energy networks (SPENs), which provide efficient test-time inference using gradient-based search on a smooth, learned representation of the score landscape, and have previously yielded state-of-the-art results in structured prediction. In particular, this truncated randomized search in the reward function yields previously unknown local improvements, providing effective supervision to SPENs, avoiding their traditional need for labeled training data.

In structured output prediction tasks, labeling ground-truth training output is often expensive. However, for many tasks, even when the true output is unknown, we can evaluate predictions using a scalar reward function, which may be easily assembled from human knowledge or non-differentiable pipelines. But searching through the entire output space to find the best output with respect to this reward function is typically intractable. In this paper, we instead use efficient truncated randomized search in this reward function to train structured prediction energy networks (SPENs), which provide efficient test-time inference using gradient-based search on a smooth, learned representation of the score landscape, and have previously yielded state-of-the-art results in structured prediction. In particular, this truncated randomized search in the reward function yields previously unknown local improvements, providing effective supervision to SPENs, avoiding their traditional need for labeled training data. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

For joint inference over multiple variables, a variety of structured prediction techniques have been developed to model correlations among variables and thereby improve predictions. However, many classical approaches suffer from one of two primary drawbacks: they either lack the ability to model high-order correlations among variables while maintaining computationally tractable inference, or they do not allow to explicitly model known correlations. To address this shortcoming, we introduce `Graph Structured Prediction Energy Networks,' for which we develop inference techniques that allow to both model explicit local and implicit higher-order correlations while maintaining tractability of inference. We apply the proposed method to tasks from the natural language processing and computer vision domain and demonstrate its general utility.

We introduce structured prediction energy networks (SPENs), a flexible framework for structured prediction. A deep architecture is used to define an energy function of candidate labels, and then predictions are produced by using back-propagation to iteratively optimize the energy with respect to the labels. This deep architecture captures dependencies between labels that would lead to intractable graphical models, and performs structure learning by automatically learning discriminative features of the structured output. One natural application of our technique is multi-label classification, which traditionally has required strict prior assumptions about the interactions between labels to ensure tractable learning and prediction. We are able to apply SPENs to multi-label problems with substantially larger label sets than previous applications of structured prediction, while modeling high-order interactions using minimal structural assumptions. Overall, deep learning provides remarkable tools for learning features of the inputs to a prediction problem, and this work extends these techniques to learning features of structured outputs. Our experiments provide impressive performance on a variety of benchmark multi-label classification tasks, demonstrate that our technique can be used to provide interpretable structure learning, and illuminate fundamental trade-offs between feed-forward and iterative structured prediction.