Jindong Chen

Yu-Chung Hsiao, Fedir Zubach, Gilles Baechler et al. · deepmind

We introduce ScreenQA, a novel benchmarking dataset designed to advance screen content understanding through question answering. The existing screen datasets are focused either on low-level structural and component understanding, or on a much higher-level composite task such as navigation and task completion for autonomous agents. ScreenQA attempts to bridge this gap. By annotating 86k question-answer pairs over the RICO dataset, we aim to benchmark the screen reading comprehension capacity, thereby laying the foundation for vision-based automation over screenshots. Our annotations encompass full answers, short answer phrases, and corresponding UI contents with bounding boxes, enabling four subtasks to address various application scenarios. We evaluate the dataset's efficacy using both open-weight and proprietary models in zero-shot, fine-tuned, and transfer learning settings. We further demonstrate positive transfer to web applications, highlighting its potential beyond mobile applications.

Yun Zhu, Yinxiao Liu, Felix Stahlberg et al. · deepmind

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for text rewriting. Nonetheless, the large sizes of these models make them impractical for on-device inference, which would otherwise allow for enhanced privacy and economical inference. Creating a smaller yet potent language model for text rewriting presents a formidable challenge because it requires balancing the need for a small size with the need to retain the emergent capabilities of the LLM, that requires costly data collection. To address the above challenge, we introduce a new instruction tuning approach for building a mobile-centric text rewriting model. Our strategies enable the generation of high quality training data without any human labeling. In addition, we propose a heuristic reinforcement learning framework which substantially enhances performance without requiring preference data. To further bridge the performance gap with the larger server-side model, we propose an effective approach that combines the mobile rewrite agent with the server model using a cascade. To tailor the text rewriting tasks to mobile scenarios, we introduce MessageRewriteEval, a benchmark that focuses on text rewriting for messages through natural language instructions. Through empirical experiments, we demonstrate that our on-device model surpasses the current state-of-the-art LLMs in text rewriting while maintaining a significantly reduced model size. Notably, we show that our proposed cascading approach improves model performance.

Maria Wang, Srinivas Sunkara, Gilles Baechler et al.

The rise of powerful multimodal LLMs has enhanced the viability of building web agents which can, with increasing levels of autonomy, assist users to retrieve information and complete tasks on various human-computer interfaces. It is hence necessary to build challenging benchmarks that span a wide-variety of use cases reflecting real-world usage. In this work, we present WebQuest, a multi-page question-answering dataset that requires reasoning across multiple related web pages. In contrast to existing UI benchmarks that focus on multi-step web navigation and task completion, our dataset evaluates information extraction, multimodal retrieval and composition of information from many web pages. WebQuest includes three question categories: single-screen QA, multi-screen QA, and QA based on navigation traces. We evaluate leading proprietary multimodal models like GPT-4V, Gemini Flash, Claude 3, and open source models like InstructBLIP, PaliGemma on our dataset, revealing a significant gap between single-screen and multi-screen reasoning. Finally, we investigate inference time techniques like Chain-of-Thought prompting to improve model capabilities on multi-screen reasoning.

Yipeng Gao, Lei Shu, Genzhi Ye et al.

Procedural 3D modeling through code is emerging as a versatile paradigm, offering deterministic, engine-ready, and precisely editable assets that neural 3D generators inherently lack. Authoring such procedural content, however, demands deep expertise in 3D software APIs, parametric design, and code-level geometric reasoning. In this paper, we propose 3DCodeBench, a systematic benchmark for evaluating vision-language model (VLM) agents for procedural 3D generation in 3D modeling software. Specifically, 3DCodeBench evaluates how effectively 12 advanced VLMs can serve as procedural 3D modelers by translating text and image references into procedural code for 3D modeling software. Recognizing that automated metrics may not fully capture the perceptual quality of 3D shapes, we build 3DCodeArena, a ranking platform based on pairwise human preferences over generated 3D outputs. From extensive evaluations and results, we observe that: (1) Failures mostly arise from API mismatches, while successful renders still suffer from disconnected or floating 3D geometric components. (2) Test-time scaling, such as higher thinking budgets and multi-turn refinement, improves performance overall. Our findings highlight a critical need for high-quality procedural coding data to advance commercial VLMs. Furthermore, effective procedural 3D modeling requires a robust execution environment that provides high-fidelity feedback for iterative refinement. We release 3DCodeBench, including the curated large-scale dataset of multimodal (text/image) prompts, procedural code, 3D object triplets, evaluation protocol, and the public 3DCodeArena platform as a foundational toolkit for exploring VLM-based procedural 3D modelers.

Bowen Tan, Yun Zhu, Lijuan Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) such as T0, FLAN, and OPT-IML, excel in multi-tasking under a unified instruction-following paradigm, where they also exhibit remarkable generalization abilities to unseen tasks. Despite their impressive performance, these LLMs, with sizes ranging from several billion to hundreds of billions of parameters, demand substantial computational resources, making their training and inference expensive and inefficient. Furthermore, adapting these models to downstream applications, particularly complex tasks, is often unfeasible due to the extensive hardware requirements for finetuning, even when utilizing parameter-efficient approaches such as prompt tuning. Additionally, the most powerful multi-task LLMs, such as OPT-IML-175B and FLAN-PaLM-540B, are not publicly accessible, severely limiting their customization potential. To address these challenges, we introduce a pretrained small scorer, Cappy, designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of multi-task LLMs. With merely 360 million parameters, Cappy functions either independently on classification tasks or serve as an auxiliary component for LLMs, boosting their performance. Moreover, Cappy enables efficiently integrating downstream supervision without requiring LLM finetuning nor the access to their parameters. Our experiments demonstrate that, when working independently on 11 language understanding tasks from PromptSource, Cappy outperforms LLMs that are several orders of magnitude larger. Besides, on 45 complex tasks from BIG-Bench, Cappy boosts the performance of the advanced multi-task LLM, FLAN-T5, by a large margin. Furthermore, Cappy is flexible to cooperate with other LLM adaptations, including finetuning and in-context learning, offering additional performance enhancement.

Chi Zhang, Lijuan Liu, Xiaoxue Zang et al.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have dominated the field of detection ever since the success of AlexNet in ImageNet classification [12]. With the sweeping reform of Transformers [27] in natural language processing, Carion et al. [2] introduce the Transformer-based detection method, i.e., DETR. However, due to the quadratic complexity in the self-attention mechanism in the Transformer, DETR is never able to incorporate multi-scale features as performed in existing CNN-based detectors, leading to inferior results in small object detection. To mitigate this issue and further improve performance of DETR, in this work, we investigate different methods to incorporate multi-scale features and find that a Bi-directional Feature Pyramid (BiFPN) works best with DETR in further raising the detection precision. With this discovery, we propose DETR++, a new architecture that improves detection results by 1.9% AP on MS COCO 2017, 11.5% AP on RICO icon detection, and 9.1% AP on RICO layout extraction over existing baselines.

Bowen Tan, Yun Zhu, Lijuan Liu et al.

The recent progress of AI can be largely attributed to large language models (LLMs). However, their escalating memory requirements introduce challenges for machine learning (ML) researchers and engineers. Addressing this requires developers to partition a large model to distribute it across multiple GPUs or TPUs. This necessitates considerable coding and intricate configuration efforts with existing model parallel tools, such as Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, and Alpa. These tools require users' expertise in machine learning systems (MLSys), creating a bottleneck in LLM development, particularly for developers without MLSys background. In this work, we present RedCoast (Redco), a lightweight and user-friendly tool crafted to automate distributed training and inference for LLMs, as well as to simplify ML pipeline development. The design of Redco emphasizes two key aspects. Firstly, to automate model parallelism, our study identifies two straightforward rules to generate tensor parallel strategies for any given LLM. Integrating these rules into Redco facilitates effortless distributed LLM training and inference, eliminating the need of additional coding or complex configurations. We demonstrate the effectiveness by applying Redco on a set of LLM architectures, such as GPT-J, LLaMA, T5, and OPT, up to the size of 66B. Secondly, we propose a mechanism that allows for the customization of diverse ML pipelines through the definition of merely three functions, avoiding redundant and formulaic code like multi-host related processing. This mechanism proves adaptable across a spectrum of ML algorithms, from foundational language modeling to complex algorithms like meta-learning and reinforcement learning. As a result, Redco implementations exhibit significantly fewer lines of code compared to their official counterparts.

Yun Zhu, Nevan Wichers, Chu-Cheng Lin et al.

Parameter Efficient Tuning has been an prominent approach to adapt the Large Language Model to downstream tasks. Most previous works considers adding the dense trainable parameters, where all parameters are used to adapt certain task. We found this less effective empirically using the example of LoRA that introducing more trainable parameters does not help. Motivated by this we investigate the importance of leveraging "sparse" computation and propose SiRA: sparse mixture of low rank adaption. SiRA leverages the Sparse Mixture of Expert(SMoE) to boost the performance of LoRA. Specifically it enforces the top $k$ experts routing with a capacity limit restricting the maximum number of tokens each expert can process. We propose a novel and simple expert dropout on top of gating network to reduce the over-fitting issue. Through extensive experiments, we verify SiRA performs better than LoRA and other mixture of expert approaches across different single tasks and multitask settings.

Lei Shu, Nevan Wichers, Liangchen Luo et al.

Evaluating natural language systems poses significant challenges, particularly in the realms of natural language understanding and high-level reasoning. In this paper, we introduce 'Fusion-Eval', an innovative approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to integrate insights from various assistant evaluators. The LLM is given the example to evaluate along with scores from the assistant evaluators. Each of these evaluators specializes in assessing distinct aspects of responses. Fusion-Eval achieves a 0.962 system-level Kendall-Tau correlation with humans on SummEval and a 0.744 turn-level Spearman correlation on TopicalChat, which is significantly higher than baseline methods. These results highlight Fusion-Eval's significant potential in the realm of natural language system evaluation.

Shoubin Yu, Lei Shu, Antoine Yang et al.

Multimodal AI agents are increasingly automating complex real-world workflows that involve online web execution. However, current web-agent benchmarks suffer from a critical limitation: they focus entirely on web-based interaction and perception, lacking grounding in the user's real-world physical surroundings. This limitation prevents evaluation in crucial scenarios, such as when an agent must use egocentric visual perception (e.g., via AR glasses) to recognize an object in the user's surroundings and then complete a related task online. To address this gap, we introduce Ego2Web, the first benchmark designed to bridge egocentric video perception and web agent execution. Ego2Web pairs real-world first-person video recordings with web tasks that require visual understanding, web task planning, and interaction in an online environment for successful completion. We utilize an automatic data-generation pipeline combined with human verification and refinement to curate well-constructed, high-quality video-task pairs across diverse web task types, including e-commerce, media retrieval, knowledge lookup, etc. To facilitate accurate and scalable evaluation for our benchmark, we also develop a novel LLM-as-a-Judge automatic evaluation method, Ego2WebJudge, which achieves approximately 84% agreement with human judgment, substantially higher than existing evaluation methods. Experiments with diverse SoTA agents on our Ego2Web show that their performance is weak, with substantial headroom across all task categories. We also conduct a comprehensive ablation study on task design, highlighting the necessity of accurate video understanding in the proposed task and the limitations of current agents. We hope Ego2Web can be a critical new resource for developing truly capable AI assistants that can seamlessly see, understand, and act across the physical and digital worlds.

Lei Shu, Liangchen Luo, Jayakumar Hoskere et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in creative tasks such as storytelling and E-mail generation. However, as LLMs are primarily trained on final text results rather than intermediate revisions, it might be challenging for them to perform text rewriting tasks. Most studies in the rewriting tasks focus on a particular transformation type within the boundaries of single sentences. In this work, we develop new strategies for instruction tuning and reinforcement learning to better align LLMs for cross-sentence rewriting tasks using diverse wording and structures expressed through natural languages including 1) generating rewriting instruction data from Wiki edits and public corpus through instruction generation and chain-of-thought prompting; 2) collecting comparison data for reward model training through a new ranking function. To facilitate this research, we introduce OpenRewriteEval, a novel benchmark covers a wide variety of rewriting types expressed through natural language instructions. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines. The public repository is available on GitHub under Google Research (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/rewritelm).

Gilles Baechler, Srinivas Sunkara, Maria Wang et al.

Screen user interfaces (UIs) and infographics, sharing similar visual language and design principles, play important roles in human communication and human-machine interaction. We introduce ScreenAI, a vision-language model that specializes in UI and infographics understanding. Our model improves upon the PaLI architecture with the flexible patching strategy of pix2struct and is trained on a unique mixture of datasets. At the heart of this mixture is a novel screen annotation task in which the model has to identify the type and location of UI elements. We use these text annotations to describe screens to Large Language Models and automatically generate question-answering (QA), UI navigation, and summarization training datasets at scale. We run ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of these design choices. At only 5B parameters, ScreenAI achieves new state-of-the-artresults on UI- and infographics-based tasks (Multi-page DocVQA, WebSRC, MoTIF and Widget Captioning), and new best-in-class performance on others (Chart QA, DocVQA, and InfographicVQA) compared to models of similar size. Finally, we release three new datasets: one focused on the screen annotation task and two others focused on question answering.

Ziyang Zeng, Heming Jing, Jindong Chen et al.

Ranking relevance is a fundamental task in search engines, aiming to identify the items most relevant to a given user query. Traditional relevance models typically produce scalar scores or directly predict relevance labels, limiting both interpretability and the modeling of complex relevance signals. Inspired by recent advances in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for complex tasks, we investigate whether explicit reasoning can enhance both interpretability and performance in relevance modeling. However, existing reasoning-based Generative Relevance Models (GRMs) primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning on large amounts of human-annotated or synthetic CoT data, which often leads to limited generalization. Moreover, domain-agnostic, free-form reasoning tends to be overly generic and insufficiently grounded, limiting its potential to handle the diverse and ambiguous cases prevalent in open-domain search. In this work, we formulate relevance modeling in Xiaohongshu search as a reasoning task and introduce a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based training framework to enhance the grounded reasoning capabilities of GRMs. Specifically, we incorporate practical business-specific relevance criteria into the multi-step reasoning prompt design and propose Stepwise Advantage Masking (SAM), a lightweight process-supervision strategy which facilitates effective learning of these criteria through improved credit assignment. To enable industrial deployment, we further distill the large-scale RL-tuned model to a lightweight version suitable for real-world search systems. Extensive experiments on industrial datasets, along with online A/B tests, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Jiannan Xiang, Yun Zhu, Lei Shu et al.

Developing and testing user interfaces (UIs) and training AI agents to interact with them are challenging due to the dynamic and diverse nature of real-world mobile environments. Existing methods often rely on cumbersome physical devices or limited static analysis of screenshots, which hinders scalable testing and the development of intelligent UI agents. We introduce UISim, a novel image-based UI simulator that offers a dynamic and interactive platform for exploring mobile phone environments purely from screen images. Our system employs a two-stage method: given an initial phone screen image and a user action, it first predicts the abstract layout of the next UI state, then synthesizes a new, visually consistent image based on this predicted layout. This approach enables the realistic simulation of UI transitions. UISim provides immediate practical benefits for UI testing, rapid prototyping, and synthetic data generation. Furthermore, its interactive capabilities pave the way for advanced applications, such as UI navigation task planning for AI agents. Our experimental results show that UISim outperforms end-to-end UI generation baselines in generating realistic and coherent subsequent UI states, highlighting its fidelity and potential to streamline UI development and enhance AI agent training.

Victor Carbune, Hassan Mansoor, Fangyu Liu et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are achieving increasingly strong performance on multimodal tasks. However, reasoning capabilities remain limited particularly for smaller VLMs, while those of large-language models (LLMs) have seen numerous improvements. We propose a technique to transfer capabilities from LLMs to VLMs. On the recently introduced ChartQA, our method obtains state-of-the-art performance when applied on the PaLI3-5B VLM by \citet{chen2023pali3}, while also enabling much better performance on PlotQA and FigureQA. We first improve the chart representation by continuing the pre-training stage using an improved version of the chart-to-table translation task by \citet{liu2023deplot}. We then propose constructing a 20x larger dataset than the original training set. To improve general reasoning capabilities and improve numerical operations, we synthesize reasoning traces using the table representation of charts. Lastly, our model is fine-tuned using the multitask loss introduced by \citet{hsieh2023distilling}. Our variant ChartPaLI-5B outperforms even 10x larger models such as PaLIX-55B without using an upstream OCR system, while keeping inference time constant compared to the PaLI3-5B baseline. When rationales are further refined with a simple program-of-thought prompt \cite{chen2023program}, our model outperforms the recently introduced Gemini Ultra and GPT-4V.

Chongyang Bai, Xiaoxue Zang, Ying Xu et al.

To improve the accessibility of smart devices and to simplify their usage, building models which understand user interfaces (UIs) and assist users to complete their tasks is critical. However, unique challenges are proposed by UI-specific characteristics, such as how to effectively leverage multimodal UI features that involve image, text, and structural metadata and how to achieve good performance when high-quality labeled data is unavailable. To address such challenges we introduce UIBert, a transformer-based joint image-text model trained through novel pre-training tasks on large-scale unlabeled UI data to learn generic feature representations for a UI and its components. Our key intuition is that the heterogeneous features in a UI are self-aligned, i.e., the image and text features of UI components, are predictive of each other. We propose five pretraining tasks utilizing this self-alignment among different features of a UI component and across various components in the same UI. We evaluate our method on nine real-world downstream UI tasks where UIBert outperforms strong multimodal baselines by up to 9.26% accuracy.

Xiaoxue Zang, Ying Xu, Jindong Chen

Annotating user interfaces (UIs) that involves localization and classification of meaningful UI elements on a screen is a critical step for many mobile applications such as screen readers and voice control of devices. Annotating object icons, such as menu, search, and arrow backward, is especially challenging due to the lack of explicit labels on screens, their similarity to pictures, and their diverse shapes. Existing studies either use view hierarchy or pixel based methods to tackle the task. Pixel based approaches are more popular as view hierarchy features on mobile platforms are often incomplete or inaccurate, however it leaves out instructional information in the view hierarchy such as resource-ids or content descriptions. We propose a novel deep learning based multi-modal approach that combines the benefits of both pixel and view hierarchy features as well as leverages the state-of-the-art object detection techniques. In order to demonstrate the utility provided, we create a high quality UI dataset by manually annotating the most commonly used 29 icons in Rico, a large scale mobile design dataset consisting of 72k UI screenshots. The experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our multi-modal approach. Our model not only outperforms a widely used object classification baseline but also pixel based object detection models. Our study sheds light on how to combine view hierarchy with pixel features for annotating UI elements.

Xiaoxue Zang, Lijuan Liu, Maria Wang et al.

We present a new human-human dialogue dataset - PhotoChat, the first dataset that casts light on the photo sharing behavior in onlin emessaging. PhotoChat contains 12k dialogues, each of which is paired with a user photo that is shared during the conversation. Based on this dataset, we propose two tasks to facilitate research on image-text modeling: a photo-sharing intent prediction task that predicts whether one intends to share a photo in the next conversation turn, and a photo retrieval task that retrieves the most relevant photo according to the dialogue context. In addition, for both tasks, we provide baseline models using the state-of-the-art models and report their benchmark performances. The best image retrieval model achieves 10.4% recall@1 (out of 1000 candidates) and the best photo intent prediction model achieves 58.1% F1 score, indicating that the dataset presents interesting yet challenging real-world problems. We are releasing PhotoChat to facilitate future research work among the community.

Zecheng He, Srinivas Sunkara, Xiaoxue Zang et al.

As mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, regularly interacting with a variety of user interfaces (UIs) is a common aspect of daily life for many people. To improve the accessibility of these devices and to enable their usage in a variety of settings, building models that can assist users and accomplish tasks through the UI is vitally important. However, there are several challenges to achieve this. First, UI components of similar appearance can have different functionalities, making understanding their function more important than just analyzing their appearance. Second, domain-specific features like Document Object Model (DOM) in web pages and View Hierarchy (VH) in mobile applications provide important signals about the semantics of UI elements, but these features are not in a natural language format. Third, owing to a large diversity in UIs and absence of standard DOM or VH representations, building a UI understanding model with high coverage requires large amounts of training data. Inspired by the success of pre-training based approaches in NLP for tackling a variety of problems in a data-efficient way, we introduce a new pre-trained UI representation model called ActionBert. Our methodology is designed to leverage visual, linguistic and domain-specific features in user interaction traces to pre-train generic feature representations of UIs and their components. Our key intuition is that user actions, e.g., a sequence of clicks on different UI components, reveals important information about their functionality. We evaluate the proposed model on a wide variety of downstream tasks, ranging from icon classification to UI component retrieval based on its natural language description. Experiments show that the proposed ActionBert model outperforms multi-modal baselines across all downstream tasks by up to 15.5%.

Xiaoxue Zang, Abhinav Rastogi, Srinivas Sunkara et al.

MultiWOZ is a well-known task-oriented dialogue dataset containing over 10,000 annotated dialogues spanning 8 domains. It is extensively used as a benchmark for dialogue state tracking. However, recent works have reported presence of substantial noise in the dialogue state annotations. MultiWOZ 2.1 identified and fixed many of these erroneous annotations and user utterances, resulting in an improved version of this dataset. This work introduces MultiWOZ 2.2, which is a yet another improved version of this dataset. Firstly, we identify and fix dialogue state annotation errors across 17.3% of the utterances on top of MultiWOZ 2.1. Secondly, we redefine the ontology by disallowing vocabularies of slots with a large number of possible values (e.g., restaurant name, time of booking). In addition, we introduce slot span annotations for these slots to standardize them across recent models, which previously used custom string matching heuristics to generate them. We also benchmark a few state of the art dialogue state tracking models on the corrected dataset to facilitate comparison for future work. In the end, we discuss best practices for dialogue data collection that can help avoid annotation errors.

Guan-Lin Chao, Abhinav Rastogi, Semih Yavuz et al.

Understanding and conversing about dynamic scenes is one of the key capabilities of AI agents that navigate the environment and convey useful information to humans. Video question answering is a specific scenario of such AI-human interaction where an agent generates a natural language response to a question regarding the video of a dynamic scene. Incorporating features from multiple modalities, which often provide supplementary information, is one of the challenging aspects of video question answering. Furthermore, a question often concerns only a small segment of the video, hence encoding the entire video sequence using a recurrent neural network is not computationally efficient. Our proposed question-guided video representation module efficiently generates the token-level video summary guided by each word in the question. The learned representations are then fused with the question to generate the answer. Through empirical evaluation on the Audio Visual Scene-aware Dialog (AVSD) dataset, our proposed models in single-turn and multi-turn question answering achieve state-of-the-art performance on several automatic natural language generation evaluation metrics.

Jindong Chen, Ao Wang, Jiangjie Chen et al.

Taxonomies play an important role in machine intelligence. However, most well-known taxonomies are in English, and non-English taxonomies, especially Chinese ones, are still very rare. In this paper, we focus on automatic Chinese taxonomy construction and propose an effective generation and verification framework to build a large-scale and high-quality Chinese taxonomy. In the generation module, we extract isA relations from multiple sources of Chinese encyclopedia, which ensures the coverage. To further improve the precision of taxonomy, we apply three heuristic approaches in verification module. As a result, we construct the largest Chinese taxonomy with high precision about 95% called CN-Probase. Our taxonomy has been deployed on Aliyun, with over 82 million API calls in six months.

Jindong Chen, Yizhou Hu, Jingping Liu et al.

Short text classification is one of important tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Unlike paragraphs or documents, short texts are more ambiguous since they have not enough contextual information, which poses a great challenge for classification. In this paper, we retrieve knowledge from external knowledge source to enhance the semantic representation of short texts. We take conceptual information as a kind of knowledge and incorporate it into deep neural networks. For the purpose of measuring the importance of knowledge, we introduce attention mechanisms and propose deep Short Text Classification with Knowledge powered Attention (STCKA). We utilize Concept towards Short Text (C- ST) attention and Concept towards Concept Set (C-CS) attention to acquire the weight of concepts from two aspects. And we classify a short text with the help of conceptual information. Unlike traditional approaches, our model acts like a human being who has intrinsic ability to make decisions based on observation (i.e., training data for machines) and pays more attention to important knowledge. We also conduct extensive experiments on four public datasets for different tasks. The experimental results and case studies show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, justifying the effectiveness of knowledge powered attention.

Nevan Wichers, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Jindong Chen

Images may have elements containing text and a bounding box associated with them, for example, text identified via optical character recognition on a computer screen image, or a natural image with labeled objects. We present an end-to-end trainable architecture to incorporate the information from these elements and the image to segment/identify the part of the image a natural language expression is referring to. We calculate an embedding for each element and then project it onto the corresponding location (i.e., the associated bounding box) of the image feature map. We show that this architecture gives an improvement in resolving referring expressions, over only using the image, and other methods that incorporate the element information. We demonstrate experimental results on the referring expression datasets based on COCO, and on a webpage image referring expression dataset that we developed.