No Arabic abstract
We propose a hierarchically structured reinforcement learning approach to address the challenges of planning for generating coherent multi-sentence stories for the visual storytelling task. Within our framework, the task of generating a story given a sequence of images is divided across a two-level hierarchical decoder. The high-level decoder constructs a plan by generating a semantic concept (i.e., topic) for each image in sequence. The low-level decoder generates a sentence for each image using a semantic compositional network, which effectively grounds the sentence generation conditioned on the topic. The two decoders are jointly trained end-to-end using reinforcement learning. We evaluate our model on the visual storytelling (VIST) dataset. Empirical results from both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed hierarchically structured reinforced training achieves significantly better performance compared to a strong flat deep reinforcement learning baseline.
Despite progress in visual perception tasks such as image classification and detection, computers still struggle to understand the interdependency of objects in the scene as a whole, e.g., relations between objects or their attributes. Existing methods often ignore global context cues capturing the interactions among different object instances, and can only recognize a handful of types by exhaustively training individual detectors for all possible relationships. To capture such global interdependency, we propose a deep Variation-structured Reinforcement Learning (VRL) framework to sequentially discover object relationships and attributes in the whole image. First, a directed semantic action graph is built using language priors to provide a rich and compact representation of semantic correlations between object categories, predicates, and attributes. Next, we use a variation-structured traversal over the action graph to construct a small, adaptive action set for each step based on the current state and historical actions. In particular, an ambiguity-aware object mining scheme is used to resolve semantic ambiguity among object categories that the object detector fails to distinguish. We then make sequential predictions using a deep RL framework, incorporating global context cues and semantic embeddings of previously extracted phrases in the state vector. Our experiments on the Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) dataset and the large-scale Visual Genome dataset validate the superiority of VRL, which can achieve significantly better detection results on datasets involving thousands of relationship and attribute types. We also demonstrate that VRL is able to predict unseen types embedded in our action graph by learning correlations on shared graph nodes.
We study the question of how concepts that have structure get represented in the brain. Specifically, we introduce a model for hierarchically structured concepts and we show how a biologically plausible neural network can recognize these concepts, and how it can learn them in the first place. Our main goal is to introduce a general framework for these tasks and prove formally how both (recognition and learning) can be achieved. We show that both tasks can be accomplished even in presence of noise. For learning, we analyze Ojas rule formally, a well-known biologically-plausible rule for adjusting the weights of synapses. We complement the learning results with lower bounds asserting that, in order to recognize concepts of a certain hierarchical depth, neural networks must have a corresponding number of layers.
We present a novel technique for self-supervised video representation learning by: (a) decoupling the learning objective into two contrastive subtasks respectively emphasizing spatial and temporal features, and (b) performing it hierarchically to encourage multi-scale understanding. Motivated by their effectiveness in supervised learning, we first introduce spatial-temporal feature learning decoupling and hierarchical learning to the context of unsupervised video learning. We show by experiments that augmentations can be manipulated as regularization to guide the network to learn desired semantics in contrastive learning, and we propose a way for the model to separately capture spatial and temporal features at multiple scales. We also introduce an approach to overcome the problem of divergent levels of instance invariance at different hierarchies by modeling the invariance as loss weights for objective re-weighting. Experiments on downstream action recognition benchmarks on UCF101 and HMDB51 show that our proposed Hierarchically Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Contrast (HDC) makes substantial improvements over directly learning spatial-temporal features as a whole and achieves competitive performance when compared with other state-of-the-art unsupervised methods. Code will be made available.
A natural image usually conveys rich semantic content and can be viewed from different angles. Existing image description methods are largely restricted by small sets of biased visual paragraph annotations, and fail to cover rich underlying semantics. In this paper, we investigate a semi-supervised paragraph generative framework that is able to synthesize diverse and semantically coherent paragraph descriptions by reasoning over local semantic regions and exploiting linguistic knowledge. The proposed Recurrent Topic-Transition Generative Adversarial Network (RTT-GAN) builds an adversarial framework between a structured paragraph generator and multi-level paragraph discriminators. The paragraph generator generates sentences recurrently by incorporating region-based visual and language attention mechanisms at each step. The quality of generated paragraph sentences is assessed by multi-level adversarial discriminators from two aspects, namely, plausibility at sentence level and topic-transition coherence at paragraph level. The joint adversarial training of RTT-GAN drives the model to generate realistic paragraphs with smooth logical transition between sentence topics. Extensive quantitative experiments on image and video paragraph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our RTT-GAN in both supervised and semi-supervised settings. Qualitative results on telling diverse stories for an image also verify the interpretability of RTT-GAN.
Large-scale pretrained language models have shown thrilling generation capabilities, especially when they generate consistent long text in thousands of words with ease. However, users of these models can only control the prefix of sentences or certain global aspects of generated text. It is challenging to simultaneously achieve fine-grained controllability and preserve the state-of-the-art unconditional text generation capability. In this paper, we first propose a new task named Outline to Story (O2S) as a test bed for fine-grained controllable generation of long text, which generates a multi-paragraph story from cascaded events, i.e. a sequence of outline events that guide subsequent paragraph generation. We then create dedicate datasets for future benchmarks, built by state-of-the-art keyword extraction techniques. Finally, we propose an extremely simple yet strong baseline method for the O2S task, which fine tunes pre-trained language models on augmented sequences of outline-story pairs with simple language modeling objective. Our method does not introduce any new parameters or perform any architecture modification, except several special tokens as delimiters to build augmented sequences. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art conditional story generation performance with our model, achieving better fine-grained controllability and user flexibility. Our paper is among the first ones by our knowledge to propose a model and to create datasets for the task of outline to story. Our work also instantiates research interest of fine-grained controllable generation of open-domain long text, where controlling inputs are represented by short text.