arXiv subjects

Julian McAuley

Publications and source records attributed to Julian McAuley.

At least 289 records · Page 16Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Adversarial Deepfakes: Evaluating Vulnerability of Deepfake Detectors to Adversarial Examples

Recent advances in video manipulation techniques have made the generation of fake videos more accessible than ever before. Manipulated videos can fuel disinformation and reduce trust in media. Therefore detection of fake videos has garnered immense interest in academia and industry. Recently developed Deepfake detection methods rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) to distinguish AI-generated fake videos from real videos. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to bypass such detectors by adversarially modifying fake videos synthesized using existing Deepfake generation methods. We further demonstrate that our adversarial perturbations are robust to image and video compression codecs, making them a real-world threat. We present pipelines in both white-box and black-box attack scenarios that can fool DNN based Deepfake detectors into classifying fake videos as real.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Speech Recognition and Multi-Speaker Diarization of Long Conversations

Speech recognition (ASR) and speaker diarization (SD) models have traditionally been trained separately to produce rich conversation transcripts with speaker labels. Recent advances have shown that joint ASR and SD models can learn to leverage audio-lexical inter-dependencies to improve word diarization performance. We introduce a new benchmark of hour-long podcasts collected from the weekly This American Life radio program to better compare these approaches when applied to extended multi-speaker conversations. We find that training separate ASR and SD models perform better when utterance boundaries are known but otherwise joint models can perform better. To handle long conversations with unknown utterance boundaries, we introduce a striding attention decoding algorithm and data augmentation techniques which, combined with model pre-training, improves ASR and SD.

eess.AS↗

arXiv2020

BERT Loses Patience: Fast and Robust Inference with Early Exit

In this paper, we propose Patience-based Early Exit, a straightforward yet effective inference method that can be used as a plug-and-play technique to simultaneously improve the efficiency and robustness of a pretrained language model (PLM). To achieve this, our approach couples an internal-classifier with each layer of a PLM and dynamically stops inference when the intermediate predictions of the internal classifiers remain unchanged for a pre-defined number of steps. Our approach improves inference efficiency as it allows the model to make a prediction with fewer layers. Meanwhile, experimental results with an ALBERT model show that our method can improve the accuracy and robustness of the model by preventing it from overthinking and exploiting multiple classifiers for prediction, yielding a better accuracy-speed trade-off compared to existing early exit methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Like hiking? You probably enjoy nature: Persona-grounded Dialog with Commonsense Expansions

Existing persona-grounded dialog models often fail to capture simple implications of given persona descriptions, something which humans are able to do seamlessly. For example, state-of-the-art models cannot infer that interest in hiking might imply love for nature or longing for a break. In this paper, we propose to expand available persona sentences using existing commonsense knowledge bases and paraphrasing resources to imbue dialog models with access to an expanded and richer set of persona descriptions. Additionally, we introduce fine-grained grounding on personas by encouraging the model to make a discrete choice among persona sentences while synthesizing a dialog response. Since such a choice is not observed in the data, we model it using a discrete latent random variable and use variational learning to sample from hundreds of persona expansions. Our model outperforms competitive baselines on the PersonaChat dataset in terms of dialog quality and diversity while achieving persona-consistent and controllable dialog generation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Learning Visual-Semantic Embeddings for Reporting Abnormal Findings on Chest X-rays

Automatic medical image report generation has drawn growing attention due to its potential to alleviate radiologists' workload. Existing work on report generation often trains encoder-decoder networks to generate complete reports. However, such models are affected by data bias (e.g.~label imbalance) and face common issues inherent in text generation models (e.g.~repetition). In this work, we focus on reporting abnormal findings on radiology images; instead of training on complete radiology reports, we propose a method to identify abnormal findings from the reports in addition to grouping them with unsupervised clustering and minimal rules. We formulate the task as cross-modal retrieval and propose Conditional Visual-Semantic Embeddings to align images and fine-grained abnormal findings in a joint embedding space. We demonstrate that our method is able to retrieve abnormal findings and outperforms existing generation models on both clinical correctness and text generation metrics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

MusPy: A Toolkit for Symbolic Music Generation

In this paper, we present MusPy, an open source Python library for symbolic music generation. MusPy provides easy-to-use tools for essential components in a music generation system, including dataset management, data I/O, data preprocessing and model evaluation. In order to showcase its potential, we present statistical analysis of the eleven datasets currently supported by MusPy. Moreover, we conduct a cross-dataset generalizability experiment by training an autoregressive model on each dataset and measuring held-out likelihood on the others---a process which is made easier by MusPy's dataset management system. The results provide a map of domain overlap between various commonly used datasets and show that some datasets contain more representative cross-genre samples than others. Along with the dataset analysis, these results might serve as a guide for choosing datasets in future research. Source code and documentation are available at https://github.com/salu133445/muspy .

cs.SD↗

arXiv2020

ReZero is All You Need: Fast Convergence at Large Depth

Deep networks often suffer from vanishing or exploding gradients due to inefficient signal propagation, leading to long training times or convergence difficulties. Various architecture designs, sophisticated residual-style networks, and initialization schemes have been shown to improve deep signal propagation. Recently, Pennington et al. used free probability theory to show that dynamical isometry plays an integral role in efficient deep learning. We show that the simplest architecture change of gating each residual connection using a single zero-initialized parameter satisfies initial dynamical isometry and outperforms more complex approaches. Although much simpler than its predecessors, this gate enables training thousands of fully connected layers with fast convergence and better test performance for ResNets trained on CIFAR-10. We apply this technique to language modeling and find that we can easily train 120-layer Transformers. When applied to 12 layer Transformers, it converges 56% faster on enwiki8.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

How Useful are Reviews for Recommendation? A Critical Review and Potential Improvements

We investigate a growing body of work that seeks to improve recommender systems through the use of review text. Generally, these papers argue that since reviews 'explain' users' opinions, they ought to be useful to infer the underlying dimensions that predict ratings or purchases. Schemes to incorporate reviews range from simple regularizers to neural network approaches. Our initial findings reveal several discrepancies in reported results, partly due to (e.g.) copying results across papers despite changes in experimental settings or data pre-processing. First, we attempt a comprehensive analysis to resolve these ambiguities. Further investigation calls for discussion on a much larger problem about the "importance" of user reviews for recommendation. Through a wide range of experiments, we observe several cases where state-of-the-art methods fail to outperform existing baselines, especially as we deviate from a few narrowly-defined settings where reviews are useful. We conclude by providing hypotheses for our observations, that seek to characterize under what conditions reviews are likely to be helpful. Through this work, we aim to evaluate the direction in which the field is progressing and encourage robust empirical evaluation.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Developing a Recommendation Benchmark for MLPerf Training and Inference

Deep learning-based recommendation models are used pervasively and broadly, for example, to recommend movies, products, or other information most relevant to users, in order to enhance the user experience. Among various application domains which have received significant industry and academia research attention, such as image classification, object detection, language and speech translation, the performance of deep learning-based recommendation models is less well explored, even though recommendation tasks unarguably represent significant AI inference cycles at large-scale datacenter fleets. To advance the state of understanding and enable machine learning system development and optimization for the commerce domain, we aim to define an industry-relevant recommendation benchmark for the MLPerf Training andInference Suites. The paper synthesizes the desirable modeling strategies for personalized recommendation systems. We lay out desirable characteristics of recommendation model architectures and data sets. We then summarize the discussions and advice from the MLPerf Recommendation Advisory Board.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Interview: A Large-Scale Open-Source Corpus of Media Dialog

Existing conversational datasets consist either of written proxies for dialog or small-scale transcriptions of natural speech. We introduce 'Interview': a large-scale (105K conversations) media dialog dataset collected from news interview transcripts. Compared to existing large-scale proxies for conversational data, language models trained on our dataset exhibit better zero-shot out-of-domain performance on existing spoken dialog datasets, demonstrating its usefulness in modeling real-world conversations. 'Interview' contains speaker role annotations for each turn, facilitating the development of engaging, responsive dialog systems. In fact, experiments on two dialog tasks show that leveraging such labels improves performance over strong speaker-agnostic baselines, and enabling models to generate more specific and inquisitive responses in interview-style conversations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Improving Neural Story Generation by Targeted Common Sense Grounding

Stories generated with neural language models have shown promise in grammatical and stylistic consistency. However, the generated stories are still lacking in common sense reasoning, e.g., they often contain sentences deprived of world knowledge. We propose a simple multi-task learning scheme to achieve quantitatively better common sense reasoning in language models by leveraging auxiliary training signals from datasets designed to provide common sense grounding. When combined with our two-stage fine-tuning pipeline, our method achieves improved common sense reasoning and state-of-the-art perplexity on the Writing Prompts (Fan et al., 2018) story generation dataset.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Addressing Marketing Bias in Product Recommendations

Modern collaborative filtering algorithms seek to provide personalized product recommendations by uncovering patterns in consumer-product interactions. However, these interactions can be biased by how the product is marketed, for example due to the selection of a particular human model in a product image. These correlations may result in the underrepresentation of particular niche markets in the interaction data; for example, a female user who would potentially like motorcycle products may be less likely to interact with them if they are promoted using stereotypically 'male' images. In this paper, we first investigate this correlation between users' interaction feedback and products' marketing images on two real-world e-commerce datasets. We further examine the response of several standard collaborative filtering algorithms to the distribution of consumer-product market segments in the input interaction data, revealing that marketing strategy can be a source of bias for modern recommender systems. In order to protect recommendation performance on underrepresented market segments, we develop a framework to address this potential marketing bias. Quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves the recommendation fairness across different market segments, with a negligible loss (or better) recommendation accuracy.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2019

Scalable and Accurate Dialogue State Tracking via Hierarchical Sequence Generation

Existing approaches to dialogue state tracking rely on pre-defined ontologies consisting of a set of all possible slot types and values. Though such approaches exhibit promising performance on single-domain benchmarks, they suffer from computational complexity that increases proportionally to the number of pre-defined slots that need tracking. This issue becomes more severe when it comes to multi-domain dialogues which include larger numbers of slots. In this paper, we investigate how to approach DST using a generation framework without the pre-defined ontology list. Given each turn of user utterance and system response, we directly generate a sequence of belief states by applying a hierarchical encoder-decoder structure. In this way, the computational complexity of our model will be a constant regardless of the number of pre-defined slots. Experiments on both the multi-domain and the single domain dialogue state tracking dataset show that our model not only scales easily with the increasing number of pre-defined domains and slots but also reaches the state-of-the-art performance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Candidate Generation with Binary Codes for Large-Scale Top-N Recommendation

Generating the Top-N recommendations from a large corpus is computationally expensive to perform at scale. Candidate generation and re-ranking based approaches are often adopted in industrial settings to alleviate efficiency problems. However it remains to be fully studied how well such schemes approximate complete rankings (or how many candidates are required to achieve a good approximation), or to develop systematic approaches to generate high-quality candidates efficiently. In this paper, we seek to investigate these questions via proposing a candidate generation and re-ranking based framework (CIGAR), which first learns a preference-preserving binary embedding for building a hash table to retrieve candidates, and then learns to re-rank the candidates using real-valued ranking models with a candidate-oriented objective. We perform a comprehensive study on several large-scale real-world datasets consisting of millions of users/items and hundreds of millions of interactions. Our results show that CIGAR significantly boosts the Top-N accuracy against state-of-the-art recommendation models, while reducing the query time by orders of magnitude. We hope that this work could draw more attention to the candidate generation problem in recommender systems.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2019

Generating Personalized Recipes from Historical User Preferences

Existing approaches to recipe generation are unable to create recipes for users with culinary preferences but incomplete knowledge of ingredients in specific dishes. We propose a new task of personalized recipe generation to help these users: expanding a name and incomplete ingredient details into complete natural-text instructions aligned with the user's historical preferences. We attend on technique- and recipe-level representations of a user's previously consumed recipes, fusing these 'user-aware' representations in an attention fusion layer to control recipe text generation. Experiments on a new dataset of 180K recipes and 700K interactions show our model's ability to generate plausible and personalized recipes compared to non-personalized baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

CosRec: 2D Convolutional Neural Networks for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential patterns play an important role in building modern recommender systems. To this end, several recommender systems have been built on top of Markov Chains and Recurrent Models (among others). Although these sequential models have proven successful at a range of tasks, they still struggle to uncover complex relationships nested in user purchase histories. In this paper, we argue that modeling pairwise relationships directly leads to an efficient representation of sequential features and captures complex item correlations. Specifically, we propose a 2D convolutional network for sequential recommendation (CosRec). It encodes a sequence of items into a three-way tensor; learns local features using 2D convolutional filters; and aggregates high-order interactions in a feedforward manner. Quantitative results on two public datasets show that our method outperforms both conventional methods and recent sequence-based approaches, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various evaluation metrics.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2019

Universal Adversarial Perturbations for Speech Recognition Systems

In this work, we demonstrate the existence of universal adversarial audio perturbations that cause mis-transcription of audio signals by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. We propose an algorithm to find a single quasi-imperceptible perturbation, which when added to any arbitrary speech signal, will most likely fool the victim speech recognition model. Our experiments demonstrate the application of our proposed technique by crafting audio-agnostic universal perturbations for the state-of-the-art ASR system -- Mozilla DeepSpeech. Additionally, we show that such perturbations generalize to a significant extent across models that are not available during training, by performing a transferability test on a WaveNet based ASR system.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Expediting TTS Synthesis with Adversarial Vocoding

Recent approaches in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis employ neural network strategies to vocode perceptually-informed spectrogram representations directly into listenable waveforms. Such vocoding procedures create a computational bottleneck in modern TTS pipelines. We propose an alternative approach which utilizes generative adversarial networks (GANs) to learn mappings from perceptually-informed spectrograms to simple magnitude spectrograms which can be heuristically vocoded. Through a user study, we show that our approach significantly outperforms naïve vocoding strategies while being hundreds of times faster than neural network vocoders used in state-of-the-art TTS systems. We also show that our method can be used to achieve state-of-the-art results in unsupervised synthesis of individual words of speech.

cs.SD↗