arXiv subjects

Martin Renqiang Min

Publications and source records attributed to Martin Renqiang Min.

50 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Learning Context-Sensitive Convolutional Filters for Text Processing

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently emerged as a popular building block for natural language processing (NLP). Despite their success, most existing CNN models employed in NLP share the same learned (and static) set of filters for all input sentences. In this paper, we consider an approach of using a small meta network to learn context-sensitive convolutional filters for text processing. The role of meta network is to abstract the contextual information of a sentence or document into a set of input-aware filters. We further generalize this framework to model sentence pairs, where a bidirectional filter generation mechanism is introduced to encapsulate co-dependent sentence representations. In our benchmarks on four different tasks, including ontology classification, sentiment analysis, answer sentence selection, and paraphrase identification, our proposed model, a modified CNN with context-sensitive filters, consistently outperforms the standard CNN and attention-based CNN baselines. By visualizing the learned context-sensitive filters, we further validate and rationalize the effectiveness of proposed framework.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Learning K-way D-dimensional Discrete Codes for Compact Embedding Representations

Conventional embedding methods directly associate each symbol with a continuous embedding vector, which is equivalent to applying a linear transformation based on a "one-hot" encoding of the discrete symbols. Despite its simplicity, such approach yields the number of parameters that grows linearly with the vocabulary size and can lead to overfitting. In this work, we propose a much more compact K-way D-dimensional discrete encoding scheme to replace the "one-hot" encoding. In the proposed "KD encoding", each symbol is represented by a $D$-dimensional code with a cardinality of $K$, and the final symbol embedding vector is generated by composing the code embedding vectors. To end-to-end learn semantically meaningful codes, we derive a relaxed discrete optimization approach based on stochastic gradient descent, which can be generally applied to any differentiable computational graph with an embedding layer. In our experiments with various applications from natural language processing to graph convolutional networks, the total size of the embedding layer can be reduced up to 98\% while achieving similar or better performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Baseline Needs More Love: On Simple Word-Embedding-Based Models and Associated Pooling Mechanisms

Many deep learning architectures have been proposed to model the compositionality in text sequences, requiring a substantial number of parameters and expensive computations. However, there has not been a rigorous evaluation regarding the added value of sophisticated compositional functions. In this paper, we conduct a point-by-point comparative study between Simple Word-Embedding-based Models (SWEMs), consisting of parameter-free pooling operations, relative to word-embedding-based RNN/CNN models. Surprisingly, SWEMs exhibit comparable or even superior performance in the majority of cases considered. Based upon this understanding, we propose two additional pooling strategies over learned word embeddings: (i) a max-pooling operation for improved interpretability; and (ii) a hierarchical pooling operation, which preserves spatial (n-gram) information within text sequences. We present experiments on 17 datasets encompassing three tasks: (i) (long) document classification; (ii) text sequence matching; and (iii) short text tasks, including classification and tagging. The source code and datasets can be obtained from https:// github.com/dinghanshen/SWEM.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Parametric t-Distributed Stochastic Exemplar-centered Embedding

Parametric embedding methods such as parametric t-SNE (pt-SNE) have been widely adopted for data visualization and out-of-sample data embedding without further computationally expensive optimization or approximation. However, the performance of pt-SNE is highly sensitive to the hyper-parameter batch size due to conflicting optimization goals, and often produces dramatically different embeddings with different choices of user-defined perplexities. To effectively solve these issues, we present parametric t-distributed stochastic exemplar-centered embedding methods. Our strategy learns embedding parameters by comparing given data only with precomputed exemplars, resulting in a cost function with linear computational and memory complexity, which is further reduced by noise contrastive samples. Moreover, we propose a shallow embedding network with high-order feature interactions for data visualization, which is much easier to tune but produces comparable performance in contrast to a deep neural network employed by pt-SNE. We empirically demonstrate, using several benchmark datasets, that our proposed methods significantly outperform pt-SNE in terms of robustness, visual effects, and quantitative evaluations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Convolutional Neural Knowledge Graph Learning

Previous models for learning entity and relationship embeddings of knowledge graphs such as TransE, TransH, and TransR aim to explore new links based on learned representations. However, these models interpret relationships as simple translations on entity embeddings. In this paper, we try to learn more complex connections between entities and relationships. In particular, we use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to learn entity and relationship representations in knowledge graphs. In our model, we treat entities and relationships as one-dimensional numerical sequences with the same length. After that, we combine each triplet of head, relationship, and tail together as a matrix with height 3. CNN is applied to the triplets to get confidence scores. Positive and manually corrupted negative triplets are used to train the embeddings and the CNN model simultaneously. Experimental results on public benchmark datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on exploring unseen relationships, which proves that CNN is effective to learn complex interactive patterns between entities and relationships.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Learning K-way D-dimensional Discrete Code For Compact Embedding Representations

Embedding methods such as word embedding have become pillars for many applications containing discrete structures. Conventional embedding methods directly associate each symbol with a continuous embedding vector, which is equivalent to applying linear transformation based on "one-hot" encoding of the discrete symbols. Despite its simplicity, such approach yields number of parameters that grows linearly with the vocabulary size and can lead to overfitting. In this work we propose a much more compact K-way D-dimensional discrete encoding scheme to replace the "one-hot" encoding. In "KD encoding", each symbol is represented by a $D$-dimensional code, and each of its dimension has a cardinality of $K$. The final symbol embedding vector can be generated by composing the code embedding vectors. To learn the semantically meaningful code, we derive a relaxed discrete optimization technique based on stochastic gradient descent. By adopting the new coding system, the efficiency of parameterization can be significantly improved (from linear to logarithmic), and this can also mitigate the over-fitting problem. In our experiments with language modeling, the number of embedding parameters can be reduced by 97\% while achieving similar or better performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Adaptive Feature Abstraction for Translating Video to Text

Previous models for video captioning often use the output from a specific layer of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as video features. However, the variable context-dependent semantics in the video may make it more appropriate to adaptively select features from the multiple CNN layers. We propose a new approach for generating adaptive spatiotemporal representations of videos for the captioning task. A novel attention mechanism is developed, that adaptively and sequentially focuses on different layers of CNN features (levels of feature "abstraction"), as well as local spatiotemporal regions of the feature maps at each layer. The proposed approach is evaluated on three benchmark datasets: YouTube2Text, M-VAD and MSR-VTT. Along with visualizing the results and how the model works, these experiments quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive spatiotemporal feature abstraction for translating videos to sentences with rich semantics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Video Generation From Text

Generating videos from text has proven to be a significant challenge for existing generative models. We tackle this problem by training a conditional generative model to extract both static and dynamic information from text. This is manifested in a hybrid framework, employing a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The static features, called "gist," are used to sketch text-conditioned background color and object layout structure. Dynamic features are considered by transforming input text into an image filter. To obtain a large amount of data for training the deep-learning model, we develop a method to automatically create a matched text-video corpus from publicly available online videos. Experimental results show that the proposed framework generates plausible and diverse videos, while accurately reflecting the input text information. It significantly outperforms baseline models that directly adapt text-to-image generation procedures to produce videos. Performance is evaluated both visually and by adapting the inception score used to evaluate image generation in GANs.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2017

A Context-aware Attention Network for Interactive Question Answering

Neural network based sequence-to-sequence models in an encoder-decoder framework have been successfully applied to solve Question Answering (QA) problems, predicting answers from statements and questions. However, almost all previous models have failed to consider detailed context information and unknown states under which systems do not have enough information to answer given questions. These scenarios with incomplete or ambiguous information are very common in the setting of Interactive Question Answering (IQA). To address this challenge, we develop a novel model, employing context-dependent word-level attention for more accurate statement representations and question-guided sentence-level attention for better context modeling. We also generate unique IQA datasets to test our model, which will be made publicly available. Employing these attention mechanisms, our model accurately understands when it can output an answer or when it requires generating a supplementary question for additional input depending on different contexts. When available, user's feedback is encoded and directly applied to update sentence-level attention to infer an answer. Extensive experiments on QA and IQA datasets quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with significant improvement over state-of-the-art conventional QA models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2017

Exemplar-Centered Supervised Shallow Parametric Data Embedding

Metric learning methods for dimensionality reduction in combination with k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) have been extensively deployed in many classification, data embedding, and information retrieval applications. However, most of these approaches involve pairwise training data comparisons, and thus have quadratic computational complexity with respect to the size of training set, preventing them from scaling to fairly big datasets. Moreover, during testing, comparing test data against all the training data points is also expensive in terms of both computational cost and resources required. Furthermore, previous metrics are either too constrained or too expressive to be well learned. To effectively solve these issues, we present an exemplar-centered supervised shallow parametric data embedding model, using a Maximally Collapsing Metric Learning (MCML) objective. Our strategy learns a shallow high-order parametric embedding function and compares training/test data only with learned or precomputed exemplars, resulting in a cost function with linear computational complexity for both training and testing. We also empirically demonstrate, using several benchmark datasets, that for classification in two-dimensional embedding space, our approach not only gains speedup of kNN by hundreds of times, but also outperforms state-of-the-art supervised embedding approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Accelerating Deep Neural Network Training with Inconsistent Stochastic Gradient Descent

SGD is the widely adopted method to train CNN. Conceptually it approximates the population with a randomly sampled batch; then it evenly trains batches by conducting a gradient update on every batch in an epoch. In this paper, we demonstrate Sampling Bias, Intrinsic Image Difference and Fixed Cycle Pseudo Random Sampling differentiate batches in training, which then affect learning speeds on them. Because of this, the unbiased treatment of batches involved in SGD creates improper load balancing. To address this issue, we present Inconsistent Stochastic Gradient Descent (ISGD) to dynamically vary training effort according to learning statuses on batches. Specifically ISGD leverages techniques in Statistical Process Control to identify a undertrained batch. Once a batch is undertrained, ISGD solves a new subproblem, a chasing logic plus a conservative constraint, to accelerate the training on the batch while avoid drastic parameter changes. Extensive experiments on a variety of datasets demonstrate ISGD converges faster than SGD. In training AlexNet, ISGD is 21.05\% faster than SGD to reach 56\% top1 accuracy under the exactly same experiment setup. We also extend ISGD to work on multiGPU or heterogeneous distributed system based on data parallelism, enabling the batch size to be the key to scalability. Then we present the study of ISGD batch size to the learning rate, parallelism, synchronization cost, system saturation and scalability. We conclude the optimal ISGD batch size is machine dependent. Various experiments on a multiGPU system validate our claim. In particular, ISGD trains AlexNet to 56.3% top1 and 80.1% top5 accuracy in 11.5 hours with 4 NVIDIA TITAN X at the batch size of 1536.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

A Shallow High-Order Parametric Approach to Data Visualization and Compression

Explicit high-order feature interactions efficiently capture essential structural knowledge about the data of interest and have been used for constructing generative models. We present a supervised discriminative High-Order Parametric Embedding (HOPE) approach to data visualization and compression. Compared to deep embedding models with complicated deep architectures, HOPE generates more effective high-order feature mapping through an embarrassingly simple shallow model. Furthermore, two approaches to generating a small number of exemplars conveying high-order interactions to represent large-scale data sets are proposed. These exemplars in combination with the feature mapping learned by HOPE effectively capture essential data variations. Moreover, through HOPE, these exemplars are employed to increase the computational efficiency of kNN classification for fast information retrieval by thousands of times. For classification in two-dimensional embedding space on MNIST and USPS datasets, our shallow method HOPE with simple Sigmoid transformations significantly outperforms state-of-the-art supervised deep embedding models based on deep neural networks, and even achieved historically low test error rate of 0.65% in two-dimensional space on MNIST, which demonstrates the representational efficiency and power of supervised shallow models with high-order feature interactions.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2015

A Deep Learning Model for Structured Outputs with High-order Interaction

Many real-world applications are associated with structured data, where not only input but also output has interplay. However, typical classification and regression models often lack the ability of simultaneously exploring high-order interaction within input and that within output. In this paper, we present a deep learning model aiming to generate a powerful nonlinear functional mapping from structured input to structured output. More specifically, we propose to integrate high-order hidden units, guided discriminative pretraining, and high-order auto-encoders for this purpose. We evaluate the model with three datasets, and obtain state-of-the-art performances among competitive methods. Our current work focuses on structured output regression, which is a less explored area, although the model can be extended to handle structured label classification.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2009

Large-Margin kNN Classification Using a Deep Encoder Network

KNN is one of the most popular classification methods, but it often fails to work well with inappropriate choice of distance metric or due to the presence of numerous class-irrelevant features. Linear feature transformation methods have been widely applied to extract class-relevant information to improve kNN classification, which is very limited in many applications. Kernels have been used to learn powerful non-linear feature transformations, but these methods fail to scale to large datasets. In this paper, we present a scalable non-linear feature mapping method based on a deep neural network pretrained with restricted boltzmann machines for improving kNN classification in a large-margin framework, which we call DNet-kNN. DNet-kNN can be used for both classification and for supervised dimensionality reduction. The experimental results on two benchmark handwritten digit datasets show that DNet-kNN has much better performance than large-margin kNN using a linear mapping and kNN based on a deep autoencoder pretrained with retricted boltzmann machines.

cs.LG↗