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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. ![]() |
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# 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. ![]() |
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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. ![]() |
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We want to find two matrices $W$ and $H$ such that $V = WH$. Often a goal is to determine underlying patterns in the relationships between the concepts represented by each row and column. $W$ is some $m$ by $n$ matrix and we want the inner dimension of the factorization to be $r$. So $$\underbrace{V}_{m \times n} = \underbrace{W}_{m \times r} \underbrace{H}_{r \times n}$$ Let's consider an example matrix where of three customers (as rows) are associated with three movies (the columns) by a rating value. $$ V = \left[\begin{array}{c c c} 5 & 4 & 1 \\\\ 4 & 5 & 1 \\\\ 2 & 1 & 5 \end{array}\right] $$ We can decompose this into two matrices with $r = 1$. First lets do this without any non-negative constraint using an SVD reshaping matrices based on removing eigenvalues: $$ W = \left[\begin{array}{c c c} -0.656 \\\ -0.652 \\\ -0.379 \end{array}\right], H = \left[\begin{array}{c c c} -6.48 & -6.26 & -3.20\\\\ \end{array}\right] $$ We can also decompose this into two matrices with $r = 1$ subject to the constraint that $w_{ij} \ge 0$ and $h_{ij} \ge 0$. (Note: this is only possible when $v_{ij} \ge 0$): $$ W = \left[\begin{array}{c c c} 0.388 \\\\ 0.386 \\\\ 0.224 \end{array}\right], H = \left[\begin{array}{c c c} 11.22 & 10.57 & 5.41 \\\\ \end{array}\right] $$ Both of these $r=1$ factorizations reconstruct matrix $V$ with the same error. $$ V \approx WH = \left[\begin{array}{c c c} 4.36 & 4.11 & 2.10 \\\ 4.33 & 4.08 & 2.09 \\\ 2.52 & 2.37 & 1.21 \\\ \end{array}\right] $$ If they both yield the same reconstruction error then why is a non-negativity constraint useful? We can see above that it is easy to observe patterns in both factorizations such as similar customers and similar movies. `TODO: motivate why NMF is better` #### Paper Contribution This paper discusses two approaches for iteratively creating a non-negative $W$ and $H$ based on random initial matrices. The paper discusses a multiplicative update rule where the elements of $W$ and $H$ are iteratively transformed by scaling each value such that error is not increased. The multiplicative approach is discussed in contrast to an additive gradient decent based approach where small corrections are iteratively applied. The multiplicative approach can be reduced to this by setting the learning rate ($\eta$) to a ratio that represents the magnitude of the element in $H$ to the scaling factor of $W$ on $H$. ### Still a draft ![]() |
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This paper presents a novel layer that can be used in convolutional neural networks. A spatial transformer layer computes re-sampling points of the signal based on another neural network. The suggested transformations include scaling, cropping, rotations and non-rigid deformation whose paramerters are trained end-to-end with the rest of the model. The resulting re-sampling grid is then used to create a new representation of the underlying signal through bi-linear or nearest neighbor interpolation. This has interesting implications: the network can learn to co-locate objects in a set of images that all contain the same object, the transformation parameter localize the attention area explicitly, fine data resolution is restricted to areas important for the task. Furthermore, the model improves over previous state-of-the-art on a number of tasks. The layer has one mini neural network that regresses on the parameters of a parametric transformation, e.g. affine), then there is a module that applies the transformation to a regular grid and a third more or less "reads off" the values in the transformed positions and maps them to a regular grid, hence under-forming the image or previous layer. Gradients for back-propagation in a few cases are derived. The results are mostly of the classic deep learning variety, including mnist and svhn, but there is also the fine-grained birds dataset. The networks with spatial transformers seem to lead to improved results in all cases. ![]() |