OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning to sportscast: a test of grounded language acquisition
Authors: David L. Chen, Raymond J. Mooney
Venue: Conference ICML 2008
Year: 2008

We present a novel commentator system that learns language from sportscasts of simulated soccer games. The system learns to parse and generate commentaries without any engineered knowledge about the English language. Training is done using only ambiguous supervision in the form of textual human commentaries and simulation states of the soccer games. The system simultaneously tries to establish correspondences between the commentaries and the simulation states as well as build a translation model. We also present a novel algorithm, Iterative Generation Strategy Learning (IGSL), for deciding which events to comment on. Human evaluations of the generated commentaries indicate they are of reasonable quality compared to human commentaries.
An accelerated gradient method for trace norm minimization
Authors: Shuiwang Ji, Jieping Ye
Venue: Conference ICML 2009
Year: 2009

We consider the minimization of a smooth loss function regularized by the trace norm of the matrix variable. Such formulation finds applications in many machine learning tasks including multi-task learning, matrix classification, and matrix completion. The standard semidefinite programming formulation for this problem is computationally expensive. In addition, due to the non-smooth nature of the trace norm, the optimal first-order black-box method for solving such class of problems converges as O(1/√k), where k is the iteration counter. In this paper, we exploit the special structure of the trace norm, based on which we propose an extended gradient algorithm that converges as O(1/k). We further propose an accelerated gradient algorithm, which achieves the optimal convergence rate of O(1/k2) for smooth problems. Experiments on multi-task learning problems demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.
Describing objects by their attributes
Authors: Ali Farhadi, Ian Endres, Derek Hoiem, David A. Forsyth
Venue: Conference CVPR 2009
Year: 2009

We propose to shift the goal of recognition from naming to describing. Doing so allows us not only to name familiar objects, but also: to report unusual aspects of a familiar object (“spotty dog”, not just “dog”); to say something about unfamiliar objects (“hairy and four-legged”, not just “unknown”); and to learn how to recognize new objects with few or no visual examples. Rather than focusing on identity assignment, we make inferring attributes the core problem of recognition. These attributes can be semantic (“spotty”) or discriminative (“dogs have it but sheep do not”). Learning attributes presents a major new challenge: generalization across object categories, not just across instances within a category. In this paper, we also introduce a novel feature selection method for learning attributes that generalize well across categories. We support our claims by thorough evaluation that provides insights into the limitations of the standard recognition paradigm of naming and demonstrates the new abilities provided by our attribute-based framework.
Attribute-centric recognition for cross-category generalization
Authors: Ali Farhadi, Ian Endres, Derek Hoiem
Venue: Conference CVPR 2010
Year: 2010

We propose an approach to find and describe objects within broad domains. We introduce a new dataset that provides annotation for sharing models of appearance and correlation across categories. We use it to learn part and category detectors. These serve as the visual basis for an integrated model of objects. We describe objects by the spatial arrangement of their attributes and the interactions between them. Using this model, our system can find animals and vehicles that it has not seen and infer attributes, such as function and pose. Our experiments demonstrate that we can more reliably locate and describe both familiar and unfamiliar objects, compared to a baseline that relies purely on basic category detectors.
Learning to detect unseen object classes by between-class attribute transfer
Authors: Christoph H. Lampert, Hannes Nickisch, Stefan Harmeling
Venue: Conference CVPR 2009
Year: 2009

We study the problem of object classification when training and test classes are disjoint, i.e. no training examples of the target classes are available. This setup has hardly been studied in computer vision research, but it is the rule rather than the exception, because the world contains tens of thousands of different object classes and for only a very few of them image, collections have been formed and annotated with suitable class labels. In this paper, we tackle the problem by introducing attribute-based classification. It performs object detection based on a human-specified high-level description of the target objects instead of training images. The description consists of arbitrary semantic attributes, like shape, color or even geographic information. Because such properties transcend the specific learning task at hand, they can be pre-learned, e.g. from image datasets unrelated to the current task. Afterwards, new classes can be detected based on their attribute representation, without the need for a new training phase. In order to evaluate our method and to facilitate research in this area, we have assembled a new large-scale dataset, “Animals with Attributes”, of over 30,000 animal images that match the 50 classes in Osherson's classic table of how strongly humans associate 85 semantic attributes with animal classes. Our experiments show that by using an attribute layer it is indeed possible to build a learning object detection system that does not require any training images of the target classes.
Interactively building a discriminative vocabulary of nameable attributes
Authors: Devi Parikh, Kristen Grauman
Venue: Conference CVPR 2011
Year: 2011

Human-nameable visual attributes offer many advantages when used as mid-level features for object recognition, but existing techniques to gather relevant attributes can be inefficient (costing substantial effort or expertise) and/or insufficient (descriptive properties need not be discriminative). We introduce an approach to define a vocabulary of attributes that is both human understandable and discriminative. The system takes object/scene-labeled images as input, and returns as output a set of attributes elicited from human annotators that distinguish the categories of interest. To ensure a compact vocabulary and efficient use of annotators' effort, we 1) show how to actively augment the vocabulary such that new attributes resolve inter-class confusions, and 2) propose a novel “nameability” manifold that prioritizes candidate attributes by their likelihood of being associated with a nameable property. We demonstrate the approach with multiple datasets, and show its clear advantages over baselines that lack a nameability model or rely on a list of expert-provided attributes.
What helps where and why? semantic relatedness for knowledge transfer
Authors: Marcus Rohrbach, Michael Stark 0003, György Szarvas, Iryna Gurevych, Bernt Schiele
Venue: Conference CVPR 2010
Year: 2010

Remarkable performance has been reported to recognize single object classes. Scalability to large numbers of classes however remains an important challenge for today's recognition methods. Several authors have promoted knowledge transfer between classes as a key ingredient to address this challenge. However, in previous work the decision which knowledge to transfer has required either manual supervision or at least a few training examples limiting the scalability of these approaches. In this work we explicitly address the question of how to automatically decide which information to transfer between classes without the need of any human intervention. For this we tap into linguistic knowledge bases to provide the semantic link between sources (what) and targets (where) of knowledge transfer. We provide a rigorous experimental evaluation of different knowledge bases and state-of-the-art techniques from Natural Language Processing which goes far beyond the limited use of language in related work. We also give insights into the applicability (why) of different knowledge sources and similarity measures for knowledge transfer.
A shape-based object class model for knowledge transfer
Authors: Michael Stark 0003, Michael Goesele, Bernt Schiele
Venue: Conference ICCV 2009
Year: 2009

Object class models trained on hundreds or thousands of images have shown to enable robust detection. Transferring knowledge from such models to new object classes trained from a few or even as little as one training instance however is still in its infancy. This paper designs a shape-based model that allows to easily and explicitly transfer knowledge on three different levels: transfer of individual parts' shape and appearance information, transfer of local symmetry between parts, and transfer of part topology. Due to the factorized form of the model, knowledge can either be transferred for the complete model or just partial knowledge corresponding to certain aspects of the model. The experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed model is competitive with the state-of-the-art and enables both full and partial knowledge transfer.
Comparative object similarity for improved recognition with few or no examples
Authors: Gang Wang 0012, David A. Forsyth, Derek Hoiem
Venue: Conference CVPR 2010
Year: 2010

Learning models for recognizing objects with few or no training examples is important, due to the intrinsic long-tailed distribution of objects in the real world. In this paper, we propose an approach to use comparative object similarity. The key insight is that: given a set of object categories which are similar and a set of categories which are dissimilar, a good object model should respond more strongly to examples from similar categories than to examples from dissimilar categories. We develop a regularized kernel machine algorithm to use this category dependent similarity regularization. Our experiments on hundreds of categories show that our method can make significant improvement, especially for categories with no examples.
Learning generative models via discriminative approaches
Authors: Zhuowen Tu
Venue: Conference CVPR 2007
Year: 2007

Generative model learning is one of the key problems in machine learning and computer vision. Currently the use of generative models is limited due to the difficulty in effectively learning them. A new learning framework is proposed in this paper which progressively learns a target generative distribution through discriminative approaches. This framework provides many interesting aspects to the literature. From the generative model side: (1) A reference distribution is used to assist the learning process, which removes the need for a sampling processes in the early stages. (2) The classification power of discriminative approaches, e.g. boosting, is directly utilized. (3) The ability to select/explore features from a large candidate pool allows us to make nearly no assumptions about the training data. From the discriminative model side: (1) This framework improves the modeling capability of discriminative models. (2) It can start with source training data only and gradually "invent" negative samples. (3) We show how sampling schemes can be introduced to discriminative models. (4) The learning procedure helps to tighten the decision boundaries for classification, and therefore, improves robustness. In this paper, we show a variety of applications including texture modeling and classification, non-photorealistic rendering, learning image statistics/denoising, and face modeling. The framework handles both homogeneous patterns, e.g. textures, and inhomogeneous patterns, e.g. faces, with nearly an identical parameter setting for all the tasks in the learning stage.
Pegasos: Primal estimated sub-gradient solver for SVM
Authors: Shai Shalev-Shwartz, Yoram Singer, Nathan Srebro
Venue: Conference ICML 2007
Year: 2007

We describe and analyze a simple and effective iterative algorithm for solving the optimization problem cast by Support Vector Machines (SVM). Our method alternates between stochastic gradient descent steps and projection steps. We prove that the number of iterations required to obtain a solution of accuracy ε is Õ(1/ε). In contrast, previous analyses of stochastic gradient descent methods require Ω (1/ε2) iterations. As in previously devised SVM solvers, the number of iterations also scales linearly with 1/λ, where λ is the regularization parameter of SVM. For a linear kernel, the total run-time of our method is Õ (d/(λε)), where d is a bound on the number of non-zero features in each example. Since the run-time does not depend directly on the size of the training set, the resulting algorithm is especially suited for learning from large datasets. Our approach can seamlessly be adapted to employ non-linear kernels while working solely on the primal objective function. We demonstrate the efficiency and applicability of our approach by conducting experiments on large text classification problems, comparing our solver to existing state-of-the-art SVM solvers. For example, it takes less than 5 seconds for our solver to converge when solving a text classification problem from Reuters Corpus Volume 1 (RCV1) with 800,000 training examples.
Probabilistic factor models for web site recommendation
Authors: Hao Ma, Chao Liu, Irwin King, Michael R. Lyu
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2011
Year: 2011

Due to the prevalence of personalization and information filteringapplications, modelingusers ’ interests on theWeb has become increasingly important duringthe past few years. In this paper, aiming at providing accurate personalized Web site recommendations for Web users, we propose a novel probabilistic factor model based on dimensionality reduction techniques. We also extend the proposed method to collective probabilistic factor modeling, which further improves model performance by incorporating heterogeneous data sources. The proposed method is general, and can be applied to not only Web site recommendations, but also a wide range of Web applications, including behavioral targeting, sponsored search, etc. The experimental analysis on Web site recommendation shows that our method outperforms other traditional recommendation approaches. Moreover, the complexity analysis indicates that our approach can be applied to very large datasets since it scales linearly with the number of observations. Categories and Subject Descriptors
Exploring question subjectivity prediction in community qa
Authors: Baoli Li, Yandong Liu, Ashwin Ram, Ernest V. Garcia, Eugene Agichtein
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2008
Year: 2008

In this paper we begin to investigate how to automatically determine the subjectivity orientation of questions posted by real users in community question answering (CQA) portals. Subjective questions seek answers containing private states, such as personal opinion and experience. In contrast, objective questions request objective, verifiable information, often with support from reliable sources. Knowing the question orientation would be helpful not only for evaluating answers provided by users, but also for guiding the CQA engine to process questions more intelligently. Our experiments on Yahoo! Answers data show that our method exhibits promising performance.
Predicting information seeker satisfaction in community question answering
Authors: Yandong Liu, Jiang Bian, Eugene Agichtein
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2008
Year: 2008

Question answering communities such as Naver and Yahoo! Answers have emerged as popular, and often effective, means of information seeking on the web. By posting questions for other participants to answer, information seekers can obtain specific answers to their questions. Users of popular portals such as Yahoo! Answers already have submitted millions of questions and received hundreds of millions of answers from other participants. However, it may also take hours --and sometime days-- until a satisfactory answer is posted. In this paper we introduce the problem of predicting information seeker satisfaction in collaborative question answering communities, where we attempt to predict whether a question author will be satisfied with the answers submitted by the community participants. We present a general prediction model, and develop a variety of content, structure, and community-focused features for this task. Our experimental results, obtained from a largescale evaluation over thousands of real questions and user ratings, demonstrate the feasibility of modeling and predicting asker satisfaction. We complement our results with a thorough investigation of the interactions and information seeking patterns in question answering communities that correlate with information seeker satisfaction. Our models and predictions could be useful for a variety of applications such as user intent inference, answer ranking, interface design, and query suggestion and routing.
Simrank: a measure of structural-context similarity
Authors: Glen Jeh, Jennifer Widom
Venue: Conference KDD 2002
Year: 2002

The problem of measuring "similarity" of objects arises in many applications, and many domain-specific measures have been developed, e.g., matching text across documents or computing overlap among item-sets. We propose a complementary approach, applicable in any domain with object-to-object relationships, that measures similarity of the structural context in which objects occur, based on their relationships with other objects. Effectively, we compute a measure that says "two objects are similar if they are related to similar objects:" This general similarity measure, called SimRank, is based on a simple and intuitive graph-theoretic model. For a given domain, SimRank can be combined with other domain-specific similarity measures. We suggest techniques for efficient computation of SimRank scores, and provide experimental results on two application domains showing the computational feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.
Pagerank on an evolving graph
Authors: Bahman Bahmani, Ravi Kumar, Mohammad Mahdian, Eli Upfal
Venue: Conference KDD 2012
Year: 2012

One of the most important features of the Web graph and social networks is that they are constantly evolving. The classical computational paradigm, which assumes a fixed data set as an input to an algorithm that terminates, is inadequate for such settings. In this paper we study the problem of computing PageRank on an evolving graph. We propose an algorithm that, at any moment in the time and by crawling a small portion of the graph, provides an estimate of the PageRank that is close to the true PageRank of the graph at that moment. We will also evaluate our algorithm experimentally on real data sets and on randomly generated inputs. Under a stylized model of graph evolution, we show that our algorithm achieves a provable performance guarantee that is significantly better than the naive algorithm that crawls the nodes in a round-robin fashion.
Care to comment?: recommendations for commenting on news stories
Authors: Erez Shmueli, Amit Kagian, Yehuda Koren, Ronny Lempel
Venue: Conference WWW 2012
Year: 2012

Many websites provide commenting facilities for users to express their opinions or sentiments with regards to content items, such as, videos, news stories, blog posts, etc. Previous studies have shown that user comments contain valuable information that can provide insight on Web documents and may be utilized for various tasks. This work presents a model that predicts, for a given user, suitable news stories for commenting. The model achieves encouraging results regarding the ability to connect users with stories they are likely to comment on. This provides grounds for personalized recommendations of stories to users who may want to take part in their discussion. We combine a content-based approach with a collaborative-filtering approach (utilizing users' co-commenting patterns) in a latent factor modeling framework. We experiment with several variations of the model's loss function in order to adjust it to the problem domain. We evaluate the results on two datasets and show that employing co-commenting patterns improves upon using content features alone, even with as few as two available comments per story. Finally, we try to incorporate available social network data into the model. Interestingly, the social data does not lead to substantial performance gains, suggesting that the value of social data for this task is quite negligible.
Information credibility on twitter
Authors: Carlos Castillo, Marcelo Mendoza, Barbara Poblete
Venue: Conference WWW 2011
Year: 2011

We analyze the information credibility of news propagated through Twitter, a popular microblogging service. Previous research has shown that most of the messages posted on Twitter are truthful, but the service is also used to spread misinformation and false rumors, often unintentionally.
Differences in the mechanics of information diffusion across topics: Idioms, political hashtags, and complex contagion on twitter
Authors: Daniel M. Romero, Brendan Meeder, Jon M. Kleinberg
Venue: Conference WWW 2011
Year: 2011

There is a widespread intuitive sense that different kinds of information spread differently on-line, but it has been difficult to evaluate this question quantitatively since it requires a setting where many different kinds of information spread in a shared environment. Here we study this issue on Twitter, analyzing the ways in which tokens known as hashtags spread on a network defined by the interactions among Twitter users. We find significant variation in the ways that widely-used hashtags on different topics spread.
Like like alike — Joint Friendship and Interest Propagation in Social Networks
Authors: Shuang-Hong Yang, Bo Long, Alexander J. Smola, Narayanan Sadagopan, Zhaohui Zheng, Hongyuan Zha
Venue: Conference WWW 2011
Year: 2011

Targeting interest to match a user with services (e.g. news, products, games, advertisements) and predicting friendship to build connections among users are two fundamental tasks for social network systems. In this paper, we show that the information contained in interest networks (i.e. user-service interactions) and friendship networks (i.e. user-user connections) is highly correlated and mutually helpful. We propose a framework that exploits homophily to establish an integrated network linking a user to interested services and connecting different users with common interests, upon which both friendship and interests could be efficiently propagated. The proposed friendship-interest propagation (FIP) framework devises a factor-based random walk model to explain friendship connections, and simultaneously it uses a coupled latent factor model to uncover interest interactions. We discuss the flexibility of the framework in the choices of loss objectives and regularization penalties and benchmark different variants on the Yahoo! Pulse social networking system. Experiments demonstrate that by coupling friendship with interest, FIP achieves much higher performance on both interest targeting and friendship prediction than systems using only one source of information.