Remi Francis

Sam Ringer, Will Williams, Tom Ash et al.

Accurate image classification given small amounts of labelled data (few-shot classification) remains an open problem in computer vision. In this work we examine how the known texture bias of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) affects few-shot classification performance. Although texture bias can help in standard image classification, in this work we show it significantly harms few-shot classification performance. After correcting this bias we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the competitive miniImageNet task using a method far simpler than the current best performing few-shot learning approaches.

Rémi Francis, Tom Ash, Will Williams

In automatic speech recognition (ASR), recurrent neural language models (RNNLM) are typically used to refine hypotheses in the form of lattices or n-best lists, which are generated by a beam search decoder with a weaker language model. The RNNLMs are usually trained generatively using the perplexity (PPL) criterion on large corpora of grammatically correct text. However, the hypotheses are noisy, and the RNNLM doesn't always make the choices that minimise the metric we optimise for, the word error rate (WER). To address this mismatch we propose to use a task specific loss to train an RNNLM to discriminate between multiple hypotheses within lattice rescoring scenario. By fine-tuning the RNNLM on lattices with the average edit distance loss, we show that we obtain a 1.9% relative improvement in word error rate over a purely generatively trained model.