Welcome to ShortScience.org! |
[link]
This paper builds on top of a bunch of existing ideas for building neural conversational agents so as to control against generic and repetitive responses. Their model is the sequence-to-sequence model with attention (Bahdanau et al.), first trained with the usual MLE loss and fine-tuned with policy gradients to optimize for specific conversational properties. Specifically, they define 3 rewards: 1. Ease of answering — Measured as the likelihood of responding to a query with a list of hand-picked dull responses (more negative log likelihood is higher reward). 2. Information flow — Consecutive responses from the same agent (person) should have different information, measured as negative of log cosine distance (more negative is better). 3. Semantic coherence — Mutual information between source and target (the response should make sense wrt query). $P(a|q) + P(q|a)$ where a is answer, q is question. The model is pre-trained with the usual supervised objective function, taking source as concatenation of two previous utterances. Then they have two stages of policy gradient training, first with just a mutual information reward and then with a combination of all three. The policy network (sequence-to-sequence model) produces a probability distribution over actions (responses) given state (previous utterances). To estimate the gradient in an iteration, the network is frozen and responses are sampled from the model, the rewards for which are then averaged and gradients are computed for first L tokens of response using MLE and remaining T-L tokens with policy gradients, with L being gradually annealed to zero (moving towards just the long-term reward). Evaluation is done based on length of dialogue, diversity (distinct unigram, bigrams) and human studies on 1. Which of two outputs has better quality (single turn) 2. Which of two outputs is easier to respond to, and 3. Which of two conversations have better quality (multi turn). ## Strengths - Interesting results - Avoids generic responses - 'Ease of responding' reward encourages responses to be question-like - Adding in hand-engineereed approximate reward functions based on conversational properties and using those to fine-tune a pre-trained network using policy gradients is neat. - Policy gradient training also encourages two dialogue agents to interact with each other and explore the complete action space (space of responses), which seems desirable to identify modes of the distribution and not converge on a single, high-scoring, generic response. ## Weaknesses / Notes - Evaluating conversational agents is hard. BLEU / perplexity are intentionally avoided as they don't necessarily reward desirable conversational properties. |
[link]
# Simultaneous Deep transfer across domains and tasks ## Tzeng, Hoffman, Saenko, 2015 * The paper aims to exploit unlabeled and sparsely labeled data from the target domain. * As a baseline, they mention that one could match feature distributions between source and target domain. This work will also explore correlation between categories, such as _bottle_ and _mug._ * The authors derive inspiration from the _Name the dataset_ game by Torralbe and Efros. In this game, you train a classifier to predict which dataset an image originates from. This idea transpires into the domain confusion loss. The domain classifier measures the confusion between learned features from source and target domain. The image classifier learns a feature representation that makes the domain inditinguishable, as measured by the domain confusion. * The second idea also learns the similarity structure between objects in the target domain. This works as follows. _We first compute the average output probability distribution, or “softlabel,” over the source training examples in each category. Then, for each target labeled example, we directly optimize our model to match the distribution over classes to the soft label. In this way we are able to perform task adaptation by transferring information to categories with no explicit labels in the target domain._ * The experiments take place in two situations. The _supervised_ case, where only few labels are present in the target domain. The _semi supervised_ case, where only few labels of a subset of the classes are present. * In the final section, the authors perform analysis on theis own result. They show how the image classifier correctly labeled monitor, while no labels for monitor were present in the target domain. |
[link]
* They suggest a new stochastic optimization method, similar to the existing SGD, Adagrad or RMSProp. * Stochastic optimization methods have to find parameters that minimize/maximize a stochastic function. * A function is stochastic (non-deterministic), if the same set of parameters can generate different results. E.g. the loss of different mini-batches can differ, even when the parameters remain unchanged. Even for the same mini-batch the results can change due to e.g. dropout. * Their method tends to converge faster to optimal parameters than the existing competitors. * Their method can deal with non-stationary distributions (similar to e.g. SGD, Adadelta, RMSProp). * Their method can deal with very sparse or noisy gradients (similar to e.g. Adagrad). ### How * Basic principle * Standard SGD just updates the parameters based on `parameters = parameters - learningRate * gradient`. * Adam operates similar to that, but adds more "cleverness" to the rule. * It assumes that the gradient values have means and variances and tries to estimate these values. * Recall here that the function to optimize is stochastic, so there is some randomness in the gradients. * The mean is also called "the first moment". * The variance is also called "the second (raw) moment". * Then an update rule very similar to SGD would be `parameters = parameters - learningRate * means`. * They instead use the update rule `parameters = parameters - learningRate * means/sqrt(variances)`. * They call `means/sqrt(variances)` a 'Signal to Noise Ratio'. * Basically, if the variance of a specific parameter's gradient is high, it is pretty unclear how it should be changend. So we choose a small step size in the update rule via `learningRate * mean/sqrt(highValue)`. * If the variance is low, it is easier to predict how far to "move", so we choose a larger step size via `learningRate * mean/sqrt(lowValue)`. * Exponential moving averages * In order to approximate the mean and variance values you could simply save the last `T` gradients and then average the values. * That however is a pretty bad idea, because it can lead to high memory demands (e.g. for millions of parameters in CNNs). * A simple average also has the disadvantage, that it would completely ignore all gradients before `T` and weight all of the last `T` gradients identically. In reality, you might want to give more weight to the last couple of gradients. * Instead, they use an exponential moving average, which fixes both problems and simply updates the average at every timestep via the formula `avg = alpha * avg + (1 - alpha) * avg`. * Let the gradient at timestep (batch) `t` be `g`, then we can approximate the mean and variance values using: * `mean = beta1 * mean + (1 - beta1) * g` * `variance = beta2 * variance + (1 - beta2) * g^2`. * `beta1` and `beta2` are hyperparameters of the algorithm. Good values for them seem to be `beta1=0.9` and `beta2=0.999`. * At the start of the algorithm, `mean` and `variance` are initialized to zero-vectors. * Bias correction * Initializing the `mean` and `variance` vectors to zero is an easy and logical step, but has the disadvantage that bias is introduced. * E.g. at the first timestep, the mean of the gradient would be `mean = beta1 * 0 + (1 - beta1) * g`, with `beta1=0.9` then: `mean = 0.9 * g`. So `0.9g`, not `g`. Both the mean and the variance are biased (towards 0). * This seems pretty harmless, but it can be shown that it lowers the convergence speed of the algorithm by quite a bit. * So to fix this pretty they perform bias-corrections of the mean and the variance: * `correctedMean = mean / (1-beta1^t)` (where `t` is the timestep). * `correctedVariance = variance / (1-beta2^t)`. * Both formulas are applied at every timestep after the exponential moving averages (they do not influence the next timestep). ![Algorithm](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aleju/papers/master/neural-nets/images/Adam__algorithm.png?raw=true "Algorithm") |
[link]
# Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Nets ## Introduction * The paper presents Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Nets (DCGAN) - a topologically constrained variant of conditional GAN. * [Link to the paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06434) ## Benefits * Stable to train * Very useful to learn unsupervised image representations. ## Model * GANs difficult to scale using CNNs. * Paper proposes following changes to GANs: * Replace any pooling layers with strided convolutions (for discriminator) and fractional strided convolutions (for generators). * Remove fully connected hidden layers. * Use batch normalisation in both generator (all layers except output layer) and discriminator (all layers except input layer). * Use LeakyReLU in all layers of the discriminator. * Use ReLU activation in all layers of the generator (except output layer which uses Tanh). ## Datasets * Large-Scale Scene Understanding. * Imagenet-1K. * Faces dataset. ## Hyperparameters * Minibatch SGD with minibatch size of 128. * Weights initialized with 0 centered Normal distribution with standard deviation = 0.02 * Adam Optimizer * Slope of leak = 0.2 for LeakyReLU. * Learning rate = 0.0002, β1 = 0.5 ## Observations * Large-Scale Scene Understanding data * Demonstrates that model scales with more data and higher resolution generation. * Even though it is unlikely that model would have memorized images (due to low learning rate of minibatch SGD). * Classifying CIFAR-10 dataset * Features * Train in Imagenet-1K and test on CIFAR-10. * Max pool discriminator's convolutional features (from all layers) to get 4x4 spatial grids. * Flatten and concatenate to get a 28672-dimensional vector. * Linear L2-SVM classifier trained over the feature vector. * 82.8% accuracy, outperforms K-means (80.6%) * Street View House Number Classifier * Similar pipeline as CIFAR-10 * 22.48% test error. * The paper contains many examples of images generated by final and intermediate layers of the network. * Images in the latent space do not show sharp transitions indicating that network did not memorize images. * DCGAN can learn an interesting hierarchy of features. * Networks seems to have some success in disentangling image representation from object representation. * Vector arithmetic can be performed on the Z vectors corresponding to the face samples to get results like `smiling woman - normal woman + normal man = smiling man` visually. |
[link]
This paper deals with the formal question of machine reading. It proposes a novel methodology for automatic dataset building for machine reading model evaluation. To do so, the authors leverage on news resources that are equipped with a summary to generate a large number of questions about articles by replacing the named entities of it. Furthermore a attention enhanced LSTM inspired reading model is proposed and evaluated. The paper is well-written and clear, the originality seems to lie on two aspects. First, an original methodology of question answering dataset creation, where context-query-answer triples are automatically extracted from news feeds. Such proposition can be considered as important because it opens the way for large model learning and evaluation. The second contribution is the addition of an attention mechanism to an LSTM reading model. the empirical results seem to show relevant improvement with respect to an up-to-date list of machine reading models. Given the lack of an appropriate dataset, the author provides a new dataset which scraped CNN and Daily Mail, using both the full text and abstract summaries/bullet points. The dataset was then anonymised (i.e. entity names removed). Next the author presents a two novel Deep long-short term memory models which perform well on the Cloze query task. |