Amani R. Maina-Kilaas

Hannah Friedman, Amani R. Maina-Kilaas, Julianna Schalkwyk et al. · mit

In this paper, we propose a new method for determining shared features of and measuring the distance between data sets or point clouds. Our approach uses the joint factorization of two data matrices $X_1,X_2$ into non-negative matrices $X_1 = AS_1, X_2 = AS_2$ to derive a similarity measure that determines how well the shared basis $A$ approximates $X_1, X_2$. We also propose a point cloud distance measure built upon this method and the learned factorization. Our method reveals structural differences in both image and text data. Potential applications include classification, detecting plagiarism or other manipulation, data denoising, and transfer learning.

Ehsan Qasemi, Amani R. Maina-Kilaas, Devadutta Dash et al.

Humans can infer the affordance of objects by extracting related contextual preconditions for each scenario. For example, upon seeing an image of a broken cup, we can infer that this precondition prevents the cup from being used for drinking. Reasoning with preconditions of commonsense is studied in NLP where the model explicitly gets the contextual precondition. However, it is unclear if SOTA visual language models (VLMs) can extract such preconditions and infer the affordance of objects with them. In this work, we introduce the task of preconditioned visual language inference and rationalization (PVLIR). We propose a learning resource based on three strategies to retrieve weak supervision signals for the task and develop a human-verified test set for evaluation. Our results reveal the shortcomings of SOTA VLM models in the task and draw a road map to address the challenges ahead in improving them.