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Visual reasoning and question-answering have gathered attention in recent years. Many datasets and evaluation protocols have been proposed; some have been shown to contain bias that allows models to ``cheat&#39;&#39; without performing true, generalizable reasoning. A well-known bias is dependence on language priors (frequency of answers) resulting in the model not looking at the image. We discover a new type of bias in the Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) dataset. In particular we show that most state-of-the-art models exploit co-occurring text between input (question) and output (answer options), and rely on only a few pieces of information in the candidate options, to make a decision. Unfortunately, relying on such superficial evidence causes models to be very fragile. To measure fragility, we propose two ways to modify the validation data, in which a few words in the answer choices are modified without significant changes in meaning. We find such insignificant changes cause models&#39; performance to degrade significantly. To resolve the issue, we propose a curriculum-based masking approach, as a mechanism to perform more robust training. Our method improves the baseline by requiring it to pay attention to the answers as a whole, and is more effective than prior masking strategies.

AAAI 2021

A Case Study of the Shortcut Effects in Visual Commonsense Reasoning

Visual reasoning and question-answering have gathered attention in recent years. Many datasets and evaluation protocols have been proposed; some have been shown to contain bias that allows models to ``cheat'' without performing true, generalizable reasoning. A well-known bias is dependence on language priors (frequency of answers) resulting in the model not looking at the image. We discover a new type of bias in the Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) dataset. In particular we show that most state-of-the-art models exploit co-occurring text between input (question) and output (answer options), and rely on only a few pieces of information in the candidate options, to make a decision. Unfortunately, relying on such superficial evidence causes models to be very fragile. To measure fragility, we propose two ways to modify the validation data, in which a few words in the answer choices are modified without significant changes in meaning. We find such insignificant changes cause models' performance to degrade significantly. To resolve the issue, we propose a curriculum-based masking approach, as a mechanism to perform more robust training. Our method improves the baseline by requiring it to pay attention to the answers as a whole, and is more effective than prior masking strategies.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Infinite Gaussian mixture modeling (IGMM) is a modeling method that determines all the parameters of a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), including its order. It has been well documented that it is a consistent estimator for probability density functions in the sense that, given enough training data from sufficiently regular probability density functions, it will converge to the shape of the original density curve. It is also known, however, that IGMM provides an inconsistent estimation of the number of clusters.
The current paper shows that the nature of this inconsistency is an overestimation, and we pinpoint that this problem is an inherent part of the training algorithm. It stems mostly from a "self-reinforcing feedback'' which is a certain relation between the likelihood function of one of the model hyperparameters (alpha) and the probability of sampling the number of components, that sustain their mutual growth during the Gibbs iterations. We show that this problem can be resolved by using informative priors for alpha and propose a modified training procedure that uses the inverse chi-square for this purpose.
The modified algorithm successfully recovers the ``known" order in all the experiments with synthetic data sets.
It also demonstrates good results when compared to other methods used to evaluate model order, using real-world databases. Furthermore, the improved performance is attained without undermining the fidelity of estimating the original PDFs and with a significant reduction in computational cost.

Infinite Gaussian Mixture Modeling with an Improved Estimation of the Number of Clusters

Branch and Bound (B&B) is the exact tree search method typically used to solve Mixed-Integer Linear Programming problems (MILPs). Learning branching policies for MILP has become an active research area, with most works proposing to imitate the strong branching rule and specialize it to distinct classes of problems. We aim instead at learning a policy that generalizes across heterogeneous MILPs: our main hypothesis is that parameterizing the state of the B&B search tree can aid this type of generalization. We propose a novel imitation learning framework, and introduce new input features and architectures to represent branching. Experiments on MILP benchmark instances clearly show the advantages of incorporating an explicit parameterization of the state of the search tree to modulate the branching decisions, in terms of both higher accuracy and smaller B&B trees. The resulting policies significantly outperform the current state-of-the-art method for "learning to branch" by effectively allowing generalization to generic unseen instances.

Parameterizing Branch-and-Bound Search Trees to Learn Branching Policies

We introduce an efficient differentiable fluid simulator that can be integrated with deep neural networks as a part of layers for learning dynamics and solving control problems. It offers the capability to handle one-way coupling of fluids with rigid objects using a variational principle that naturally enforces necessary boundary conditions at the fluid-solid interface with sub-grid details. This simulator utilizes the adjoint method to efficiently compute the gradient for multiple time steps of fluid simulation with user defined objective functions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for solving inverse and control problems on fluids with one-way coupled solids. Our method outperforms the previous gradient computations, state-of-the-art derivative-free optimization, and model-free reinforcement learning techniques by at least one order of magnitude.

Differentiable Fluids with Solid Coupling for Learning and Control

We present GraphMix, a regularization method for Graph Neural Network based semi-supervised object classification, whereby we propose to train a fully-connected network jointly with the graph neural network via parameter sharing and interpolation-based regularization. Further, we provide a theoretical analysis of how GraphMix improves the generalization bounds of the underlying graph neural network, without making any assumptions about the "aggregation" layer or the depth of the graph neural networks. We experimentally validate this analysis by applying GraphMix to various architectures such as Graph Convolutional Networks, Graph Attention Networks and Graph-U-Net. Despite its simplicity, we demonstrate that GraphMix can consistently improve or closely match state-of-the-art performance using even simpler architectures such as Graph Convolutional Networks, across three established graph benchmarks:  Cora, Citeseer and Pubmed citation network datasets, as well as three newly proposed datasets: Cora-Full, Co-author-CS and Co-author-Physics.

GraphMix: Improved Training of GNNs for Semi-Supervised Learning

Brain activation can reflect semantic information elicited by natural words and concepts. Increasing research has been conducted on decoding such neural activation patterns using representational semantic models. However, prior work decoding semantic meaning from neurophysiological responses has been largely limited to ECoG, fMRI, MEG, and EEG techniques, each having its own advantages and limitations. More recently, the functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has emerged as an alternative hemodynamic-based approach and possesses a number of strengths. We investigate brain decoding tasks under the help of fNIRS and empirically compare fNIRS with fMRI. Primarily, we find that: 1) like fMRI scans, activation patterns recorded from fNIRS encode rich information for discriminating concepts, but show limits on the possibility of decoding fine-grained semantic clues; 2) fNIRS decoding shows robustness across different brain regions, semantic categories and even subjects; 3) fNIRS has higher accuracy being decoded based on multi-channel patterns as compared to single-channel ones, which is in line with our intuition of the working mechanism of human brain. Our findings prove that fNIRS has the potential to promote a deep integration of NLP and cognitive neuroscience from the perspective of language understanding. We release the largest fNIRS dataset by far to facilitate future research.

Brain Decoding Using fNIRS

Extractive summarization suffers from irrelevance, redundancy and incoherence. Existing work shows that abstractive rewriting for extractive summaries can improve the conciseness and readability. These rewriting systems consider extracted summaries as the only input, which is relatively focused but can lose important background knowledge. In this paper, we investigate contextualized rewriting, which ingests the entire original document. We formalize contextualized rewriting as a seq2seq problem with group alignments, introducing group tag as a solution to model the alignments, identifying extracted summaries through content-based addressing. Results show that our approach significantly outperforms non-contextualized rewriting systems without requiring reinforcement learning, achieving strong improvements on ROUGE scores upon multiple extractive summarizers.

Contextualized Rewriting for Text Summarization

Speech-to-text translation (ST), which directly translates the source language speech to the target language text, has attracted intensive attention recently. However, the combination of speech recognition and machine translation in a single model poses a heavy burden on the direct cross-modal cross-lingual mapping. To reduce the learning difficulty, we propose COnSecutive Transcription and Translation (COSTT), an integral approach for speech-to-text translation. The key idea is to generate source transcript and target translation text with a single decoder. It benefits the model training so that additional large parallel text corpus can be fully exploited to enhance the speech translation training. Our method is verified on three mainstream datasets, including Augmented LibriSpeech English-French dataset, TED English-German dataset, and TED English-Chinese dataset. Experiments show that our proposed COSTT outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/dqqcasia/st.

Consecutive Decoding for Speech-to-Text Translation

Inference in deep neural networks can be  computationally expensive, and networks capable of anytime inference are  important in  scenarios where the amount of compute or input data varies over time. In such networks the inference process can interrupted to provide a result faster, or continued to obtain a more accurate result. 
We propose Hierarchical Neural Ensembles (HNE), a novel framework to embed an ensemble of multiple networks in a hierarchical tree structure, sharing intermediate layers. In HNE we control the complexity of inference on-the-fly by evaluating more or less models in the ensemble. Our second contribution is a novel hierarchical distillation method to boost the predictions  of small ensembles. This approach leverages the nested structure of our ensembles, to optimally allocate accuracy and diversity across the individual models.  Our experiments show that, compared to previous anytime inference models, HNE provides state-of-the-art accuracy-computation trade-offs on the  CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets.

Anytime Inference with Distilled Hierarchical Neural Ensembles

We study active feature selection, a novel feature selection setting in which unlabeled data is available, but the budget for labels is limited, and the examples to label can be actively selected by the algorithm. We focus on feature selection using the classical mutual information criterion, which selects the k features with the largest mutual information with the label. In the active feature selection setting, the goal is to use significantly fewer labels than the data set size and still find k features whose mutual information with the label based on the entire data set is large.  We explain and experimentally study the choices that we make in the algorithm, and show that they lead to a successful algorithm, compared to other more naive approaches. Our design draws on insights which relate the problem of active feature selection to the study of pure-exploration multi-armed bandits settings. While we focus here on mutual information, our general methodology can be adapted to other feature-quality measures as well. The extended version of this paper, reporting all experiment results, is available at Schnapp and Sabato (2020). The code is available at the following url:
https://github.com/ShacharSchnapp/ActiveFeatureSelection

Active Feature Selection for the Mutual Information Criterion

We consider the problem of learning a set of probability distributions from the empirical Bellman dynamics in distributional reinforcement learning (RL), a class of state-of-the-art methods that estimate the distribution, as opposed to only the expectation, of the total return. We formulate a method that learns a finite set of statistics from each return distribution via neural networks, as in the distributional RL literature. Existing distributional RL methods however constrain the learned statistics to predefined functional forms of the return distribution which is both restrictive in representation and difficult in maintaining the predefined statistics. Instead, we learn unrestricted statistics, i.e., deterministic (pseudo-)samples, of the return distribution by leveraging a technique from hypothesis testing known as maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), which leads to a simpler objective amenable to backpropagation.  Our method can be interpreted as implicitly matching all orders of moments between a return distribution and its Bellman target. We establish sufficient conditions for the contraction of the distributional Bellman operator and provide finite-sample analysis for the deterministic samples in distribution approximation. Experiments on the suite of Atari games show that our method outperforms the standard distributional RL baselines and sets a new record in the Atari games for non-distributed agents.

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Infinite Gaussian Mixture Modeling with an Improved Estimation of the Number of Clusters

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