Sumit Chopra

Arda Atalık, Sumit Chopra, Daniel K. Sodickson

MRI provides excellent soft-tissue contrast without ionizing radiation, but long acquisition times increase patient discomfort while also raising exam costs and limiting scanner throughput. A common approach to reduce scan time is to acquire fewer measurements, which yields an ill-posed linear inverse problem; recovering diagnostic-quality images therefore requires incorporating prior knowledge beyond the measured data. In follow-up exams, the most recent prior scan of a patient can provide a highly informative subject-specific context, but practical use is complicated by temporal changes (including pathology progression), misalignment between scans, and protocol drift across acquisitions. In this work, we introduce L-TGVN, a Longitudinal Trust-Guided Variational Network that leverages prior scans as side information to reconstruct the current scan from heavily undersampled measurements. Crucially, L-TGVN constrains the influence of prior scans to be consistent with the acquired measurements. Unlike many existing longitudinal reconstruction methods, it does not require explicit pre-registration between prior and current scans. It further accommodates differences in acquisition protocols across visits (e.g., changes in sequence parameters). We evaluate L-TGVN against matched-capacity baselines, including prior-guided methods and methods that do not use longitudinal priors, and observe consistent improvements in standard quantitative metrics together with better preservation of fine structures at challenging accelerations. Source code is available at github.com/sodicksonlab/L-TGVN.

Radhika Tibrewala, Tarun Dutt, Angela Tong et al.

The fastMRI brain and knee dataset has enabled significant advances in exploring reconstruction methods for improving speed and image quality for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) via novel, clinically relevant reconstruction approaches. In this study, we describe the April 2023 expansion of the fastMRI dataset to include biparametric prostate MRI data acquired on a clinical population. The dataset consists of raw k-space and reconstructed images for T2-weighted and diffusion-weighted sequences along with slice-level labels that indicate the presence and grade of prostate cancer. As has been the case with fastMRI, increasing accessibility to raw prostate MRI data will further facilitate research in MR image reconstruction and evaluation with the larger goal of improving the utility of MRI for prostate cancer detection and evaluation. The dataset is available at https://fastmri.med.nyu.edu.

Raghav Singhal, Mukund Sudarshan, Anish Mahishi et al.

Early detection of many life-threatening diseases (e.g., prostate and breast cancer) within at-risk population can improve clinical outcomes and reduce cost of care. While numerous disease-specific "screening" tests that are closer to Point-of-Care (POC) are in use for this task, their low specificity results in unnecessary biopsies, leading to avoidable patient trauma and wasteful healthcare spending. On the other hand, despite the high accuracy of Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging in disease diagnosis, it is not used as a POC disease identification tool because of poor accessibility. The root cause of poor accessibility of MR stems from the requirement to reconstruct high-fidelity images, as it necessitates a lengthy and complex process of acquiring large quantities of high-quality k-space measurements. In this study we explore the feasibility of an ML-augmented MR pipeline that directly infers the disease sidestepping the image reconstruction process. We hypothesise that the disease classification task can be solved using a very small tailored subset of k-space data, compared to image reconstruction. Towards that end, we propose a method that performs two tasks: 1) identifies a subset of the k-space that maximizes disease identification accuracy, and 2) infers the disease directly using the identified k-space subset, bypassing the image reconstruction step. We validate our hypothesis by measuring the performance of the proposed system across multiple diseases and anatomies. We show that comparable performance to image-based classifiers, trained on images reconstructed with full k-space data, can be achieved using small quantities of data: 8% of the data for detecting multiple abnormalities in prostate and brain scans, and 5% of the data for knee abnormalities. To better understand the proposed approach and instigate future research, we provide an extensive analysis and release code.

Divyam Madaan, Daniel Sodickson, Kyunghyun Cho et al.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is considered the gold standard of medical imaging because of the excellent soft-tissue contrast exhibited in the images reconstructed by the MRI pipeline, which in-turn enables the human radiologist to discern many pathologies easily. More recently, Deep Learning (DL) models have also achieved state-of-the-art performance in diagnosing multiple diseases using these reconstructed images as input. However, the image reconstruction process within the MRI pipeline, which requires the use of complex hardware and adjustment of a large number of scanner parameters, is highly susceptible to noise of various forms, resulting in arbitrary artifacts within the images. Furthermore, the noise distribution is not stationary and varies within a machine, across machines, and patients, leading to varying artifacts within the images. Unfortunately, DL models are quite sensitive to these varying artifacts as it leads to changes in the input data distribution between the training and testing phases. The lack of robustness of these models against varying artifacts impedes their use in medical applications where safety is critical. In this work, we focus on improving the generalization performance of these models in the presence of multiple varying artifacts that manifest due to the complexity of the MR data acquisition. In our experiments, we observe that Batch Normalization, a widely used technique during the training of DL models for medical image analysis, is a significant cause of performance degradation in these changing environments. As a solution, we propose to use other normalization techniques, such as Group Normalization and Layer Normalization (LN), to inject robustness into model performance against varying image artifacts. Through a systematic set of experiments, we show that GN and LN provide better accuracy for various MR artifacts and distribution shifts.

Yuxuan Chen, Haoyan Yang, Hengkai Pan et al.

Breast ultrasound is essential for detecting and diagnosing abnormalities, with radiology reports summarizing key findings like lesion characteristics and malignancy assessments. Extracting this critical information is challenging due to the unstructured nature of these reports, with varied linguistic styles and inconsistent formatting. While proprietary LLMs like GPT-4 are effective, they are costly and raise privacy concerns when handling protected health information. This study presents a pipeline for developing an in-house LLM to extract clinical information from radiology reports. We first use GPT-4 to create a small labeled dataset, then fine-tune a Llama3-8B model on it. Evaluated on clinician-annotated reports, our model achieves an average F1 score of 84.6%, which is on par with GPT-4. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of developing an in-house LLM that not only matches GPT-4's performance but also offers cost reductions and enhanced data privacy.

Divyam Madaan, Sumit Chopra, Kyunghyun Cho

Despite the recent success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), existing approaches predominantly assume the availability of multiple modalities during training and inference. In practice, multimodal data is often incomplete because modalities may be missing, collected asynchronously, or available only for a subset of examples. In this work, we propose PRIMO, a supervised latent-variable imputation model that quantifies the predictive impact of any missing modality within the multimodal learning setting. PRIMO enables the use of all available training examples, whether modalities are complete or partial. Specifically, it models the missing modality through a latent variable that captures its relationship with the observed modality in the context of prediction. During inference, we draw many samples from the learned distribution over the missing modality to both obtain the marginal predictive distribution (for the purpose of prediction) and analyze the impact of the missing modalities on the prediction for each instance. We evaluate PRIMO on a synthetic XOR dataset, Audio-Vision MNIST, and MIMIC-III for mortality and ICD-9 prediction. Across all datasets, PRIMO obtains performance comparable to unimodal baselines when a modality is fully missing and to multimodal baselines when all modalities are available. PRIMO quantifies the predictive impact of a modality at the instance level using a variance-based metric computed from predictions across latent completions. We visually demonstrate how varying completions of the missing modality result in a set of plausible labels.

Umang Sharma, Jungkyu Park, Laura Heacock et al.

Full Field Digital Mammograms (FFDMs) and Digital Breast Tomosynthesis (DBT) are the two most widely used imaging modalities for breast cancer screening. Although DBT has increased cancer detection compared to FFDM, its widespread adoption in clinical practice has been slowed by increased interpretation times and a perceived decrease in the conspicuity of specific lesion types. Specifically, the non-inferiority of DBT for microcalcifications remains under debate. Due to concerns about the decrease in visual acuity, combined DBT-FFDM acquisitions remain popular, leading to overall increased exam times and radiation dosage. Enabling DBT to provide diagnostic information present in both FFDM and DBT would reduce reliance on FFDM, resulting in a reduction in both quantities. We propose a machine learning methodology that learns high-level representations leveraging the complementary diagnostic signal from both DBT and FFDM. Experiments on a large-scale data set validate our claims and show that our representations enable more accurate breast lesion detection than any DBT- or FFDM-based model.

Arda Atalık, Sumit Chopra, Daniel K. Sodickson

Reducing MRI scan times can improve patient care and lower healthcare costs. Many acceleration methods are designed to reconstruct diagnostic-quality images from sparse k-space data, via an ill-posed or ill-conditioned linear inverse problem (LIP). To address the resulting ambiguities, it is crucial to incorporate prior knowledge into the optimization problem, e.g., in the form of regularization. Another form of prior knowledge less commonly used in medical imaging is the readily available auxiliary data (a.k.a. side information) obtained from sources other than the current acquisition. In this paper, we present the Trust- Guided Variational Network (TGVN), an end-to-end deep learning framework that effectively and reliably integrates side information into LIPs. We demonstrate its effectiveness in multi-coil, multi-contrast MRI reconstruction, where incomplete or low-SNR measurements from one contrast are used as side information to reconstruct high-quality images of another contrast from heavily under-sampled data. TGVN is robust across different contrasts, anatomies, and field strengths. Compared to baselines utilizing side information, TGVN achieves superior image quality while preserving subtle pathological features even at challenging acceleration levels, drastically speeding up acquisition while minimizing hallucinations. Source code and dataset splits are available on github.com/sodicksonlab/TGVN.

Luoyao Chen, Revant Teotia, Antonio Verdone et al.

Radiology reports summarize key findings and differential diagnoses derived from medical imaging examinations. The extraction of differential diagnoses is crucial for downstream tasks, including patient management and treatment planning. However, the unstructured nature of these reports, characterized by diverse linguistic styles and inconsistent formatting, presents significant challenges. Although proprietary large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 can effectively retrieve clinical information, their use is limited in practice by high costs and concerns over the privacy of protected health information (PHI). This study introduces a pipeline for developing in-house LLMs tailored to identify differential diagnoses from radiology reports. We first utilize GPT-4 to create 31,056 labeled reports, then fine-tune open source LLM using this dataset. Evaluated on a set of 1,067 reports annotated by clinicians, the proposed model achieves an average F1 score of 92.1\%, which is on par with GPT-4 (90.8\%). Through this study, we provide a methodology for constructing in-house LLMs that: match the performance of GPT, reduce dependence on expensive proprietary models, and enhance the privacy and security of PHI.

Haoxu Huang, Cem M. Deniz, Kyunghyun Cho et al.

Chest X-ray imaging is a widely accessible and non-invasive diagnostic tool for detecting thoracic abnormalities. While numerous AI models assist radiologists in interpreting these images, most overlook patients' historical data. To bridge this gap, we introduce Temporal MIMIC dataset, which integrates five years of patient history, including radiographic scans and reports from MIMIC-CXR and MIMIC-IV, encompassing 12,221 patients and thirteen pathologies. Building on this, we present HIST-AID, a framework that enhances automatic diagnostic accuracy using historical reports. HIST-AID emulates the radiologist's comprehensive approach, leveraging historical data to improve diagnostic accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements, with AUROC increasing by 6.56% and AUPRC by 9.51% compared to models that rely solely on radiographic scans. These gains were consistently observed across diverse demographic groups, including variations in gender, age, and racial categories. We show that while recent data boost performance, older data may reduce accuracy due to changes in patient conditions. Our work paves the potential of incorporating historical data for more reliable automatic diagnosis, providing critical support for clinical decision-making.

Divyam Madaan, Varshan Muhunthan, Kyunghyun Cho et al.

Understanding the interplay between intra-modality dependencies (the contribution of an individual modality to a target task) and inter-modality dependencies (the relationships between modalities and the target task) is fundamental to advancing multi-modal learning. However, the nature of and interaction between these dependencies within current benchmark evaluations remains poorly characterized. In this work, we present a large-scale empirical study to quantify these dependencies across 23 visual question-answering benchmarks using multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) covering domains such as general and expert knowledge reasoning, optical character recognition, and document understanding. Our findings show that the reliance on vision, question (text), and their interaction varies significantly, both across and within benchmarks. We discover that numerous benchmarks intended to mitigate text-only biases have inadvertently amplified image-only dependencies. This characterization persists across model sizes, as larger models often use these intra-modality dependencies to achieve high performance that mask an underlying lack of multi-modal reasoning. We provide a quantitative characterization of multi-modal datasets, enabling a principled approach to multi-modal benchmark design and evaluation.

Revant Teotia, Candace Ross, Karen Ullrich et al.

Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved impressive quality and consistency. However, this has come at the cost of representation diversity. While automatic evaluation methods exist for benchmarking model diversity, they either require reference image datasets or lack specificity about the kind of diversity measured, limiting their adaptability and interpretability. To address this gap, we introduce the Does-it/Can-it framework, DIM-CIM, a reference-free measurement of default-mode diversity ("Does" the model generate images with expected attributes?) and generalization capacity ("Can" the model generate diverse attributes for a particular concept?). We construct the COCO-DIMCIM benchmark, which is seeded with COCO concepts and captions and augmented by a large language model. With COCO-DIMCIM, we find that widely-used models improve in generalization at the cost of default-mode diversity when scaling from 1.5B to 8.1B parameters. DIMCIM also identifies fine-grained failure cases, such as attributes that are generated with generic prompts but are rarely generated when explicitly requested. Finally, we use DIMCIM to evaluate the training data of a T2I model and observe a correlation of 0.85 between diversity in training images and default-mode diversity. Our work provides a flexible and interpretable framework for assessing T2I model diversity and generalization, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of model performance.

Divyam Madaan, Sumit Chopra, Kyunghyun Cho

Machine learning (ML) models often struggle to maintain performance under distribution shifts, leading to inaccurate predictions on unseen future data. In this work, we investigate whether and under what conditions models can achieve such a generalization when relying solely on past data. We explore two primary approaches: convex combinations of past model parameters (\emph{parameter interpolation}) and explicit extrapolation beyond the convex hull of past parameters (\emph{parameter extrapolation}). We benchmark several methods within these categories on a diverse set of temporal tasks, including language modeling, news summarization, news tag prediction, academic paper categorization, satellite image-based land use classification over time, and historical yearbook photo gender prediction. Our empirical findings show that none of the evaluated methods consistently outperforms the simple baseline of using the latest available model parameters in all scenarios. In the absence of access to future data or robust assumptions about the underlying data-generating process, these results underscore the inherent difficulties of generalizing and extrapolating to future data and warrant caution when evaluating claims of such generalization.

Chen-Yu Yen, Raghav Singhal, Umang Sharma et al.

Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging, despite its proven diagnostic utility, remains an inaccessible imaging modality for disease surveillance at the population level. A major factor rendering MR inaccessible is lengthy scan times. An MR scanner collects measurements associated with the underlying anatomy in the Fourier space, also known as the k-space. Creating a high-fidelity image requires collecting large quantities of such measurements, increasing the scan time. Traditionally to accelerate an MR scan, image reconstruction from under-sampled k-space data is the method of choice. However, recent works show the feasibility of bypassing image reconstruction and directly learning to detect disease directly from a sparser learned subset of the k-space measurements. In this work, we propose Adaptive Sampling for MR (ASMR), a sampling method that learns an adaptive policy to sequentially select k-space samples to optimize for target disease detection. On 6 out of 8 pathology classification tasks spanning the Knee, Brain, and Prostate MR scans, ASMR reaches within 2% of the performance of a fully sampled classifier while using only 8% of the k-space, as well as outperforming prior state-of-the-art work in k-space sampling such as EMRT, LOUPE, and DPS.

Anant Gupta, Srivas Venkatesh, Sumit Chopra et al.

Insufficient training data and severe class imbalance are often limiting factors when developing machine learning models for the classification of rare diseases. In this work, we address the problem of classifying bone lesions from X-ray images by increasing the small number of positive samples in the training set. We propose a generative data augmentation approach based on a cycle-consistent generative adversarial network that synthesizes bone lesions on images without pathology. We pose the generative task as an image-patch translation problem that we optimize specifically for distinct bones (humerus, tibia, femur). In experimental results, we confirm that the described method mitigates the class imbalance problem in the binary classification task of bone lesion detection. We show that the augmented training sets enable the training of superior classifiers achieving better performance on a held-out test set. Additionally, we demonstrate the feasibility of transfer learning and apply a generative model that was trained on one body part to another.

Ledell Wu, Adam Fisch, Sumit Chopra et al.

We present StarSpace, a general-purpose neural embedding model that can solve a wide variety of problems: labeling tasks such as text classification, ranking tasks such as information retrieval/web search, collaborative filtering-based or content-based recommendation, embedding of multi-relational graphs, and learning word, sentence or document level embeddings. In each case the model works by embedding those entities comprised of discrete features and comparing them against each other -- learning similarities dependent on the task. Empirical results on a number of tasks show that StarSpace is highly competitive with existing methods, whilst also being generally applicable to new cases where those methods are not.

Sam Wiseman, Sumit Chopra, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato et al.

While Truncated Back-Propagation through Time (BPTT) is the most popular approach to training Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), it suffers from being inherently sequential (making parallelization difficult) and from truncating gradient flow between distant time-steps. We investigate whether Target Propagation (TPROP) style approaches can address these shortcomings. Unfortunately, extensive experiments suggest that TPROP generally underperforms BPTT, and we end with an analysis of this phenomenon, and suggestions for future work.

Jiwei Li, Alexander H. Miller, Sumit Chopra et al.

A good dialogue agent should have the ability to interact with users by both responding to questions and by asking questions, and importantly to learn from both types of interaction. In this work, we explore this direction by designing a simulator and a set of synthetic tasks in the movie domain that allow such interactions between a learner and a teacher. We investigate how a learner can benefit from asking questions in both offline and online reinforcement learning settings, and demonstrate that the learner improves when asking questions. Finally, real experiments with Mechanical Turk validate the approach. Our work represents a first step in developing such end-to-end learned interactive dialogue agents.

Jiwei Li, Alexander H. Miller, Sumit Chopra et al.

An important aspect of developing conversational agents is to give a bot the ability to improve through communicating with humans and to learn from the mistakes that it makes. Most research has focused on learning from fixed training sets of labeled data rather than interacting with a dialogue partner in an online fashion. In this paper we explore this direction in a reinforcement learning setting where the bot improves its question-answering ability from feedback a teacher gives following its generated responses. We build a simulator that tests various aspects of such learning in a synthetic environment, and introduce models that work in this regime. Finally, real experiments with Mechanical Turk validate the approach.

Jesse Dodge, Andreea Gane, Xiang Zhang et al.

A long-term goal of machine learning is to build intelligent conversational agents. One recent popular approach is to train end-to-end models on a large amount of real dialog transcripts between humans (Sordoni et al., 2015; Vinyals & Le, 2015; Shang et al., 2015). However, this approach leaves many questions unanswered as an understanding of the precise successes and shortcomings of each model is hard to assess. A contrasting recent proposal are the bAbI tasks (Weston et al., 2015b) which are synthetic data that measure the ability of learning machines at various reasoning tasks over toy language. Unfortunately, those tests are very small and hence may encourage methods that do not scale. In this work, we propose a suite of new tasks of a much larger scale that attempt to bridge the gap between the two regimes. Choosing the domain of movies, we provide tasks that test the ability of models to answer factual questions (utilizing OMDB), provide personalization (utilizing MovieLens), carry short conversations about the two, and finally to perform on natural dialogs from Reddit. We provide a dataset covering 75k movie entities and with 3.5M training examples. We present results of various models on these tasks, and evaluate their performance.

Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, Sumit Chopra, Michael Auli et al.

Many natural language processing applications use language models to generate text. These models are typically trained to predict the next word in a sequence, given the previous words and some context such as an image. However, at test time the model is expected to generate the entire sequence from scratch. This discrepancy makes generation brittle, as errors may accumulate along the way. We address this issue by proposing a novel sequence level training algorithm that directly optimizes the metric used at test time, such as BLEU or ROUGE. On three different tasks, our approach outperforms several strong baselines for greedy generation. The method is also competitive when these baselines employ beam search, while being several times faster.

Felix Hill, Antoine Bordes, Sumit Chopra et al.

We introduce a new test of how well language models capture meaning in children's books. Unlike standard language modelling benchmarks, it distinguishes the task of predicting syntactic function words from that of predicting lower-frequency words, which carry greater semantic content. We compare a range of state-of-the-art models, each with a different way of encoding what has been previously read. We show that models which store explicit representations of long-term contexts outperform state-of-the-art neural language models at predicting semantic content words, although this advantage is not observed for syntactic function words. Interestingly, we find that the amount of text encoded in a single memory representation is highly influential to the performance: there is a sweet-spot, not too big and not too small, between single words and full sentences that allows the most meaningful information in a text to be effectively retained and recalled. Further, the attention over such window-based memories can be trained effectively through self-supervision. We then assess the generality of this principle by applying it to the CNN QA benchmark, which involves identifying named entities in paraphrased summaries of news articles, and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Alexander M. Rush, Sumit Chopra, Jason Weston

Summarization based on text extraction is inherently limited, but generation-style abstractive methods have proven challenging to build. In this work, we propose a fully data-driven approach to abstractive sentence summarization. Our method utilizes a local attention-based model that generates each word of the summary conditioned on the input sentence. While the model is structurally simple, it can easily be trained end-to-end and scales to a large amount of training data. The model shows significant performance gains on the DUC-2004 shared task compared with several strong baselines.

Antoine Bordes, Nicolas Usunier, Sumit Chopra et al.

Training large-scale question answering systems is complicated because training sources usually cover a small portion of the range of possible questions. This paper studies the impact of multitask and transfer learning for simple question answering; a setting for which the reasoning required to answer is quite easy, as long as one can retrieve the correct evidence given a question, which can be difficult in large-scale conditions. To this end, we introduce a new dataset of 100k questions that we use in conjunction with existing benchmarks. We conduct our study within the framework of Memory Networks (Weston et al., 2015) because this perspective allows us to eventually scale up to more complex reasoning, and show that Memory Networks can be successfully trained to achieve excellent performance.

Jason Weston, Antoine Bordes, Sumit Chopra et al.

One long-term goal of machine learning research is to produce methods that are applicable to reasoning and natural language, in particular building an intelligent dialogue agent. To measure progress towards that goal, we argue for the usefulness of a set of proxy tasks that evaluate reading comprehension via question answering. Our tasks measure understanding in several ways: whether a system is able to answer questions via chaining facts, simple induction, deduction and many more. The tasks are designed to be prerequisites for any system that aims to be capable of conversing with a human. We believe many existing learning systems can currently not solve them, and hence our aim is to classify these tasks into skill sets, so that researchers can identify (and then rectify) the failings of their systems. We also extend and improve the recently introduced Memory Networks model, and show it is able to solve some, but not all, of the tasks.

Tomas Mikolov, Armand Joulin, Sumit Chopra et al.

Recurrent neural network is a powerful model that learns temporal patterns in sequential data. For a long time, it was believed that recurrent networks are difficult to train using simple optimizers, such as stochastic gradient descent, due to the so-called vanishing gradient problem. In this paper, we show that learning longer term patterns in real data, such as in natural language, is perfectly possible using gradient descent. This is achieved by using a slight structural modification of the simple recurrent neural network architecture. We encourage some of the hidden units to change their state slowly by making part of the recurrent weight matrix close to identity, thus forming kind of a longer term memory. We evaluate our model in language modeling experiments, where we obtain similar performance to the much more complex Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997).

MarcAurelio Ranzato, Arthur Szlam, Joan Bruna et al.

We propose a strong baseline model for unsupervised feature learning using video data. By learning to predict missing frames or extrapolate future frames from an input video sequence, the model discovers both spatial and temporal correlations which are useful to represent complex deformations and motion patterns. The models we propose are largely borrowed from the language modeling literature, and adapted to the vision domain by quantizing the space of image patches into a large dictionary. We demonstrate the approach on both a filling and a generation task. For the first time, we show that, after training on natural videos, such a model can predict non-trivial motions over short video sequences.

Jason Weston, Sumit Chopra, Antoine Bordes

We describe a new class of learning models called memory networks. Memory networks reason with inference components combined with a long-term memory component; they learn how to use these jointly. The long-term memory can be read and written to, with the goal of using it for prediction. We investigate these models in the context of question answering (QA) where the long-term memory effectively acts as a (dynamic) knowledge base, and the output is a textual response. We evaluate them on a large-scale QA task, and a smaller, but more complex, toy task generated from a simulated world. In the latter, we show the reasoning power of such models by chaining multiple supporting sentences to answer questions that require understanding the intension of verbs.

Antoine Bordes, Sumit Chopra, Jason Weston

This paper presents a system which learns to answer questions on a broad range of topics from a knowledge base using few hand-crafted features. Our model learns low-dimensional embeddings of words and knowledge base constituents; these representations are used to score natural language questions against candidate answers. Training our system using pairs of questions and structured representations of their answers, and pairs of question paraphrases, yields competitive results on a competitive benchmark of the literature.