CVAug 26, 2024Code
A Practitioner's Guide to Continual Multimodal PretrainingKarsten Roth, Vishaal Udandarao, Sebastian Dziadzio et al. · cambridge
Multimodal foundation models serve numerous applications at the intersection of vision and language. Still, despite being pretrained on extensive data, they become outdated over time. To keep models updated, research into continual pretraining mainly explores scenarios with either (1) infrequent, indiscriminate updates on large-scale new data, or (2) frequent, sample-level updates. However, practical model deployment often operates in the gap between these two limit cases, as real-world applications often demand adaptation to specific subdomains, tasks or concepts -- spread over the entire, varying life cycle of a model. In this work, we complement current perspectives on continual pretraining through a research test bed as well as provide comprehensive guidance for effective continual model updates in such scenarios. We first introduce FoMo-in-Flux, a continual multimodal pretraining benchmark with realistic compute constraints and practical deployment requirements, constructed over 63 datasets with diverse visual and semantic coverage. Using FoMo-in-Flux, we explore the complex landscape of practical continual pretraining through multiple perspectives: (1) A data-centric investigation of data mixtures and stream orderings that emulate real-world deployment situations, (2) a method-centric investigation ranging from simple fine-tuning and traditional continual learning strategies to parameter-efficient updates and model merging, (3) meta learning rate schedules and mechanistic design choices, and (4) the influence of model and compute scaling. Together, our insights provide a practitioner's guide to continual multimodal pretraining for real-world deployment. Our benchmark and code is here: https://github.com/ExplainableML/fomo_in_flux.
CVNov 28, 2022Code
SuS-X: Training-Free Name-Only Transfer of Vision-Language ModelsVishaal Udandarao, Ankush Gupta, Samuel Albanie · cambridge
Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has emerged as a simple yet effective way to train large-scale vision-language models. CLIP demonstrates impressive zero-shot classification and retrieval on diverse downstream tasks. However, to leverage its full potential, fine-tuning still appears to be necessary. Fine-tuning the entire CLIP model can be resource-intensive and unstable. Moreover, recent methods that aim to circumvent this need for fine-tuning still require access to images from the target distribution. In this paper, we pursue a different approach and explore the regime of training-free "name-only transfer" in which the only knowledge we possess about the downstream task comprises the names of downstream target categories. We propose a novel method, SuS-X, consisting of two key building blocks -- SuS and TIP-X, that requires neither intensive fine-tuning nor costly labelled data. SuS-X achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot classification results on 19 benchmark datasets. We further show the utility of TIP-X in the training-free few-shot setting, where we again achieve state-of-the-art results over strong training-free baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/vishaal27/SuS-X.
CVOct 12, 2023Code
Visual Data-Type Understanding does not emerge from Scaling Vision-Language ModelsVishaal Udandarao, Max F. Burg, Samuel Albanie et al. · cambridge
Recent advances in the development of vision-language models (VLMs) are yielding remarkable success in recognizing visual semantic content, including impressive instances of compositional image understanding. Here, we introduce the novel task of Visual Data-Type Identification, a basic perceptual skill with implications for data curation (e.g., noisy data-removal from large datasets, domain-specific retrieval) and autonomous vision (e.g., distinguishing changing weather conditions from camera lens staining). We develop two datasets consisting of animal images altered across a diverse set of 27 visual data-types, spanning four broad categories. An extensive zero-shot evaluation of 39 VLMs, ranging from 100M to 80B parameters, shows a nuanced performance landscape. While VLMs are reasonably good at identifying certain stylistic \textit{data-types}, such as cartoons and sketches, they struggle with simpler data-types arising from basic manipulations like image rotations or additive noise. Our findings reveal that (i) model scaling alone yields marginal gains for contrastively-trained models like CLIP, and (ii) there is a pronounced drop in performance for the largest auto-regressively trained VLMs like OpenFlamingo. This finding points to a blind spot in current frontier VLMs: they excel in recognizing semantic content but fail to acquire an understanding of visual data-types through scaling. By analyzing the pre-training distributions of these models and incorporating data-type information into the captions during fine-tuning, we achieve a significant enhancement in performance. By exploring this previously uncharted task, we aim to set the stage for further advancing VLMs to equip them with visual data-type understanding. Code and datasets are released at https://github.com/bethgelab/DataTypeIdentification.
CLJul 31, 2024
Data Contamination Report from the 2024 CONDA Shared TaskOscar Sainz, Iker García-Ferrero, Alon Jacovi et al. · ibm-research
The 1st Workshop on Data Contamination (CONDA 2024) focuses on all relevant aspects of data contamination in natural language processing, where data contamination is understood as situations where evaluation data is included in pre-training corpora used to train large scale models, compromising evaluation results. The workshop fostered a shared task to collect evidence on data contamination in current available datasets and models. The goal of the shared task and associated database is to assist the community in understanding the extent of the problem and to assist researchers in avoiding reporting evaluation results on known contaminated resources. The shared task provides a structured, centralized public database for the collection of contamination evidence, open to contributions from the community via GitHub pool requests. This first compilation paper is based on 566 reported entries over 91 contaminated sources from a total of 23 contributors. The details of the individual contamination events are available in the platform. The platform continues to be online, open to contributions from the community.
CLJul 10, 2024
CiteME: Can Language Models Accurately Cite Scientific Claims?Ori Press, Andreas Hochlehnert, Ameya Prabhu et al. · uw
Thousands of new scientific papers are published each month. Such information overload complicates researcher efforts to stay current with the state-of-the-art as well as to verify and correctly attribute claims. We pose the following research question: Given a text excerpt referencing a paper, could an LM act as a research assistant to correctly identify the referenced paper? We advance efforts to answer this question by building a benchmark that evaluates the abilities of LMs in citation attribution. Our benchmark, CiteME, consists of text excerpts from recent machine learning papers, each referencing a single other paper. CiteME use reveals a large gap between frontier LMs and human performance, with LMs achieving only 4.2-18.5% accuracy and humans 69.7%. We close this gap by introducing CiteAgent, an autonomous system built on the GPT-4o LM that can also search and read papers, which achieves an accuracy of 35.3\% on CiteME. Overall, CiteME serves as a challenging testbed for open-ended claim attribution, driving the research community towards a future where any claim made by an LM can be automatically verified and discarded if found to be incorrect.
CVNov 20, 2025Code
Solving Spatial Supersensing Without Spatial SupersensingVishaal Udandarao, Shyamgopal Karthik, Surabhi S. Nath et al.
Cambrian-S aims to take the first steps towards improving video world models with spatial supersensing by introducing (i) two benchmarks, VSI-Super-Recall (VSR) and VSI-Super-Counting (VSC), and (ii) bespoke predictive sensing inference strategies tailored to each benchmark. In this work, we conduct a critical analysis of Cambrian-S across both these fronts. First, we introduce a simple baseline, NoSense, which discards almost all temporal structure and uses only a bag-of-words SigLIP model, yet near-perfectly solves VSR, achieving 95% accuracy even on 4-hour videos. This shows benchmarks like VSR can be nearly solved without spatial cognition, world modeling or spatial supersensing. Second, we hypothesize that the tailored inference methods proposed by Cambrian-S likely exploit shortcut heuristics in the benchmark. We illustrate this with a simple sanity check on the VSC benchmark, called VSC-Repeat: We concatenate each video with itself 1-5 times, which does not change the number of unique objects. However, this simple perturbation entirely collapses the mean relative accuracy of Cambrian-S from 42% to 0%. A system that performs spatial supersensing and integrates information across experiences should recognize views of the same scene and keep object-count predictions unchanged; instead, Cambrian-S inference algorithm relies largely on a shortcut in the VSC benchmark that rooms are never revisited. Taken together, our findings suggest that (i) current VSI-Super benchmarks do not yet reliably measure spatial supersensing, and (ii) predictive-sensing inference recipes used by Cambrian-S improve performance by inadvertently exploiting shortcuts rather than from robust spatial supersensing. We include the response from the Cambrian-S authors (in Appendix A) to provide a balanced perspective alongside our claims. We release our code at: https://github.com/bethgelab/supersanity
CVNov 25, 2025Code
Concept-Aware Batch Sampling Improves Language-Image PretrainingAdhiraj Ghosh, Vishaal Udandarao, Thao Nguyen et al.
What data should a vision-language model be trained on? To answer this question, many data curation efforts center on the quality of a dataset. However, most of these existing methods are (i) offline, i.e. they produce a static dataset from a set of predetermined filtering criteria, and (ii) concept-agnostic, i.e. they use model-based filters which induce additional data biases. In this work, we go beyond such offline, concept-agnostic methods and advocate for more flexible, task-adaptive online concept-based curation. Our first contribution is DataConcept, a collection of 128M web-crawled image-text pairs annotated with fine-grained details about their concept composition. Building on DataConcept, we introduce Concept-Aware Batch Sampling (CABS), a simple yet effective batch sampling framework that flexibly constructs batches on-the-fly based on specific target distributions. We propose two variants: (i) Diversity Maximization (CABS-DM) to curate batches with a broad coverage of available concepts, and (ii) Frequency Maximization (CABS-FM) to curate batches with high object multiplicity. Through extensive evaluations across 28 benchmarks, we demonstrate that our CABS method significantly benefits CLIP/SigLIP model classes and yields highly performant models. Overall, CABS represents a strong open-source alternative to proprietary online data curation algorithms, enabling practitioners to define custom concept distributions that optimize for specific downstream tasks.
CVApr 4, 2024
No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model PerformanceVishaal Udandarao, Ameya Prabhu, Adhiraj Ghosh et al. · cambridge
Web-crawled pretraining datasets underlie the impressive "zero-shot" evaluation performance of multimodal models, such as CLIP for classification/retrieval and Stable-Diffusion for image generation. However, it is unclear how meaningful the notion of "zero-shot" generalization is for such multimodal models, as it is not known to what extent their pretraining datasets encompass the downstream concepts targeted for during "zero-shot" evaluation. In this work, we ask: How is the performance of multimodal models on downstream concepts influenced by the frequency of these concepts in their pretraining datasets? We comprehensively investigate this question across 34 models and five standard pretraining datasets (CC-3M, CC-12M, YFCC-15M, LAION-400M, LAION-Aesthetics), generating over 300GB of data artifacts. We consistently find that, far from exhibiting "zero-shot" generalization, multimodal models require exponentially more data to achieve linear improvements in downstream "zero-shot" performance, following a sample inefficient log-linear scaling trend. This trend persists even when controlling for sample-level similarity between pretraining and downstream datasets, and testing on purely synthetic data distributions. Furthermore, upon benchmarking models on long-tailed data sampled based on our analysis, we demonstrate that multimodal models across the board perform poorly. We contribute this long-tail test set as the "Let it Wag!" benchmark to further research in this direction. Taken together, our study reveals an exponential need for training data which implies that the key to "zero-shot" generalization capabilities under large-scale training paradigms remains to be found.
LGApr 9, 2025
A Sober Look at Progress in Language Model Reasoning: Pitfalls and Paths to ReproducibilityAndreas Hochlehnert, Hardik Bhatnagar, Vishaal Udandarao et al. · cambridge
Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on benchmarking practices that lack transparency, robustness, or statistical grounding. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study and find that current mathematical reasoning benchmarks are highly sensitive to subtle implementation choices--including decoding parameters, random seeds, prompt formatting, and even hardware and software configurations. Performance gains reported in recent studies frequently hinge on unclear comparisons or unreported sources of variance. To address these issues, we propose a standardized evaluation framework with clearly defined best practices and reporting standards. Using this framework, we reassess recent methods and find that most reinforcement learning (RL) approaches yield only modest improvements--far below prior claims--and are prone to overfitting, especially on small-scale benchmarks like AIME'24. In contrast, supervised finetuning (SFT) methods show consistently stronger generalization in the settings we study. To foster reproducibility, we release all code, prompts, and model outputs, for reasoning benchmarks, establishing more rigorous foundations for future work.
LGOct 26, 2024
Centaur: a foundation model of human cognitionMarcel Binz, Elif Akata, Matthias Bethge et al. · princeton
Establishing a unified theory of cognition has been a major goal of psychology. While there have been previous attempts to instantiate such theories by building computational models, we currently do not have one model that captures the human mind in its entirety. A first step in this direction is to create a model that can predict human behavior in a wide range of settings. Here we introduce Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behavior in any experiment expressible in natural language. We derived Centaur by finetuning a state-of-the-art language model on a novel, large-scale data set called Psych-101. Psych-101 reaches an unprecedented scale, covering trial-by-trial data from over 60,000 participants performing over 10,000,000 choices in 160 experiments. Centaur not only captures the behavior of held-out participants better than existing cognitive models, but also generalizes to new cover stories, structural task modifications, and entirely new domains. Furthermore, we find that the model's internal representations become more aligned with human neural activity after finetuning. Taken together, our results demonstrate that it is possible to discover computational models that capture human behavior across a wide range of domains. We believe that such models provide tremendous potential for guiding the development of cognitive theories and present a case study to demonstrate this.
CVFeb 13, 2025
ZeroBench: An Impossible Visual Benchmark for Contemporary Large Multimodal ModelsJonathan Roberts, Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Ansh Sharma et al. · cambridge, oxford
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit major shortfalls when interpreting images and, by some measures, have poorer spatial cognition than small children or animals. Despite this, they attain high scores on many popular visual benchmarks, with headroom rapidly eroded by an ongoing surge of model progress. To address this, there is a pressing need for difficult benchmarks that remain relevant for longer. We take this idea to its limit by introducing ZeroBench-a lightweight visual reasoning benchmark that is entirely impossible for contemporary frontier LMMs. Our benchmark consists of 100 manually curated questions and 334 less difficult subquestions. We evaluate 20 LMMs on ZeroBench, all of which score 0.0%, and rigorously analyse the errors. To encourage progress in visual understanding, we publicly release ZeroBench.
LGDec 9, 2024
How to Merge Your Multimodal Models Over Time?Sebastian Dziadzio, Vishaal Udandarao, Karsten Roth et al. · cambridge
Model merging combines multiple expert models - finetuned from a base foundation model on diverse tasks and domains - into a single, more capable model. However, most existing model merging approaches assume that all experts are available simultaneously. In reality, new tasks and domains emerge progressively over time, requiring strategies to integrate the knowledge of expert models as they become available: a process we call temporal model merging. The temporal dimension introduces unique challenges not addressed in prior work, raising new questions such as: when training for a new task, should the expert model start from the merged past experts or from the original base model? Should we merge all models at each time step? Which merging techniques are best suited for temporal merging? Should different strategies be used to initialize the training and deploy the model? To answer these questions, we propose a unified framework called TIME - Temporal Integration of Model Expertise - which defines temporal model merging across three axes: (1) Initialization Phase, (2) Deployment Phase, and (3) Merging Technique. Using TIME, we study temporal model merging across model sizes, compute budgets, and learning horizons on the FoMo-in-Flux benchmark. Our comprehensive suite of experiments across TIME allows us to uncover key insights for temporal model merging, offering a better understanding of current challenges and best practices for effective temporal model merging.
CVNov 27, 2024
Active Data Curation Effectively Distills Large-Scale Multimodal ModelsVishaal Udandarao, Nikhil Parthasarathy, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem et al. · cambridge
Knowledge distillation (KD) is the de facto standard for compressing large-scale models into smaller ones. Prior works have explored ever more complex KD strategies involving different objective functions, teacher-ensembles, and weight inheritance. In this work we explore an alternative, yet simple approach -- active data curation as effective distillation for contrastive multimodal pretraining. Our simple online batch selection method, ACID, outperforms strong KD baselines across various model-, data- and compute-configurations. Further, we find such an active data curation strategy to in fact be complementary to standard KD, and can be effectively combined to train highly performant inference-efficient models. Our simple and scalable pretraining framework, ACED, achieves state-of-the-art results across 27 zero-shot classification and retrieval tasks with upto 11% less inference FLOPs. We further demonstrate that our ACED models yield strong vision-encoders for training generative multimodal models in the LiT-Decoder setting, outperforming larger vision encoders for image-captioning and visual question-answering tasks.
LGDec 9, 2024
ONEBench to Test Them All: Sample-Level Benchmarking Over Open-Ended CapabilitiesAdhiraj Ghosh, Sebastian Dziadzio, Ameya Prabhu et al. · cambridge
Traditional fixed test sets fall short in evaluating open-ended capabilities of foundation models. To address this, we propose ONEBench(OpeN-Ended Benchmarking), a new testing paradigm that consolidates individual evaluation datasets into a unified, ever-expanding sample pool. ONEBench allows users to generate custom, open-ended evaluation benchmarks from this pool, corresponding to specific capabilities of interest. By aggregating samples across test sets, ONEBench enables the assessment of diverse capabilities beyond those covered by the original test sets, while mitigating overfitting and dataset bias. Most importantly, it frames model evaluation as a collective process of selecting and aggregating sample-level tests. The shift from task-specific benchmarks to ONEBench introduces two challenges: (1)heterogeneity and (2)incompleteness. Heterogeneity refers to the aggregation over diverse metrics, while incompleteness describes comparing models evaluated on different data subsets. To address these challenges, we explore algorithms to aggregate sparse measurements into reliable model scores. Our aggregation algorithm ensures identifiability(asymptotically recovering ground-truth scores) and rapid convergence, enabling accurate model ranking with less data. On homogenous datasets, we show our aggregation algorithm provides rankings that highly correlate with those produced by average scores. We also demonstrate robustness to ~95% of measurements missing, reducing evaluation cost by up to 20x with little-to-no change in model rankings. We introduce ONEBench-LLM for language models and ONEBench-LMM for vision-language models, unifying evaluations across these domains. Overall, we present a technique for open-ended evaluation, which can aggregate over incomplete, heterogeneous sample-level measurements to continually grow a benchmark alongside the rapidly developing foundation models.
LGFeb 29, 2024
Efficient Lifelong Model Evaluation in an Era of Rapid ProgressAmeya Prabhu, Vishaal Udandarao, Philip Torr et al. · cambridge
Standardized benchmarks drive progress in machine learning. However, with repeated testing, the risk of overfitting grows as algorithms over-exploit benchmark idiosyncrasies. In our work, we seek to mitigate this challenge by compiling ever-expanding large-scale benchmarks called Lifelong Benchmarks. These benchmarks introduce a major challenge: the high cost of evaluating a growing number of models across very large sample sets. To address this challenge, we introduce an efficient framework for model evaluation, Sort & Search (S&S)}, which reuses previously evaluated models by leveraging dynamic programming algorithms to selectively rank and sub-select test samples. To test our approach at scale, we create Lifelong-CIFAR10 and Lifelong-ImageNet, containing 1.69M and 1.98M test samples for classification. Extensive empirical evaluations across over 31,000 models demonstrate that S&S achieves highly-efficient approximate accuracy measurement, reducing compute cost from 180 GPU days to 5 GPU hours (about 1000x reduction) on a single A100 GPU, with low approximation error and memory cost of <100MB. Our work also highlights issues with current accuracy prediction metrics, suggesting a need to move towards sample-level evaluation metrics. We hope to guide future research by showing our method's bottleneck lies primarily in generalizing Sort beyond a single rank order and not in improving Search.
CVJun 9, 2025
A Good CREPE needs more than just Sugar: Investigating Biases in Compositional Vision-Language BenchmarksVishaal Udandarao, Mehdi Cherti, Shyamgopal Karthik et al. · cambridge
We investigate 17 benchmarks (e.g. SugarCREPE, VALSE) commonly used for measuring compositional understanding capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). We scrutinize design choices in their construction, including data source (e.g. MS-COCO) and curation procedures (e.g. constructing negative images/captions), uncovering several inherent biases across most benchmarks. We find that blind heuristics (e.g. token-length, log-likelihood under a language model) perform on par with CLIP models, indicating that these benchmarks do not effectively measure compositional understanding. We demonstrate that the underlying factor is a distribution asymmetry between positive and negative images/captions, induced by the benchmark construction procedures. To mitigate these issues, we provide a few key recommendations for constructing more robust vision-language compositional understanding benchmarks, that would be less prone to such simple attacks.
ASOct 22, 2025
Data-Centric Lessons To Improve Speech-Language PretrainingVishaal Udandarao, Zhiyun Lu, Xuankai Chang et al. · utoronto
Spoken Question-Answering (SQA) is a core capability for useful and interactive artificial intelligence systems. Recently, several speech-language models (SpeechLMs) have been released with a specific focus on improving their SQA performance. However, a lack of controlled ablations of pretraining data processing and curation makes it challenging to understand what factors account for performance, despite substantial gains from similar studies in other data modalities. In this work, we address this gap by conducting a data-centric exploration for pretraining SpeechLMs. We focus on three research questions fundamental to speech-language pretraining data: (1) how to process raw web-crawled audio content for speech-text pretraining, (2) how to construct synthetic pretraining datasets to augment web-crawled data and (3) how to interleave (text, audio) segments into training sequences. We apply the insights from our controlled data-centric ablations to pretrain a 3.8B-parameter SpeechLM, called SpeLangy, that outperforms models that are up to 3x larger by 10.2% absolute performance. We hope our findings highlight the impact of effective data curation for speech-language pretraining and guide future data-centric exploration in SpeechLMs.
AIJul 20, 2020
It's LeVAsa not LevioSA! Latent Encodings for Valence-Arousal Structure AlignmentSurabhi S. Nath, Vishaal Udandarao, Jainendra Shukla
In recent years, great strides have been made in the field of affective computing. Several models have been developed to represent and quantify emotions. Two popular ones include (i) categorical models which represent emotions as discrete labels, and (ii) dimensional models which represent emotions in a Valence-Arousal (VA) circumplex domain. However, there is no standard for annotation mapping between the two labelling methods. We build a novel algorithm for mapping categorical and dimensional model labels using annotation transfer across affective facial image datasets. Further, we utilize the transferred annotations to learn rich and interpretable data representations using a variational autoencoder (VAE). We present "LeVAsa", a VAE model that learns implicit structure by aligning the latent space with the VA space. We evaluate the efficacy of LeVAsa by comparing performance with the Vanilla VAE using quantitative and qualitative analysis on two benchmark affective image datasets. Our results reveal that LeVAsa achieves high latent-circumplex alignment which leads to improved downstream categorical emotion prediction. The work also demonstrates the trade-off between degree of alignment and quality of reconstructions.
CVJun 16, 2020
On the Inference of Soft Biometrics from Typing Patterns Collected in a Multi-device EnvironmentVishaal Udandarao, Mohit Agrawal, Rajesh Kumar et al.
In this paper, we study the inference of gender, major/minor (computer science, non-computer science), typing style, age, and height from the typing patterns collected from 117 individuals in a multi-device environment. The inference of the first three identifiers was considered as classification tasks, while the rest as regression tasks. For classification tasks, we benchmark the performance of six classical machine learning (ML) and four deep learning (DL) classifiers. On the other hand, for regression tasks, we evaluated three ML and four DL-based regressors. The overall experiment consisted of two text-entry (free and fixed) and four device (Desktop, Tablet, Phone, and Combined) configurations. The best arrangements achieved accuracies of 96.15%, 93.02%, and 87.80% for typing style, gender, and major/minor, respectively, and mean absolute errors of 1.77 years and 2.65 inches for age and height, respectively. The results are promising considering the variety of application scenarios that we have listed in this work.
CVJun 10, 2020
DisCont: Self-Supervised Visual Attribute Disentanglement using Context VectorsSarthak Bhagat, Vishaal Udandarao, Shagun Uppal
Disentangling the underlying feature attributes within an image with no prior supervision is a challenging task. Models that can disentangle attributes well provide greater interpretability and control. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised framework DisCont to disentangle multiple attributes by exploiting the structural inductive biases within images. Motivated by the recent surge in contrastive learning paradigms, our model bridges the gap between self-supervised contrastive learning algorithms and unsupervised disentanglement. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach, both qualitatively and quantitatively, on four benchmark datasets.
LGMay 7, 2020
COBRA: Contrastive Bi-Modal Representation AlgorithmVishaal Udandarao, Abhishek Maiti, Deepak Srivatsav et al.
There are a wide range of applications that involve multi-modal data, such as cross-modal retrieval, visual question-answering, and image captioning. Such applications are primarily dependent on aligned distributions of the different constituent modalities. Existing approaches generate latent embeddings for each modality in a joint fashion by representing them in a common manifold. However these joint embedding spaces fail to sufficiently reduce the modality gap, which affects the performance in downstream tasks. We hypothesize that these embeddings retain the intra-class relationships but are unable to preserve the inter-class dynamics. In this paper, we present a novel framework COBRA that aims to train two modalities (image and text) in a joint fashion inspired by the Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) and Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) paradigms which preserve both inter and intra-class relationships. We empirically show that this framework reduces the modality gap significantly and generates a robust and task agnostic joint-embedding space. We outperform existing work on four diverse downstream tasks spanning across seven benchmark cross-modal datasets.
AINov 12, 2019
EDUQA: Educational Domain Question Answering System using Conceptual Network MappingAbhishek Agarwal, Nikhil Sachdeva, Raj Kamal Yadav et al.
Most of the existing question answering models can be largely compiled into two categories: i) open domain question answering models that answer generic questions and use large-scale knowledge base along with the targeted web-corpus retrieval and ii) closed domain question answering models that address focused questioning area and use complex deep learning models. Both the above models derive answers through textual comprehension methods. Due to their inability to capture the pedagogical meaning of textual content, these models are not appropriately suited to the educational field for pedagogy. In this paper, we propose an on-the-fly conceptual network model that incorporates educational semantics. The proposed model preserves correlations between conceptual entities by applying intelligent indexing algorithms on the concept network so as to improve answer generation. This model can be utilized for building interactive conversational agents for aiding classroom learning.
CLOct 27, 2019
Memeify: A Large-Scale Meme Generation SystemSuryatej Reddy Vyalla, Vishaal Udandarao, Tanmoy Chakraborty
Interest in the research areas related to meme propagation and generation has been increasing rapidly in the last couple of years. Meme datasets available online are either specific to a context or contain no class information. Here, we prepare a large-scale dataset of memes with captions and class labels. The dataset consists of 1.1 million meme captions from 128 classes. We also provide reasoning for the existence of broad categories, called "themes" across the meme dataset; each theme consists of multiple meme classes. Our generation system uses a trained state-of-the-art transformer-based model for caption generation by employing an encoder-decoder architecture. We develop a web interface, called Memeify for users to generate memes of their choice, and explain in detail, the working of individual components of the system. We also perform a qualitative evaluation of the generated memes by conducting a user study. A link to the demonstration of the Memeify system is https://youtu.be/P_Tfs0X-czs.