OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Multi-Task Learning Approach for Improving Product Title Compression with User Search Log Data
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

It is a challenging and practical research problem to obtain effective compression of lengthy product titles for E-commerce. This is particularly important as more and more users browse mobile E-commerce apps and more merchants make the original product titles redundant and lengthy for Search Engine Optimization. Traditional text summarization approaches often require a large amount of preprocessing costs and do not capture the important issue of conversion rate in E-commerce. This paper proposes a novel multi-task learning approach for improving product title compression with user search log data. In particular, a pointer network-based sequence-to-sequence approach is utilized for title compression with an attentive mechanism as an extractive method and an attentive encoder-decoder approach is utilized for generating user search queries. The encoding parameters (i.e., semantic embedding of original titles) are shared among the two tasks and the attention distributions are jointly optimized. An extensive set of experiments with both human annotated data and online deployment demonstrate the advantage of the proposed research for both compression qualities and online business values.
Translating Pro-Drop Languages With Reconstruction Models
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Pronouns are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages, such as Chinese, generally leading to significant challenges with respect to the production of complete translations. To date, very little attention has been paid to the dropped pronoun (DP) problem within neural machine translation (NMT). In this work, we propose a novel reconstruction-based approach to alleviating DP translation problems for NMT models. Firstly, DPs within all source sentences are automatically annotated with parallel information extracted from the bilingual training corpus. Next, the annotated source sentence is reconstructed from hidden representations in the NMT model. With auxiliary training objectives, in terms of reconstruction scores, the parameters associated with the NMT model are guided to produce enhanced hidden representations that are encouraged as much as possible to embed annotated DP information. Experimental results on both Chinese-English and Japanese-English dialogue translation tasks show that the proposed approach significantly and consistently improves translation performance over a strong NMT baseline, which is directly built on the training data annotated with DPs.
Movie Question Answering: Remembering the Textual Cues for Layered Visual Contents
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Movies provide us with a mass of visual content as well as attracting stories. Existing methods have illustrated that understanding movie stories through only visual content is still a hard problem. In this paper, for answering questions about movies, we put forward a Layered Memory Network (LMN) that represents frame-level and clip-level movie content by the Static Word Memory module and the Dynamic Subtitle Memory module, respectively. Particularly, we firstly extract words and sentences from the training movie subtitles. Then the hierarchically formed movie representations, which are learned from LMN, not only encode the correspondence between words and visual content inside frames, but also encode the temporal alignment between sentences and frames inside movie clips. We also extend our LMN model into three variant frameworks to illustrate the good extendable capabilities. We conduct extensive experiments on the MovieQA dataset. With only visual content as inputs, LMN with frame-level representation obtains a large performance improvement. When incorporating subtitles into LMN to form the clip-level representation, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the online evaluation task of 'Video+Subtitles'. The good performance successfully demonstrates that the proposed framework of LMN is effective and the hierarchically formed movie representations have good potential for the applications of movie question answering.
Learning Multimodal Word Representation via Dynamic Fusion Methods
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Multimodal models have been proven to outperform text-based models on learning semantic word representations. Almost all previous multimodal models typically treat the representations from different modalities equally. However, it is obvious that information from different modalities contributes differently to the meaning of words. This motivates us to build a multimodal model that can dynamically fuse the semantic representations from different modalities according to different types of words. To that end, we propose three novel dynamic fusion methods to assign importance weights to each modality, in which weights are learned under the weak supervision of word association pairs. The extensive experiments have demonstrated that the proposed methods outperform strong unimodal baselines and state-of-the-art multimodal models.
Deep TAMER: Interactive Agent Shaping in High-Dimensional State Spaces
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

While recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have allowed autonomous learning agents to succeed at a variety of complex tasks, existing algorithms generally require a lot of training data. One way to increase the speed at which agents are able to learn to perform tasks is by leveraging the input of human trainers. Although such input can take many forms, real-time, scalar-valued feedback is especially useful in situations where it proves difficult or impossible for humans to provide expert demonstrations. Previous approaches have shown the usefulness of human input provided in this fashion (e.g., the TAMER framework), but they have thus far not considered high-dimensional state spaces or employed the use of deep learning. In this paper, we do both: we propose Deep TAMER, an extension of the TAMER framework that leverages the representational power of deep neural networks in order to learn complex tasks in just a short amount of time with a human trainer. We demonstrate Deep TAMER's success by using it and just 15 minutes of human-provided feedback to train an agent that performs better than humans on the Atari game of Bowling - a task that has proven difficult for even state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods.
Improving Review Representations With User Attention and Product Attention for Sentiment Classification
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Neural network methods have achieved great success in reviews sentiment classification. Recently, some works achieved improvement by incorporating user and product information to generate a review representation. However, in reviews, we observe that some words or sentences show strong user's preference, and some others tend to indicate product's characteristic. The two kinds of information play different roles in determining the sentiment label of a review. Therefore, it is not reasonable to encode user and product information together into one representation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to encode user and product information. Firstly, we apply two individual hierarchical neural networks to generate two representations, with user attention or with product attention. Then, we design a combined strategy to make full use of the two representations for training and final prediction. The experimental results show that our model obviously outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on IMDB and Yelp datasets. Through the visualization of attention over words related to user or product, we validate our observation mentioned above.
Learning to Extract Coherent Summary via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Coherence plays a critical role in producing a high-quality summary from a document. In recent years, neural extractive summarization is becoming increasingly attractive. However, most of them ignore the coherence of summaries when extracting sentences. As an effort towards extracting coherent summaries, we propose a neural coherence model to capture the cross-sentence semantic and syntactic coherence patterns. The proposed neural coherence model obviates the need for feature engineering and can be trained in an end-to-end fashion using unlabeled data. Empirical results show that the proposed neural coherence model can efficiently capture the cross-sentence coherence patterns. Using the combined output of the neural coherence model and ROUGE package as the reward, we design a reinforcement learning method to train a proposed neural extractive summarizer which is named Reinforced Neural Extractive Summarization (RNES) model. The RNES model learns to optimize coherence and informative importance of the summary simultaneously. Experimental results show that the proposed RNES outperforms existing baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance in term of ROUGE on CNN/Daily Mail dataset. The qualitative evaluation indicates that summaries produced by RNES are more coherent and readable.
A Low-Cost Ethics Shaping Approach for Designing Reinforcement Learning Agents
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a low-cost, easily realizable strategy to equip a reinforcement learning (RL) agent the capability of behaving ethically. Our model allows the designers of RL agents to solely focus on the task to achieve, without having to worry about the implementation of multiple trivial ethical patterns to follow. Based on the assumption that the majority of human behavior, regardless which goals they are achieving, is ethical, our design integrates human policy with the RL policy to achieve the target objective with less chance of violating the ethical code that human beings normally obey.
Learning Robust Search Strategies Using a Bandit-Based Approach
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Effective solving of constraint problems often requires choosing good or specific search heuristics. However, choosing or designing a good search heuristic is non-trivial and is often a manual process. In this paper, rather than manually choosing/designing search heuristics, we propose the use of bandit-based learning techniques to automatically select search heuristics. Our approach is online where the solver learns and selects from a set of heuristics during search. The goal is to obtain automatic search heuristics which give robust performance. Preliminary experiments show that our adaptive technique is more robust than the original search heuristics. It can also outperform the original heuristics.
Towards Training Probabilistic Topic Models on Neuromorphic Multi-Chip Systems
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Probabilistic topic models are popular unsupervised learning methods, including probabilistic latent semantic indexing (pLSI) and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). By now, their training is implemented on general purpose computers (GPCs), which are flexible in programming but energy-consuming. Towards low-energy implementations, this paper investigates their training on an emerging hardware technology called the neuromorphic multi-chip systems (NMSs). NMSs are very effective for a family of algorithms called spiking neural networks (SNNs). We present three SNNs to train topic models. The first SNN is a batch algorithm combining the conventional collapsed Gibbs sampling (CGS) algorithm and an inference SNN to train LDA. The other two SNNs are online algorithms targeting at both energy- and storage-limited environments. The two online algorithms are equivalent with training LDA by using maximum-a-posterior estimation and maximizing the semi-collapsed likelihood, respectively. They use novel, tailored ordinary differential equations for stochastic optimization. We simulate the new algorithms and show that they are comparable with the GPC algorithms, while being suitable for NMS implementation. We also propose an extension to train pLSI and a method to prune the network to obey the limited fan-in of some NMSs.
Transferable Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

The performance of deep learning based semantic segmentation models heavily depends on sufficient data with careful annotations. However, even the largest public datasets only provide samples with pixel-level annotations for rather limited semantic categories. Such data scarcity critically limits scalability and applicability of semantic segmentation models in real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel transferable semi-supervised semantic segmentation model that can transfer the learned segmentation knowledge from a few strong categories with pixel-level annotations to unseen weak categories with only image-level annotations, significantly broadening the applicable territory of deep segmentation models. In particular, the proposed model consists of two complementary and learnable components: a Label transfer Network (L-Net) and a Prediction transfer Network (P-Net). The L-Net learns to transfer the segmentation knowledge from strong categories to the images in the weak categories and produces coarse pixel-level semantic maps, by effectively exploiting the similar appearance shared across categories. Meanwhile, the P-Net tailors the transferred knowledge through a carefully designed adversarial learning strategy and produces refined segmentation results with better details. Integrating the L-Net and P-Net achieves 96.5% and 89.4% performance of the fully-supervised baseline using 50% and 0% categories with pixel-level annotations respectively on PASCAL VOC 2012. With such a novel transfer mechanism, our proposed model is easily generalizable to a variety of new categories, only requiring image-level annotations, and offers appealing scalability in real applications.
Does William Shakespeare REALLY Write Hamlet? Knowledge Representation Learning With Confidence
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Knowledge graphs (KGs), which could provide essential relational information between entities, have been widely utilized in various knowledge-driven applications. Since the overall human knowledge is innumerable that still grows explosively and changes frequently, knowledge construction and update inevitably involve automatic mechanisms with less human supervision, which usually bring in plenty of noises and conflicts to KGs. However, most conventional knowledge representation learning methods assume that all triple facts in existing KGs share the same significance without any noises. To address this problem, we propose a novel confidence-aware knowledge representation learning framework (CKRL), which detects possible noises in KGs while learning knowledge representations with confidence simultaneously. Specifically, we introduce the triple confidence to conventional translation-based methods for knowledge representation learning. To make triple confidence more flexible and universal, we only utilize the internal structural information in KGs, and propose three kinds of triple confidences considering both local and global structural information. In experiments, We evaluate our models on knowledge graph noise detection, knowledge graph completion and triple classification. Experimental results demonstrate that our confidence-aware models achieve significant and consistent improvements on all tasks, which confirms the capability of CKRL modeling confidence with structural information in both KG noise detection and knowledge representation learning.
How Images Inspire Poems: Generating Classical Chinese Poetry from Images with Memory Networks
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

With the recent advances of neural models and natural language processing, automatic generation of classical Chinese poetry has drawn significant attention due to its artistic and cultural value. Previous works mainly focus on generating poetry given keywords or other text information, while visual inspirations for poetry have been rarely explored. Generating poetry from images is much more challenging than generating poetry from text, since images contain very rich visual information which cannot be described completely using several keywords, and a good poem should convey the image accurately. In this paper, we propose a memory based neural model which exploits images to generate poems. Specifically, an Encoder-Decoder model with a topic memory network is proposed to generate classical Chinese poetry from images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work attempting to generate classical Chinese poetry from images with neural networks. A comprehensive experimental investigation with both human evaluation and quantitative analysis demonstrates that the proposed model can generate poems which convey images accurately.
Contrastive Training for Models of Information Cascades
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

This paper proposes a model of information cascades as directed spanning trees (DSTs) over observed documents. In addition, we propose a contrastive training procedure that exploits partial temporal ordering of node infections in lieu of labeled training links. This combination of model and unsupervised training makes it possible to improve on models that use infection times alone and to exploit arbitrary features of the nodes and of the text content of messages in information cascades. With only basic node and time lag features similar to previous models, the DST model achieves performance with unsupervised training comparable to strong baselines on a blog network inference task. Unsupervised training with additional content features achieves significantly better results, reaching half the accuracy of a fully supervised model.
Deep Neural Network Compression With Single and Multiple Level Quantization
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Network quantization is an effective solution to compress deep neural networks for practical usage. Existing network quantization methods cannot sufficiently exploit the depth information to generate low-bit compressed network. In this paper, we propose two novel network quantization approaches, single-level network quantization (SLQ) for high-bit quantization and multi-level network quantization (MLQ) for extremely low-bit quantization (ternary).We are the first to consider the network quantization from both width and depth level. In the width level, parameters are divided into two parts: one for quantization and the other for re-training to eliminate the quantization loss. SLQ leverages the distribution of the parameters to improve the width level. In the depth level, we introduce incremental layer compensation to quantize layers iteratively which decreases the quantization loss in each iteration. The proposed approaches are validated with extensive experiments based on the state-of-the-art neural networks including AlexNet, VGG-16, GoogleNet and ResNet-18. Both SLQ and MLQ achieve impressive results.
Assertion-Based QA With Question-Aware Open Information Extraction
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

We present assertion based question answering (ABQA), an open domain question answering task that takes a question and a passage as inputs, and outputs a semi-structured assertion consisting of a subject, a predicate and a list of arguments. An assertion conveys more evidences than a short answer span in reading comprehension, and it is more concise than a tedious passage in passage-based QA. These advantages make ABQA more suitable for human-computer interaction scenarios such as voice-controlled speakers. Further progress towards improving ABQA requires richer supervised dataset and powerful models of text understanding. To remedy this, we introduce a new dataset called WebAssertions, which includes hand-annotated QA labels for 358,427 assertions in 55,960 web passages. To address ABQA, we develop both generative and extractive approaches. The backbone of our generative approach is sequence to sequence learning. In order to capture the structure of the output assertion, we introduce a hierarchical decoder that first generates the structure of the assertion and then generates the words of each field. The extractive approach is based on learning to rank. Features at different levels of granularity are designed to measure the semantic relevance between a question and an assertion. Experimental results show that our approaches have the ability to infer question-aware assertions from a passage. We further evaluate our approaches by incorporating the ABQA results as additional features in passage-based QA. Results on two datasets show that ABQA features significantly improve the accuracy on passage-based~QA.
Spatial Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Dynamics of human body skeletons convey significant information for human action recognition. Conventional approaches for modeling skeletons usually rely on hand-crafted parts or traversal rules, thus resulting in limited expressive power and difficulties of generalization. In this work, we propose a novel model of dynamic skeletons called Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (ST-GCN), which moves beyond the limitations of previous methods by automatically learning both the spatial and temporal patterns from data. This formulation not only leads to greater expressive power but also stronger generalization capability. On two large datasets, Kinetics and NTU-RGBD, it achieves substantial improvements over mainstream methods.
A Poisson Gamma Probabilistic Model for Latent Node-Group Memberships in Dynamic Networks
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

We present a probabilistic model for learning from dynamic relational data, wherein the observed interactions among networked nodes are modeled via the Bernoulli Poisson link function, and the underlying network structure are characterized by nonnegative latent node-group memberships, which are assumed to be gamma distributed. The latent memberships evolve according to Markov processes. The optimal number of latent groups can be determined by data itself. The computational complexity of our method scales with the number of non-zero links, which makes it scalable to large sparse dynamic relational data. We present batch and online Gibbs sampling algorithms to perform model inference. Finally, we demonstrate the model's performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods.
From Common to Special: When Multi-Attribute Learning Meets Personalized Opinions
Venue: Conference AAAI 2018
Year: 2018

Visual attributes, which refer to human-labeled semantic annotations, have gained increasing popularity in a wide range of real world applications. Generally, the existing attribute learning methods fall into two categories: one focuses on learning user-specific labels separately for different attributes, while the other one focuses on learning crowd-sourced global labels jointly for multiple attributes. However, both categories ignore the joint effect of the two mentioned factors: the personal diversity with respect to the global consensus; and the intrinsic correlation among multiple attributes. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel model to learn user-specific predictors across multiple attributes. In our proposed model, the diversity of personalized opinions and the intrinsic relationship among multiple attributes are unified in a common-to-special manner. To this end, we adopt a three-component decomposition. Specifically, our model integrates a common cognition factor, an attribute-specific bias factor and a user-specific bias factor. Meanwhile Lasso and group Lasso penalties are adopted to leverage efficient feature selection. Furthermore, theoretical analysis is conducted to show that our proposed method could reach reasonable performance. Eventually, the empirical study carried out in this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.