No Arabic abstract
In multi-hop QA, answering complex questions entails iterative document retrieval for finding the missing entity of the question. The main steps of this process are sub-question detection, document retrieval for the sub-question, and generation of a new query for the final document retrieval. However, building a dataset that contains complex questions with sub-questions and their corresponding documents requires costly human annotation. To address the issue, we propose a new method for weakly supervised multi-hop retriever pre-training without human efforts. Our method includes 1) a pre-training task for generating vector representations of complex questions, 2) a scalable data generation method that produces the nested structure of question and sub-question as weak supervision for pre-training, and 3) a pre-training model structure based on dense encoders. We conduct experiments to compare the performance of our pre-trained retriever with several state-of-the-art models on end-to-end multi-hop QA as well as document retrieval. The experimental results show that our pre-trained retriever is effective and also robust on limited data and computational resources.
Knowledge-based visual question answering (VQA) requires answering questions with external knowledge in addition to the content of images. One dataset that is mostly used in evaluating knowledge-based VQA is OK-VQA, but it lacks a gold standard knowledge corpus for retrieval. Existing work leverage different knowledge bases (e.g., ConceptNet and Wikipedia) to obtain external knowledge. Because of varying knowledge bases, it is hard to fairly compare models performance. To address this issue, we collect a natural language knowledge base that can be used for any VQA system. Moreover, we propose a Visual Retriever-Reader pipeline to approach knowledge-based VQA. The visual retriever aims to retrieve relevant knowledge, and the visual reader seeks to predict answers based on given knowledge. We introduce various ways to retrieve knowledge using text and images and two reader styles: classification and extraction. Both the retriever and reader are trained with weak supervision. Our experimental results show that a good retriever can significantly improve the readers performance on the OK-VQA challenge. The code and corpus are provided in https://github.com/luomancs/retriever_reader_for_okvqa.git
Answering natural language questions over tables is usually seen as a semantic parsing task. To alleviate the collection cost of full logical forms, one popular approach focuses on weak supervision consisting of denotations instead of logical forms. However, training semantic parsers from weak supervision poses difficulties, and in addition, the generated logical forms are only used as an intermediate step prior to retrieving the denotation. In this paper, we present TAPAS, an approach to question answering over tables without generating logical forms. TAPAS trains from weak supervision, and predicts the denotation by selecting table cells and optionally applying a corresponding aggregation operator to such selection. TAPAS extends BERTs architecture to encode tables as input, initializes from an effective joint pre-training of text segments and tables crawled from Wikipedia, and is trained end-to-end. We experiment with three different semantic parsing datasets, and find that TAPAS outperforms or rivals semantic parsing models by improving state-of-the-art accuracy on SQA from 55.1 to 67.2 and performing on par with the state-of-the-art on WIKISQL and WIKITQ, but with a simpler model architecture. We additionally find that transfer learning, which is trivial in our setting, from WIKISQL to WIKITQ, yields 48.7 accuracy, 4.2 points above the state-of-the-art.
Multimodal pre-training models, such as LXMERT, have achieved excellent results in downstream tasks. However, current pre-trained models require large amounts of training data and have huge model sizes, which make them difficult to apply in low-resource situations. How to obtain similar or even better performance than a larger model under the premise of less pre-training data and smaller model size has become an important problem. In this paper, we propose a new Multi-stage Pre-training (MSP) method, which uses information at different granularities from word, phrase to sentence in both texts and images to pre-train the model in stages. We also design several different pre-training tasks suitable for the information granularity in different stage in order to efficiently capture the diverse knowledge from a limited corpus. We take a Simplified LXMERT (LXMERT- S), which has only 45.9% parameters of the original LXMERT model and 11.76% of the original pre-training data as the testbed of our MSP method. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable performance to the original LXMERT model in all downstream tasks, and even outperforms the original model in Image-Text Retrieval task.
Deep learning is very data hungry, and supervised learning especially requires massive labeled data to work well. Machine listening research often suffers from limited labeled data problem, as human annotations are costly to acquire, and annotations for audio are time consuming and less intuitive. Besides, models learned from labeled dataset often embed biases specific to that particular dataset. Therefore, unsupervised learning techniques become popular approaches in solving machine listening problems. Particularly, a self-supervised learning technique utilizing reconstructions of multiple hand-crafted audio features has shown promising results when it is applied to speech domain such as emotion recognition and automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we apply self-supervised and multi-task learning methods for pre-training music encoders, and explore various design choices including encoder architectures, weighting mechanisms to combine losses from multiple tasks, and worker selections of pretext tasks. We investigate how these design choices interact with various downstream music classification tasks. We find that using various music specific workers altogether with weighting mechanisms to balance the losses during pre-training helps improve and generalize to the downstream tasks.
Multimodal affect recognition constitutes an important aspect for enhancing interpersonal relationships in human-computer interaction. However, relevant data is hard to come by and notably costly to annotate, which poses a challenging barrier to build robust multimodal affect recognition systems. Models trained on these relatively small datasets tend to overfit and the improvement gained by using complex state-of-the-art models is marginal compared to simple baselines. Meanwhile, there are many different multimodal affect recognition datasets, though each may be small. In this paper, we propose to leverage these datasets using weakly-supervised multi-task learning to improve the generalization performance on each of them. Specifically, we explore three multimodal affect recognition tasks: 1) emotion recognition; 2) sentiment analysis; and 3) sarcasm recognition. Our experimental results show that multi-tasking can benefit all these tasks, achieving an improvement up to 2.9% accuracy and 3.3% F1-score. Furthermore, our method also helps to improve the stability of model performance. In addition, our analysis suggests that weak supervision can provide a comparable contribution to strong supervision if the tasks are highly correlated.