Louis Mahon

Louis Mahon, Thomas Lukasiewicz

Online deep clustering refers to the joint use of a feature extraction network and a clustering model to assign cluster labels to each new data point or batch as it is processed. While faster and more versatile than offline methods, online clustering can easily reach the collapsed solution where the encoder maps all inputs to the same point and all are put into a single cluster. Successful existing models have employed various techniques to avoid this problem, most of which require data augmentation or which aim to make the average soft assignment across the dataset the same for each cluster. We propose a method that does not require data augmentation, and that, differently from existing methods, regularizes the hard assignments. Using a Bayesian framework, we derive an intuitive optimization objective that can be straightforwardly included in the training of the encoder network. Tested on four image datasets and one human-activity recognition dataset, it consistently avoids collapse more robustly than other methods and leads to more accurate clustering. We also conduct further experiments and analyses justifying our choice to regularize the hard cluster assignments. Code is available at https://github.com/Lou1sM/online_hard_clustering.

Jeffrey T. H. Wong, Cheng Zhang, Louis Mahon et al.

Attention sinks are tokens, often the beginning-of-sequence (BOS) token, that receive disproportionately high attention despite limited semantic relevance. In this work, we identify a class of attention sinks, which we term secondary sinks, that differ fundamentally from the sinks studied in prior works, which we term primary sinks. While prior works have identified that tokens other than BOS can sometimes become sinks, they were found to exhibit properties analogous to the BOS token. Specifically, they emerge at the same layer, persist throughout the network and draw a large amount of attention mass. Whereas, we find the existence of secondary sinks that arise primarily in middle layers and can persist for a variable number of layers, and draw a smaller, but still significant, amount of attention mass. Through extensive experiments across 11 model families, we analyze where these secondary sinks appear, their properties, how they are formed, and their impact on the attention mechanism. Specifically, we show that: (1) these sinks are formed by specific middle-layer MLP modules; these MLPs map token representations to vectors that align with the direction of the primary sink of that layer. (2) The $\ell_2$-norm of these vectors determines the sink score of the secondary sink, and also the number of layers it lasts for, thereby leading to different impacts on the attention mechanisms accordingly. (3) The primary sink weakens in middle layers, coinciding with the emergence of secondary sinks. We observe that in larger-scale models, the location and lifetime of the sinks, together referred to as sink levels, appear in a more deterministic and frequent manner. Specifically, we identify three sink levels in QwQ-32B and six levels in Qwen3-14B. We open-sourced our findings at github.com/JeffreyWong20/Secondary-Attention-Sinks.

Louis Mahon, Thomas Lukasiewicz

Existing image complexity metrics cannot distinguish meaningful content from noise. This means that white noise images, which contain no meaningful information, are judged as highly complex. We present a new image complexity metric through hierarchical clustering of patches. We use the minimum description length principle to determine the number of clusters and designate certain points as outliers and, hence, correctly assign white noise a low score. The presented method has similarities to theoretical ideas for measuring meaningful complexity. We conduct experiments on seven different sets of images, which show that our method assigns the most accurate scores to all images considered. Additionally, comparing the different levels of the hierarchy of clusters can reveal how complexity manifests at different scales, from local detail to global structure. We then present ablation studies showing the contribution of the components of our method, and that it continues to assign reasonable scores when the inputs are modified in certain ways, including the addition of Gaussian noise and the lowering of the resolution.

Louis Mahon, Thomas Lukasiewicz

There has been much recent research on human activity re\-cog\-ni\-tion (HAR), due to the proliferation of wearable sensors in watches and phones, and the advances of deep learning methods, which avoid the need to manually extract features from raw sensor signals. A significant disadvantage of deep learning applied to HAR is the need for manually labelled training data, which is especially difficult to obtain for HAR datasets. Progress is starting to be made in the unsupervised setting, in the form of deep HAR clustering models, which can assign labels to data without having been given any labels to train on, but there are problems with evaluating deep HAR clustering models, which makes assessing the field and devising new methods difficult. In this paper, we highlight several distinct problems with how deep HAR clustering models are evaluated, describing these problems in detail and conducting careful experiments to explicate the effect that they can have on results. We then discuss solutions to these problems, and suggest standard evaluation settings for future deep HAR clustering models. Additionally, we present a new deep clustering model for HAR. When tested under our proposed settings, our model performs better than (or on par with) existing models, while also being more efficient and better able to scale to more complex datasets by avoiding the need for an autoencoder.

Louis Mahon, Lei Shah, Thomas Lukasiewicz

Recent years have seen growing interest in learning disentangled representations, in which distinct features, such as size or shape, are represented by distinct neurons. Quantifying the extent to which a given representation is disentangled is not straightforward; multiple metrics have been proposed. In this paper, we identify two failings of existing metrics, which mean they can assign a high score to a model which is still entangled, and we propose two new metrics, which redress these problems. We then consider the task of compositional generalization. Unlike prior works, we treat this as a classification problem, which allows us to use it to measure the disentanglement ability of the encoder, without depending on the decoder. We show that performance on this task is (a) generally quite poor, (b) correlated with most disentanglement metrics, and (c) most strongly correlated with our newly proposed metrics.

Louis Mahon, Omri Abend, Uri Berger et al.

This work reimplements a recent semantic bootstrapping child-language acquisition model, which was originally designed for English, and trains it to learn a new language: Hebrew. The model learns from pairs of utterances and logical forms as meaning representations, and acquires both syntax and word meanings simultaneously. The results show that the model mostly transfers to Hebrew, but that a number of factors, including the richer morphology in Hebrew, makes the learning slower and less robust. This suggests that a clear direction for future work is to enable the model to leverage the similarities between different word forms.

Louis Mahon, Carl Vogel

This paper presents FASTFOOD, a rule-based Natural Language Generation Program for cooking recipes. Recipes are generated by using an Automated Theorem Proving procedure to select the ingredients and instructions, with ingredients corresponding to axioms and instructions to implications. FASTFOOD also contains a temporal optimization module which can rearrange the recipe to make it more time-efficient for the user, e.g. the recipe specifies to chop the vegetables while the rice is boiling. The system is described in detail, using a framework which divides Natural Language Generation into 4 phases: content production, content selection, content organisation and content realisation. A comparison is then made with similar existing systems and techniques.

Louis Mahon, Thomas Lukasiewicz

Deep neural networks (DNNs) offer a means of addressing the challenging task of clustering high-dimensional data. DNNs can extract useful features, and so produce a lower dimensional representation, which is more amenable to clustering techniques. As clustering is typically performed in a purely unsupervised setting, where no training labels are available, the question then arises as to how the DNN feature extractor can be trained. The most accurate existing approaches combine the training of the DNN with the clustering objective, so that information from the clustering process can be used to update the DNN to produce better features for clustering. One problem with this approach is that these ``pseudo-labels'' produced by the clustering algorithm are noisy, and any errors that they contain will hurt the training of the DNN. In this paper, we propose selective pseudo-label clustering, which uses only the most confident pseudo-labels for training the~DNN. We formally prove the performance gains under certain conditions. Applied to the task of image clustering, the new approach achieves a state-of-the-art performance on three popular image datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/Lou1sM/clustering.

Taniya Das, Louis Mahon, Thomas Lukasiewicz

One of the challenging tasks in the field of video understanding is extracting semantic content from video inputs. Most existing systems use language models to describe videos in natural language sentences, but this has several major shortcomings. Such systems can rely too heavily on the language model component and base their output on statistical regularities in natural language text rather than on the visual contents of the video. Additionally, natural language annotations cannot be readily processed by a computer, are difficult to evaluate with performance metrics and cannot be easily translated into a different natural language. In this paper, we propose a method to annotate videos with knowledge graphs, and so avoid these problems. Specifically, we propose a deep-learning-based model for this task that first predicts pairs of individuals and then the relations between them. Additionally, we propose an extension of our model for the inclusion of background knowledge in the construction of knowledge graphs.

Louis Mahon, Eleonora Giunchiglia, Bowen Li et al.

Nearly all existing techniques for automated video annotation (or captioning) describe videos using natural language sentences. However, this has several shortcomings: (i) it is very hard to then further use the generated natural language annotations in automated data processing, (ii) generating natural language annotations requires to solve the hard subtask of generating semantically precise and syntactically correct natural language sentences, which is actually unrelated to the task of video annotation, (iii) it is difficult to quantitatively measure performance, as standard metrics (e.g., accuracy and F1-score) are inapplicable, and (iv) annotations are language-specific. In this paper, we propose the new task of knowledge graph extraction from videos, i.e., producing a description in the form of a knowledge graph of the contents of a given video. Since no datasets exist for this task, we also include a method to automatically generate them, starting from datasets where videos are annotated with natural language. We then describe an initial deep-learning model for knowledge graph extraction from videos, and report results on MSVD* and MSR-VTT*, two datasets obtained from MSVD and MSR-VTT using our method.