Li Deng

Jogi Suda Neto, Li Deng, Thejaswi Raya et al.

Language Models are being widely used in Education. Even though modern deep learning models achieve very good performance on question-answering tasks, sometimes they make errors. To avoid misleading students by showing wrong answers, it is important to calibrate the confidence - that is, the prediction probability - of these models. In our work, we propose to use an XGBoost on top of BERT to output the corrected probabilities, using features based on the attention mechanism. Our hypothesis is that the level of uncertainty contained in the flow of attention is related to the quality of the model's response itself.

Raymond Li, Ilya Valmianski, Li Deng et al.

Medical entity span extraction and linking are critical steps for many healthcare NLP tasks. Most existing entity extraction methods either have a fixed vocabulary of medical entities or require span annotations. In this paper, we propose a method for linking an open set of entities that does not require any span annotations. Our method, Open Set Label Attention Transformer (OSLAT), uses the label-attention mechanism to learn candidate-entity contextualized text representations. We find that OSLAT can not only link entities but is also able to implicitly learn spans associated with entities. We evaluate OSLAT on two tasks: (1) span extraction trained without explicit span annotations, and (2) entity linking trained without span-level annotation. We test the generalizability of our method by training two separate models on two datasets with low entity overlap and comparing cross-dataset performance.

Rhys Compton, Ilya Valmianski, Li Deng et al.

We present MEDCOD, a Medically-Accurate, Emotive, Diverse, and Controllable Dialog system with a unique approach to the natural language generator module. MEDCOD has been developed and evaluated specifically for the history taking task. It integrates the advantage of a traditional modular approach to incorporate (medical) domain knowledge with modern deep learning techniques to generate flexible, human-like natural language expressions. Two key aspects of MEDCOD's natural language output are described in detail. First, the generated sentences are emotive and empathetic, similar to how a doctor would communicate to the patient. Second, the generated sentence structures and phrasings are varied and diverse while maintaining medical consistency with the desired medical concept (provided by the dialogue manager module of MEDCOD). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in creating a human-like medical dialogue system. Relevant code is available at https://github.com/curai/curai-research/tree/main/MEDCOD

Bhuwan Dhingra, Lihong Li, Xiujun Li et al.

This paper proposes KB-InfoBot -- a multi-turn dialogue agent which helps users search Knowledge Bases (KBs) without composing complicated queries. Such goal-oriented dialogue agents typically need to interact with an external database to access real-world knowledge. Previous systems achieved this by issuing a symbolic query to the KB to retrieve entries based on their attributes. However, such symbolic operations break the differentiability of the system and prevent end-to-end training of neural dialogue agents. In this paper, we address this limitation by replacing symbolic queries with an induced "soft" posterior distribution over the KB that indicates which entities the user is interested in. Integrating the soft retrieval process with a reinforcement learner leads to higher task success rate and reward in both simulations and against real users. We also present a fully neural end-to-end agent, trained entirely from user feedback, and discuss its application towards personalized dialogue agents. The source code is available at https://github.com/MiuLab/KB-InfoBot.

Chao Zhang, Zichao Yang, Xiaodong He et al.

Deep learning methods have revolutionized speech recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing since 2010. Each of these tasks involves a single modality in their input signals. However, many applications in the artificial intelligence field involve multiple modalities. Therefore, it is of broad interest to study the more difficult and complex problem of modeling and learning across multiple modalities. In this paper, we provide a technical review of available models and learning methods for multimodal intelligence. The main focus of this review is the combination of vision and natural language modalities, which has become an important topic in both the computer vision and natural language processing research communities. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of recent works on multimodal deep learning from three perspectives: learning multimodal representations, fusing multimodal signals at various levels, and multimodal applications. Regarding multimodal representation learning, we review the key concepts of embedding, which unify multimodal signals into a single vector space and thereby enable cross-modality signal processing. We also review the properties of many types of embeddings that are constructed and learned for general downstream tasks. Regarding multimodal fusion, this review focuses on special architectures for the integration of representations of unimodal signals for a particular task. Regarding applications, selected areas of a broad interest in the current literature are covered, including image-to-text caption generation, text-to-image generation, and visual question answering. We believe that this review will facilitate future studies in the emerging field of multimodal intelligence for related communities.

Yu Liu, Li Deng, Jianshu Chen et al.

Many important classification problems, such as object classification, speech recognition, and machine translation, have been tackled by the supervised learning paradigm in the past, where training corpora of parallel input-output pairs are required with high cost. To remove the need for the parallel training corpora has practical significance for real-world applications, and it is one of the main goals of unsupervised learning. Recently, encouraging progress in unsupervised learning for solving such classification problems has been made and the nature of the challenges has been clarified. In this article, we review this progress and disseminate a class of promising new methods to facilitate understanding the methods for machine learning researchers. In particular, we emphasize the key information that enables the success of unsupervised learning - the sequential statistics as the distributional prior in the labels. Exploitation of such sequential statistics makes it possible to estimate parameters of classifiers without the need of paired input-output data. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of Caesar Cipher and its decryption, which motivated the construction of the novel loss function for unsupervised learning we use throughout the paper. Then we use a simple but representative binary classification task as an example to derive and describe the unsupervised learning algorithm in a step-by-step, easy-to-understand fashion. We include two cases, one with Bigram language model as the sequential statistics for use in unsupervised parameter estimation, and another with a simpler Unigram language model. For both cases, detailed derivation steps for the learning algorithm are included. Further, a summary table compares computational steps of the two cases in executing the unsupervised learning algorithm for learning binary classifiers.

Li Deng, Shuo Zhang, Krisztian Balog

Tables contain valuable knowledge in a structured form. We employ neural language modeling approaches to embed tabular data into vector spaces. Specifically, we consider different table elements, such caption, column headings, and cells, for training word and entity embeddings. These embeddings are then utilized in three particular table-related tasks, row population, column population, and table retrieval, by incorporating them into existing retrieval models as additional semantic similarity signals. Evaluation results show that table embeddings can significantly improve upon the performance of state-of-the-art baselines.

Qiuyuan Huang, Li Deng, Dapeng Wu et al.

This paper proposes a new architecture - Attentive Tensor Product Learning (ATPL) - to represent grammatical structures in deep learning models. ATPL is a new architecture to bridge this gap by exploiting Tensor Product Representations (TPR), a structured neural-symbolic model developed in cognitive science, aiming to integrate deep learning with explicit language structures and rules. The key ideas of ATPL are: 1) unsupervised learning of role-unbinding vectors of words via TPR-based deep neural network; 2) employing attention modules to compute TPR; and 3) integration of TPR with typical deep learning architectures including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Feedforward Neural Network (FFNN). The novelty of our approach lies in its ability to extract the grammatical structure of a sentence by using role-unbinding vectors, which are obtained in an unsupervised manner. This ATPL approach is applied to 1) image captioning, 2) part of speech (POS) tagging, and 3) constituency parsing of a sentence. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Zachary Lipton, Xiujun Li, Jianfeng Gao et al.

We present a new algorithm that significantly improves the efficiency of exploration for deep Q-learning agents in dialogue systems. Our agents explore via Thompson sampling, drawing Monte Carlo samples from a Bayes-by-Backprop neural network. Our algorithm learns much faster than common exploration strategies such as ε-greedy, Boltzmann, bootstrapping, and intrinsic-reward-based ones. Additionally, we show that spiking the replay buffer with experiences from just a few successful episodes can make Q-learning feasible when it might otherwise fail.

Qiuyuan Huang, Paul Smolensky, Xiaodong He et al.

CAPTCHAs based on reading text are susceptible to machine-learning-based attacks due to recent significant advances in deep learning (DL). To address this, this paper promotes image/visual captioning based CAPTCHAs, which is robust against machine-learning-based attacks. To develop image/visual-captioning-based CAPTCHAs, this paper proposes a new image captioning architecture by exploiting tensor product representations (TPR), a structured neural-symbolic framework developed in cognitive science over the past 20 years, with the aim of integrating DL with explicit language structures and rules. We call it the Tensor Product Generation Network (TPGN). The key ideas of TPGN are: 1) unsupervised learning of role-unbinding vectors of words via a TPR-based deep neural network, and 2) integration of TPR with typical DL architectures including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models. The novelty of our approach lies in its ability to generate a sentence and extract partial grammatical structure of the sentence by using role-unbinding vectors, which are obtained in an unsupervised manner. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Qiuyuan Huang, Paul Smolensky, Xiaodong He et al.

We present a new approach to the design of deep networks for natural language processing (NLP), based on the general technique of Tensor Product Representations (TPRs) for encoding and processing symbol structures in distributed neural networks. A network architecture --- the Tensor Product Generation Network (TPGN) --- is proposed which is capable in principle of carrying out TPR computation, but which uses unconstrained deep learning to design its internal representations. Instantiated in a model for image-caption generation, TPGN outperforms LSTM baselines when evaluated on the COCO dataset. The TPR-capable structure enables interpretation of internal representations and operations, which prove to contain considerable grammatical content. Our caption-generation model can be interpreted as generating sequences of grammatical categories and retrieving words by their categories from a plan encoded as a distributed representation.

David Golub, Po-Sen Huang, Xiaodong He et al.

We develop a technique for transfer learning in machine comprehension (MC) using a novel two-stage synthesis network (SynNet). Given a high-performing MC model in one domain, our technique aims to answer questions about documents in another domain, where we use no labeled data of question-answer pairs. Using the proposed SynNet with a pretrained model from the SQuAD dataset on the challenging NewsQA dataset, we achieve an F1 measure of 44.3% with a single model and 46.6% with an ensemble, approaching performance of in-domain models (F1 measure of 50.0%) and outperforming the out-of-domain baseline of 7.6%, without use of provided annotations.

Po-Sen Huang, Chong Wang, Sitao Huang et al.

In this paper, we present Neural Phrase-based Machine Translation (NPMT). Our method explicitly models the phrase structures in output sequences using Sleep-WAke Networks (SWAN), a recently proposed segmentation-based sequence modeling method. To mitigate the monotonic alignment requirement of SWAN, we introduce a new layer to perform (soft) local reordering of input sequences. Different from existing neural machine translation (NMT) approaches, NPMT does not use attention-based decoding mechanisms. Instead, it directly outputs phrases in a sequential order and can decode in linear time. Our experiments show that NPMT achieves superior performances on IWSLT 2014 German-English/English-German and IWSLT 2015 English-Vietnamese machine translation tasks compared with strong NMT baselines. We also observe that our method produces meaningful phrases in output languages.

Hamid Palangi, Paul Smolensky, Xiaodong He et al.

We introduce an architecture, the Tensor Product Recurrent Network (TPRN). In our application of TPRN, internal representations learned by end-to-end optimization in a deep neural network performing a textual question-answering (QA) task can be interpreted using basic concepts from linguistic theory. No performance penalty need be paid for this increased interpretability: the proposed model performs comparably to a state-of-the-art system on the SQuAD QA task. The internal representation which is interpreted is a Tensor Product Representation: for each input word, the model selects a symbol to encode the word, and a role in which to place the symbol, and binds the two together. The selection is via soft attention. The overall interpretation is built from interpretations of the symbols, as recruited by the trained model, and interpretations of the roles as used by the model. We find support for our initial hypothesis that symbols can be interpreted as lexical-semantic word meanings, while roles can be interpreted as approximations of grammatical roles (or categories) such as subject, wh-word, determiner, etc. Fine-grained analysis reveals specific correspondences between the learned roles and parts of speech as assigned by a standard tagger (Toutanova et al. 2003), and finds several discrepancies in the model's favor. In this sense, the model learns significant aspects of grammar, after having been exposed solely to linguistically unannotated text, questions, and answers: no prior linguistic knowledge is given to the model. What is given is the means to build representations using symbols and roles, with an inductive bias favoring use of these in an approximately discrete manner.

Asli Celikyilmaz, Li Deng, Lihong Li et al.

We introduce a new paradigm of learning for reasoning, understanding, and prediction, as well as the scaffolding network to implement this paradigm. The scaffolding network embodies an incremental learning approach that is formulated as a teacher-student network architecture to teach machines how to understand text and do reasoning. The key to our computational scaffolding approach is the interactions between the teacher and the student through sequential questioning. The student observes each sentence in the text incrementally, and it uses an attention-based neural net to discover and register the key information in relation to its current memory. Meanwhile, the teacher asks questions about the observed text, and the student network gets rewarded by correctly answering these questions. The entire network is updated continually using reinforcement learning. Our experimental results on synthetic and real datasets show that the scaffolding network not only outperforms state-of-the-art methods but also learns to do reasoning in a scalable way even with little human generated input.

Yu Liu, Jianshu Chen, Li Deng

We consider learning a sequence classifier without labeled data by using sequential output statistics. The problem is highly valuable since obtaining labels in training data is often costly, while the sequential output statistics (e.g., language models) could be obtained independently of input data and thus with low or no cost. To address the problem, we propose an unsupervised learning cost function and study its properties. We show that, compared to earlier works, it is less inclined to be stuck in trivial solutions and avoids the need for a strong generative model. Although it is harder to optimize in its functional form, a stochastic primal-dual gradient method is developed to effectively solve the problem. Experiment results on real-world datasets demonstrate that the new unsupervised learning method gives drastically lower errors than other baseline methods. Specifically, it reaches test errors about twice of those obtained by fully supervised learning.

Chong Wang, Yining Wang, Po-Sen Huang et al.

Segmental structure is a common pattern in many types of sequences such as phrases in human languages. In this paper, we present a probabilistic model for sequences via their segmentations. The probability of a segmented sequence is calculated as the product of the probabilities of all its segments, where each segment is modeled using existing tools such as recurrent neural networks. Since the segmentation of a sequence is usually unknown in advance, we sum over all valid segmentations to obtain the final probability for the sequence. An efficient dynamic programming algorithm is developed for forward and backward computations without resorting to any approximation. We demonstrate our approach on text segmentation and speech recognition tasks. In addition to quantitative results, we also show that our approach can discover meaningful segments in their respective application contexts.

Zhe Gan, P. D. Singh, Ameet Joshi et al.

Connecting different text attributes associated with the same entity (conflation) is important in business data analytics since it could help merge two different tables in a database to provide a more comprehensive profile of an entity. However, the conflation task is challenging because two text strings that describe the same entity could be quite different from each other for reasons such as misspelling. It is therefore critical to develop a conflation model that is able to truly understand the semantic meaning of the strings and match them at the semantic level. To this end, we develop a character-level deep conflation model that encodes the input text strings from character level into finite dimension feature vectors, which are then used to compute the cosine similarity between the text strings. The model is trained in an end-to-end manner using back propagation and stochastic gradient descent to maximize the likelihood of the correct association. Specifically, we propose two variants of the deep conflation model, based on long-short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) and convolutional neural network (CNN), respectively. Both models perform well on a real-world business analytics dataset and significantly outperform the baseline bag-of-character (BoC) model.

Xuesong Yang, Yun-Nung Chen, Dilek Hakkani-Tur et al.

Natural language understanding and dialogue policy learning are both essential in conversational systems that predict the next system actions in response to a current user utterance. Conventional approaches aggregate separate models of natural language understanding (NLU) and system action prediction (SAP) as a pipeline that is sensitive to noisy outputs of error-prone NLU. To address the issues, we propose an end-to-end deep recurrent neural network with limited contextual dialogue memory by jointly training NLU and SAP on DSTC4 multi-domain human-human dialogues. Experiments show that our proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art pipeline models for both NLU and SAP, which indicates that our joint model is capable of mitigating the affects of noisy NLU outputs, and NLU model can be refined by error flows backpropagating from the extra supervised signals of system actions.

Payal Bajaj, Daniel Campos, Nick Craswell et al.

We introduce a large scale MAchine Reading COmprehension dataset, which we name MS MARCO. The dataset comprises of 1,010,916 anonymized questions---sampled from Bing's search query logs---each with a human generated answer and 182,669 completely human rewritten generated answers. In addition, the dataset contains 8,841,823 passages---extracted from 3,563,535 web documents retrieved by Bing---that provide the information necessary for curating the natural language answers. A question in the MS MARCO dataset may have multiple answers or no answers at all. Using this dataset, we propose three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (i) predict if a question is answerable given a set of context passages, and extract and synthesize the answer as a human would (ii) generate a well-formed answer (if possible) based on the context passages that can be understood with the question and passage context, and finally (iii) rank a set of retrieved passages given a question. The size of the dataset and the fact that the questions are derived from real user search queries distinguishes MS MARCO from other well-known publicly available datasets for machine reading comprehension and question-answering. We believe that the scale and the real-world nature of this dataset makes it attractive for benchmarking machine reading comprehension and question-answering models.

Zhe Gan, Chuang Gan, Xiaodong He et al.

A Semantic Compositional Network (SCN) is developed for image captioning, in which semantic concepts (i.e., tags) are detected from the image, and the probability of each tag is used to compose the parameters in a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The SCN extends each weight matrix of the LSTM to an ensemble of tag-dependent weight matrices. The degree to which each member of the ensemble is used to generate an image caption is tied to the image-dependent probability of the corresponding tag. In addition to captioning images, we also extend the SCN to generate captions for video clips. We qualitatively analyze semantic composition in SCNs, and quantitatively evaluate the algorithm on three benchmark datasets: COCO, Flickr30k, and Youtube2Text. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, across multiple evaluation metrics.

Zachary C. Lipton, Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, Abhishek Kumar et al.

Many practical environments contain catastrophic states that an optimal agent would visit infrequently or never. Even on toy problems, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents tend to periodically revisit these states upon forgetting their existence under a new policy. We introduce intrinsic fear (IF), a learned reward shaping that guards DRL agents against periodic catastrophes. IF agents possess a fear model trained to predict the probability of imminent catastrophe. This score is then used to penalize the Q-learning objective. Our theoretical analysis bounds the reduction in average return due to learning on the perturbed objective. We also prove robustness to classification errors. As a bonus, IF models tend to learn faster, owing to reward shaping. Experiments demonstrate that intrinsic-fear DQNs solve otherwise pathological environments and improve on several Atari games.

Yun-Nung Chen, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Gokhan Tur et al.

Natural language understanding (NLU) is a core component of a spoken dialogue system. Recently recurrent neural networks (RNN) obtained strong results on NLU due to their superior ability of preserving sequential information over time. Traditionally, the NLU module tags semantic slots for utterances considering their flat structures, as the underlying RNN structure is a linear chain. However, natural language exhibits linguistic properties that provide rich, structured information for better understanding. This paper introduces a novel model, knowledge-guided structural attention networks (K-SAN), a generalization of RNN to additionally incorporate non-flat network topologies guided by prior knowledge. There are two characteristics: 1) important substructures can be captured from small training data, allowing the model to generalize to previously unseen test data; 2) the model automatically figures out the salient substructures that are essential to predict the semantic tags of the given sentences, so that the understanding performance can be improved. The experiments on the benchmark Air Travel Information System (ATIS) data show that the proposed K-SAN architecture can effectively extract salient knowledge from substructures with an attention mechanism, and outperform the performance of the state-of-the-art neural network based frameworks.

Zachary C. Lipton, Xiujun Li, Jianfeng Gao et al.

We present a new algorithm that significantly improves the efficiency of exploration for deep Q-learning agents in dialogue systems. Our agents explore via Thompson sampling, drawing Monte Carlo samples from a Bayes-by-Backprop neural network. Our algorithm learns much faster than common exploration strategies such as $ε$-greedy, Boltzmann, bootstrapping, and intrinsic-reward-based ones. Additionally, we show that spiking the replay buffer with experiences from just a few successful episodes can make Q-learning feasible when it might otherwise fail.

Hao Cheng, Hao Fang, Xiaodong He et al.

We develop a novel bi-directional attention model for dependency parsing, which learns to agree on headword predictions from the forward and backward parsing directions. The parsing procedure for each direction is formulated as sequentially querying the memory component that stores continuous headword embeddings. The proposed parser makes use of {\it soft} headword embeddings, allowing the model to implicitly capture high-order parsing history without dramatically increasing the computational complexity. We conduct experiments on English, Chinese, and 12 other languages from the CoNLL 2006 shared task, showing that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art unlabeled attachment scores on 6 languages.

Jianshu Chen, Po-Sen Huang, Xiaodong He et al.

Unsupervised learning is the most challenging problem in machine learning and especially in deep learning. Among many scenarios, we study an unsupervised learning problem of high economic value --- learning to predict without costly pairing of input data and corresponding labels. Part of the difficulty in this problem is a lack of solid evaluation measures. In this paper, we take a practical approach to grounding unsupervised learning by using the same success criterion as for supervised learning in prediction tasks but we do not require the presence of paired input-output training data. In particular, we propose an objective function that aims to make the predicted outputs fit well the structure of the output while preserving the correlation between the input and the predicted output. We experiment with a synthetic structural prediction problem and show that even with simple linear classifiers, the objective function is already highly non-convex. We further demonstrate the nature of this non-convex optimization problem as well as potential solutions. In particular, we show that with regularization via a generative model, learning with the proposed unsupervised objective function converges to an optimal solution.

Ji He, Mari Ostendorf, Xiaodong He et al.

We introduce an online popularity prediction and tracking task as a benchmark task for reinforcement learning with a combinatorial, natural language action space. A specified number of discussion threads predicted to be popular are recommended, chosen from a fixed window of recent comments to track. Novel deep reinforcement learning architectures are studied for effective modeling of the value function associated with actions comprised of interdependent sub-actions. The proposed model, which represents dependence between sub-actions through a bi-directional LSTM, gives the best performance across different experimental configurations and domains, and it also generalizes well with varying numbers of recommendation requests.

Paul Smolensky, Moontae Lee, Xiaodong He et al.

In this paper we present the initial development of a general theory for mapping inference in predicate logic to computation over Tensor Product Representations (TPRs; Smolensky (1990), Smolensky & Legendre (2006)). After an initial brief synopsis of TPRs (Section 0), we begin with particular examples of inference with TPRs in the 'bAbI' question-answering task of Weston et al. (2015) (Section 1). We then present a simplification of the general analysis that suffices for the bAbI task (Section 2). Finally, we lay out the general treatment of inference over TPRs (Section 3). We also show the simplification in Section 2 derives the inference methods described in Lee et al. (2016); this shows how the simple methods of Lee et al. (2016) can be formally extended to more general reasoning tasks.

Moontae Lee, Xiaodong He, Wen-tau Yih et al.

Question answering tasks have shown remarkable progress with distributed vector representation. In this paper, we investigate the recently proposed Facebook bAbI tasks which consist of twenty different categories of questions that require complex reasoning. Because the previous work on bAbI are all end-to-end models, errors could come from either an imperfect understanding of semantics or in certain steps of the reasoning. For clearer analysis, we propose two vector space models inspired by Tensor Product Representation (TPR) to perform knowledge encoding and logical reasoning based on common-sense inference. They together achieve near-perfect accuracy on all categories including positional reasoning and path finding that have proved difficult for most of the previous approaches. We hypothesize that the difficulties in these categories are due to the multi-relations in contrast to uni-relational characteristic of other categories. Our exploration sheds light on designing more sophisticated dataset and moving one step toward integrating transparent and interpretable formalism of TPR into existing learning paradigms.

Ji He, Jianshu Chen, Xiaodong He et al.

This paper introduces a novel architecture for reinforcement learning with deep neural networks designed to handle state and action spaces characterized by natural language, as found in text-based games. Termed a deep reinforcement relevance network (DRRN), the architecture represents action and state spaces with separate embedding vectors, which are combined with an interaction function to approximate the Q-function in reinforcement learning. We evaluate the DRRN on two popular text games, showing superior performance over other deep Q-learning architectures. Experiments with paraphrased action descriptions show that the model is extracting meaning rather than simply memorizing strings of text.

Zichao Yang, Xiaodong He, Jianfeng Gao et al.

This paper presents stacked attention networks (SANs) that learn to answer natural language questions from images. SANs use semantic representation of a question as query to search for the regions in an image that are related to the answer. We argue that image question answering (QA) often requires multiple steps of reasoning. Thus, we develop a multiple-layer SAN in which we query an image multiple times to infer the answer progressively. Experiments conducted on four image QA data sets demonstrate that the proposed SANs significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches. The visualization of the attention layers illustrates the progress that the SAN locates the relevant visual clues that lead to the answer of the question layer-by-layer.

Xiujun Li, Lihong Li, Jianfeng Gao et al.

Successful applications of reinforcement learning in real-world problems often require dealing with partially observable states. It is in general very challenging to construct and infer hidden states as they often depend on the agent's entire interaction history and may require substantial domain knowledge. In this work, we investigate a deep-learning approach to learning the representation of states in partially observable tasks, with minimal prior knowledge of the domain. In particular, we propose a new family of hybrid models that combines the strength of both supervised learning (SL) and reinforcement learning (RL), trained in a joint fashion: The SL component can be a recurrent neural networks (RNN) or its long short-term memory (LSTM) version, which is equipped with the desired property of being able to capture long-term dependency on history, thus providing an effective way of learning the representation of hidden states. The RL component is a deep Q-network (DQN) that learns to optimize the control for maximizing long-term rewards. Extensive experiments in a direct mailing campaign problem demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed approach, which performs the best among a set of previous state-of-the-art methods.

Hamid Palangi, Rabab Ward, Li Deng

Various studies that address the compressed sensing problem with Multiple Measurement Vectors (MMVs) have been recently carried. These studies assume the vectors of the different channels to be jointly sparse. In this paper, we relax this condition. Instead we assume that these sparse vectors depend on each other but that this dependency is unknown. We capture this dependency by computing the conditional probability of each entry in each vector being non-zero, given the "residuals" of all previous vectors. To estimate these probabilities, we propose the use of the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)[1], a data driven model for sequence modelling that is deep in time. To calculate the model parameters, we minimize a cross entropy cost function. To reconstruct the sparse vectors at the decoder, we propose a greedy solver that uses the above model to estimate the conditional probabilities. By performing extensive experiments on two real world datasets, we show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the general MMV solver (the Simultaneous Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (SOMP)) and a number of the model-based Bayesian methods. The proposed method does not add any complexity to the general compressive sensing encoder. The trained model is used just at the decoder. As the proposed method is a data driven method, it is only applicable when training data is available. In many applications however, training data is indeed available, e.g. in recorded images and videos.

Jianshu Chen, Ji He, Yelong Shen et al.

We develop a fully discriminative learning approach for supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model using Back Propagation (i.e., BP-sLDA), which maximizes the posterior probability of the prediction variable given the input document. Different from traditional variational learning or Gibbs sampling approaches, the proposed learning method applies (i) the mirror descent algorithm for maximum a posterior inference and (ii) back propagation over a deep architecture together with stochastic gradient/mirror descent for model parameter estimation, leading to scalable and end-to-end discriminative learning of the model. As a byproduct, we also apply this technique to develop a new learning method for the traditional unsupervised LDA model (i.e., BP-LDA). Experimental results on three real-world regression and classification tasks show that the proposed methods significantly outperform the previous supervised topic models, neural networks, and is on par with deep neural networks.

Jacob Devlin, Hao Cheng, Hao Fang et al.

Two recent approaches have achieved state-of-the-art results in image captioning. The first uses a pipelined process where a set of candidate words is generated by a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on images, and then a maximum entropy (ME) language model is used to arrange these words into a coherent sentence. The second uses the penultimate activation layer of the CNN as input to a recurrent neural network (RNN) that then generates the caption sequence. In this paper, we compare the merits of these different language modeling approaches for the first time by using the same state-of-the-art CNN as input. We examine issues in the different approaches, including linguistic irregularities, caption repetition, and data set overlap. By combining key aspects of the ME and RNN methods, we achieve a new record performance over previously published results on the benchmark COCO dataset. However, the gains we see in BLEU do not translate to human judgments.

Xiaodong He, Rupesh Srivastava, Jianfeng Gao et al.

This technical report provides extra details of the deep multimodal similarity model (DMSM) which was proposed in (Fang et al. 2015, arXiv:1411.4952). The model is trained via maximizing global semantic similarity between images and their captions in natural language using the public Microsoft COCO database, which consists of a large set of images and their corresponding captions. The learned representations attempt to capture the combination of various visual concepts and cues.

Yelong Shen, Ruoming Jin, Jianshu Chen et al.

Co-occurrence Data is a common and important information source in many areas, such as the word co-occurrence in the sentences, friends co-occurrence in social networks and products co-occurrence in commercial transaction data, etc, which contains rich correlation and clustering information about the items. In this paper, we study co-occurrence data using a general energy-based probabilistic model, and we analyze three different categories of energy-based model, namely, the $L_1$, $L_2$ and $L_k$ models, which are able to capture different levels of dependency in the co-occurrence data. We also discuss how several typical existing models are related to these three types of energy models, including the Fully Visible Boltzmann Machine (FVBM) ($L_2$), Matrix Factorization ($L_2$), Log-BiLinear (LBL) models ($L_2$), and the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) model ($L_k$). Then, we propose a Deep Embedding Model (DEM) (an $L_k$ model) from the energy model in a \emph{principled} manner. Furthermore, motivated by the observation that the partition function in the energy model is intractable and the fact that the major objective of modeling the co-occurrence data is to predict using the conditional probability, we apply the \emph{maximum pseudo-likelihood} method to learn DEM. In consequence, the developed model and its learning method naturally avoid the above difficulties and can be easily used to compute the conditional probability in prediction. Interestingly, our method is equivalent to learning a special structured deep neural network using back-propagation and a special sampling strategy, which makes it scalable on large-scale datasets. Finally, in the experiments, we show that the DEM can achieve comparable or better results than state-of-the-art methods on datasets across several application domains.

Hamid Palangi, Li Deng, Yelong Shen et al.

This paper develops a model that addresses sentence embedding, a hot topic in current natural language processing research, using recurrent neural networks with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells. Due to its ability to capture long term memory, the LSTM-RNN accumulates increasingly richer information as it goes through the sentence, and when it reaches the last word, the hidden layer of the network provides a semantic representation of the whole sentence. In this paper, the LSTM-RNN is trained in a weakly supervised manner on user click-through data logged by a commercial web search engine. Visualization and analysis are performed to understand how the embedding process works. The model is found to automatically attenuate the unimportant words and detects the salient keywords in the sentence. Furthermore, these detected keywords are found to automatically activate different cells of the LSTM-RNN, where words belonging to a similar topic activate the same cell. As a semantic representation of the sentence, the embedding vector can be used in many different applications. These automatic keyword detection and topic allocation abilities enabled by the LSTM-RNN allow the network to perform document retrieval, a difficult language processing task, where the similarity between the query and documents can be measured by the distance between their corresponding sentence embedding vectors computed by the LSTM-RNN. On a web search task, the LSTM-RNN embedding is shown to significantly outperform several existing state of the art methods. We emphasize that the proposed model generates sentence embedding vectors that are specially useful for web document retrieval tasks. A comparison with a well known general sentence embedding method, the Paragraph Vector, is performed. The results show that the proposed method in this paper significantly outperforms it for web document retrieval task.

Bishan Yang, Wen-tau Yih, Xiaodong He et al.

We consider learning representations of entities and relations in KBs using the neural-embedding approach. We show that most existing models, including NTN (Socher et al., 2013) and TransE (Bordes et al., 2013b), can be generalized under a unified learning framework, where entities are low-dimensional vectors learned from a neural network and relations are bilinear and/or linear mapping functions. Under this framework, we compare a variety of embedding models on the link prediction task. We show that a simple bilinear formulation achieves new state-of-the-art results for the task (achieving a top-10 accuracy of 73.2% vs. 54.7% by TransE on Freebase). Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes the learned relation embeddings to mine logical rules such as "BornInCity(a,b) and CityInCountry(b,c) => Nationality(a,c)". We find that embeddings learned from the bilinear objective are particularly good at capturing relational semantics and that the composition of relations is characterized by matrix multiplication. More interestingly, we demonstrate that our embedding-based rule extraction approach successfully outperforms a state-of-the-art confidence-based rule mining approach in mining Horn rules that involve compositional reasoning.

Hao Fang, Saurabh Gupta, Forrest Iandola et al.

This paper presents a novel approach for automatically generating image descriptions: visual detectors, language models, and multimodal similarity models learnt directly from a dataset of image captions. We use multiple instance learning to train visual detectors for words that commonly occur in captions, including many different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The word detector outputs serve as conditional inputs to a maximum-entropy language model. The language model learns from a set of over 400,000 image descriptions to capture the statistics of word usage. We capture global semantics by re-ranking caption candidates using sentence-level features and a deep multimodal similarity model. Our system is state-of-the-art on the official Microsoft COCO benchmark, producing a BLEU-4 score of 29.1%. When human judges compare the system captions to ones written by other people on our held-out test set, the system captions have equal or better quality 34% of the time.

Bishan Yang, Wen-tau Yih, Xiaodong He et al.

In this paper we present a unified framework for modeling multi-relational representations, scoring, and learning, and conduct an empirical study of several recent multi-relational embedding models under the framework. We investigate the different choices of relation operators based on linear and bilinear transformations, and also the effects of entity representations by incorporating unsupervised vectors pre-trained on extra textual resources. Our results show several interesting findings, enabling the design of a simple embedding model that achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on a popular knowledge base completion task evaluated on Freebase.

Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong He, Wen-tau Yih et al.

This paper presents a novel semantic-based phrase translation model. A pair of source and target phrases are projected into continuous-valued vector representations in a low-dimensional latent semantic space, where their translation score is computed by the distance between the pair in this new space. The projection is performed by a multi-layer neural network whose weights are learned on parallel training data. The learning is aimed to directly optimize the quality of end-to-end machine translation results. Experimental evaluation has been performed on two Europarl translation tasks, English-French and German-English. The results show that the new semantic-based phrase translation model significantly improves the performance of a state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation sys-tem, leading to a gain of 0.7-1.0 BLEU points.

Jianshu Chen, Li Deng

We present an architecture of a recurrent neural network (RNN) with a fully-connected deep neural network (DNN) as its feature extractor. The RNN is equipped with both causal temporal prediction and non-causal look-ahead, via auto-regression (AR) and moving-average (MA), respectively. The focus of this paper is a primal-dual training method that formulates the learning of the RNN as a formal optimization problem with an inequality constraint that provides a sufficient condition for the stability of the network dynamics. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this new method, which achieves 18.86% phone recognition error on the TIMIT benchmark for the core test set. The result approaches the best result of 17.7%, which was obtained by using RNN with long short-term memory (LSTM). The results also show that the proposed primal-dual training method produces lower recognition errors than the popular RNN methods developed earlier based on the carefully tuned threshold parameter that heuristically prevents the gradient from exploding.

Hamid Palangi, Li Deng, Rabab K Ward

Echo State Networks (ESNs) are a special type of the temporally deep network model, the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), where the recurrent matrix is carefully designed and both the recurrent and input matrices are fixed. An ESN uses the linearity of the activation function of the output units to simplify the learning of the output matrix. In this paper, we devise a special technique that take advantage of this linearity in the output units of an ESN, to learn the input and recurrent matrices. This has not been done in earlier ESNs due to their well known difficulty in learning those matrices. Compared to the technique of BackPropagation Through Time (BPTT) in learning general RNNs, our proposed method exploits linearity of activation function in the output units to formulate the relationships amongst the various matrices in an RNN. These relationships results in the gradient of the cost function having an analytical form and being more accurate. This would enable us to compute the gradients instead of obtaining them by recursion as in BPTT. Experimental results on phone state classification show that learning one or both the input and recurrent matrices in an ESN yields superior results compared to traditional ESNs that do not learn these matrices, especially when longer time steps are used.