Paper:
GLoMo: Unsupervised Learning of Transferable Relational Graphs
Modern deep transfer learning approaches have mainly focused on learning generic feature vectors from one task that are transferable to other tasks, such as word embeddings in language and pretrained convolutional features in vision. However, these approaches usually transfer unary features and largely ignore more structured graphical representations. This work explores the possibility of learning generic latent relational graphs that capture dependencies between pairs of data units (e.g., words or pixels) from large-scale unlabeled data and transferring the graphs to downstream tasks. Our proposed transfer learning framework improves performance on various tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and image classification. We also show that the learned graphs are generic enough to be transferred to different embeddings on which the graphs have not been trained (including GloVe embeddings, ELMo embeddings, and task-specific RNN hidden units), or embedding-free units such as image pixels.

Review:
This paper presents a method to transfer graph structures learned on unlabeled data to downstream tasks, which is a conceptual shift from existing research that aims to transfer features (e.g., embeddings). The method consists of jointly training a feature and graph predictor using an unsupervised objective (which are decoupled) and then extracting only the output of the graph predictor for downstream tasks, where it is multiplicatively applied to arbitrary features. The method yields small improvements on a variety of NLP and vision tasks, and the qualitative analysis of the learned graphs does not convince me that it learns "meaningful" substructures. Overall, however, the paper has a compelling and promising idea (graph transfer), and it seems like there is room to improve on its results, so I'm a weak accept.  Detailed comments: - Is "unsupervisedly" a word? It sounds weird...  - The objective function in eq 3 is interesting and could have potential uses outside of just graph induction, as it seems especially powerful from the ablations in table 2... Even for feature learning (e.g., ELMo), predicting the next D words instead of just the next word may give gains. However, I'd like more details on how exactly the RNN decoder was implemented. Did the authors feed the ground-truth previous word/pixel at every step (making the decoder a language model) or try and predict the next D words/pixels directly from the hidden state at time t (e.g., no input feeding)? The latter method seems like it would result in more powerful representations, as the former gives the decoder a lot of leeway to ignore parts of the original context after a couple predictions.  - Did you try experimenting with the features learned by your feature predictor as embeddings (instead of GloVe or ELMo)? Perhaps those features are even better because they were jointly trained with the graph predictor?  - The decoupling between feature and graph predictor is not very clearly described. It appears like they are not entirely decoupled, as the feature predictor takes the learned graph as input, and the graph predictor is only trained with one type of feature predictor... Fig 2 is also confusing, as there are arrows from the graph predictor to the feature predictor but the objective is computed over the "mixed graph". It would be easier to understand if the graph and feature predictor diagrams were switched, and the "mixed graph" explicitly shown as a combination of graph * weighted feature sum at each layer.   - Instead of performing transfer with just a single graph M as in sec 2.2, it seems like you could also try using each layer-specific affinity matrix individually (e.g., if your downstream model also had multiple layers).  - Fig 3 is very confusing. Are these visualizations of M (the mixture of graphs)? How does each row sum to 1 if many of them are completely blank? A color scale would be very helpful here, and also a more informative caption.