No Arabic abstract
Recent progress in AutoML has lead to state-of-the-art methods (e.g., AutoSKLearn) that can be readily used by non-experts to approach any supervised learning problem. Whereas these methods are quite effective, they are still limited in the sense that they work for tabular (matrix formatted) data only. This paper describes one step forward in trying to automate the design of supervised learning methods in the context of text mining. We introduce a meta learning methodology for automatically obtaining a representation for text mining tasks starting from raw text. We report experiments considering 60 different textual representations and more than 80 text mining datasets associated to a wide variety of tasks. Experimental results show the proposed methodology is a promising solution to obtain highly effective off the shell text classification pipelines.
A continual learning agent should be able to build on top of existing knowledge to learn on new data quickly while minimizing forgetting. Current intelligent systems based on neural network function approximators arguably do the opposite---they are highly prone to forgetting and rarely trained to facilitate future learning. One reason for this poor behavior is that they learn from a representation that is not explicitly trained for these two goals. In this paper, we propose OML, an objective that directly minimizes catastrophic interference by learning representations that accelerate future learning and are robust to forgetting under online updates in continual learning. We show that it is possible to learn naturally sparse representations that are more effective for online updating. Moreover, our algorithm is complementary to existing continual learning strategies, such as MER and GEM. Finally, we demonstrate that a basic online updating strategy on representations learned by OML is competitive with rehearsal based methods for continual learning. We release an implementation of our method at https://github.com/khurramjaved96/mrcl .
Knowledge is captured in the form of entities and their relationships and stored in knowledge graphs. Knowledge graphs enhance the capabilities of applications in many different areas including Web search, recommendation, and natural language understanding. This is mainly because, entities enable machines to understand things that go beyond simple tokens. Many modern algorithms use learned entity embeddings from these structured representations. However, building a knowledge graph takes time and effort, hence very costly and nontrivial. On the other hand, many Web sources describe entities in some structured format and therefore, finding ways to get them into useful entity knowledge is advantageous. We propose an approach that processes entity centric textual knowledge sources to learn entity embeddings and in turn avoids the need for a traditional knowledge graph. We first extract triples into the new representation format that does not use traditional complex triple extraction methods defined by pre-determined relationship labels. Then we learn entity embeddings through this new type of triples. We show that the embeddings learned from our approach are: (i) high quality and comparable to a known knowledge graph-based embeddings and can be used to improve them further, (ii) better than a contextual language model-based entity embeddings, and (iii) easy to compute and versatile in domain-specific applications where a knowledge graph is not readily available
The de-facto approach to many vision tasks is to start from pretrained visual representations, typically learned via supervised training on ImageNet. Recent methods have explored unsupervised pretraining to scale to vast quantities of unlabeled images. In contrast, we aim to learn high-quality visual representations from fewer images. To this end, we revisit supervised pretraining, and seek data-efficient alternatives to classification-based pretraining. We propose VirTex -- a pretraining approach using semantically dense captions to learn visual representations. We train convolutional networks from scratch on COCO Captions, and transfer them to downstream recognition tasks including image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. On all tasks, VirTex yields features that match or exceed those learned on ImageNet -- supervised or unsupervised -- despite using up to ten times fewer images.
Computer vision tasks such as object detection and semantic/instance segmentation rely on the painstaking annotation of large training datasets. In this paper, we propose LocTex that takes advantage of the low-cost localized textual annotations (i.e., captions and synchronized mouse-over gestures) to reduce the annotation effort. We introduce a contrastive pre-training framework between images and captions and propose to supervise the cross-modal attention map with rendered mouse traces to provide coarse localization signals. Our learned visual features capture rich semantics (from free-form captions) and accurate localization (from mouse traces), which are very effective when transferred to various downstream vision tasks. Compared with ImageNet supervised pre-training, LocTex can reduce the size of the pre-training dataset by 10x or the target dataset by 2x while achieving comparable or even improved performance on COCO instance segmentation. When provided with the same amount of annotations, LocTex achieves around 4% higher accuracy than the previous state-of-the-art vision+language pre-training approach on the task of PASCAL VOC image classification.
Representations are fundamental to artificial intelligence. The performance of a learning system depends on the type of representation used for representing the data. Typically, these representations are hand-engineered using domain knowledge. More recently, the trend is to learn these representations through stochastic gradient descent in multi-layer neural networks, which is called backprop. Learning the representations directly from the incoming data stream reduces the human labour involved in designing a learning system. More importantly, this allows in scaling of a learning system for difficult tasks. In this paper, we introduce a new incremental learning algorithm called crossprop, which learns incoming weights of hidden units based on the meta-gradient descent approach, that was previously introduced by Sutton (1992) and Schraudolph (1999) for learning step-sizes. The final update equation introduces an additional memory parameter for each of these weights and generalizes the backprop update equation. From our experiments, we show that crossprop learns and reuses its feature representation while tackling new and unseen tasks whereas backprop relearns a new feature representation.