With recent progress in joint modeling of visual and textual representations, Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has achieved impressive performance on many multimodal downstream tasks. However, the requirement for expensive annotations including clea
n image captions and regional labels limits the scalability of existing approaches, and complicates the pretraining procedure with the introduction of multiple dataset-specific objectives. In this work, we relax these constraints and present a minimalist pretraining framework, named Simple Visual Language Model (SimVLM). Unlike prior work, SimVLM reduces the training complexity by exploiting large-scale weak supervision, and is trained end-to-end with a single prefix language modeling objective. Without utilizing extra data or task-specific customization, the resulting model significantly outperforms previous pretraining methods and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a wide range of discriminative and generative vision-language benchmarks, including VQA (+3.74% vqa-score), NLVR2 (+1.17% accuracy), SNLI-VE (+1.37% accuracy) and image captioning tasks (+10.1% average CIDEr score). Furthermore, we demonstrate that SimVLM acquires strong generalization and transfer ability, enabling zero-shot behavior including open-ended visual question answering and cross-modality transfer.
End-to-end (E2E) models have shown to outperform state-of-the-art conventional models for streaming speech recognition [1] across many dimensions, including quality (as measured by word error rate (WER)) and endpointer latency [2]. However, the model
still tends to delay the predictions towards the end and thus has much higher partial latency compared to a conventional ASR model. To address this issue, we look at encouraging the E2E model to emit words early, through an algorithm called FastEmit [3]. Naturally, improving on latency results in a quality degradation. To address this, we explore replacing the LSTM layers in the encoder of our E2E model with Conformer layers [4], which has shown good improvements for ASR. Secondly, we also explore running a 2nd-pass beam search to improve quality. In order to ensure the 2nd-pass completes quickly, we explore non-causal Conformer layers that feed into the same 1st-pass RNN-T decoder, an algorithm called Cascaded Encoders [5]. Overall, we find that the Conformer RNN-T with Cascaded Encoders offers a better quality and latency tradeoff for streaming ASR.
We consider shallow (single hidden layer) neural networks and characterize their performance when trained with stochastic gradient descent as the number of hidden units $N$ and gradient descent steps grow to infinity. In particular, we investigate th
e effect of different scaling schemes, which lead to different normalizations of the neural network, on the networks statistical output, closing the gap between the $1/sqrt{N}$ and the mean-field $1/N$ normalization. We develop an asymptotic expansion for the neural networks statistical output pointwise with respect to the scaling parameter as the number of hidden units grows to infinity. Based on this expansion, we demonstrate mathematically that to leading order in $N$, there is no bias-variance trade off, in that both bias and variance (both explicitly characterized) decrease as the number of hidden units increases and time grows. In addition, we show that to leading order in $N$, the variance of the neural networks statistical output decays as the implied normalization by the scaling parameter approaches the mean field normalization. Numerical studies on the MNIST and CIFAR10 datasets show that test and train accuracy monotonically improve as the neural networks normalization gets closer to the mean field normalization.
The generative adversarial network (GAN) framework has emerged as a powerful tool for various image and video synthesis tasks, allowing the synthesis of visual content in an unconditional or input-conditional manner. It has enabled the generation of
high-resolution photorealistic images and videos, a task that was challenging or impossible with prior methods. It has also led to the creation of many new applications in content creation. In this paper, we provide an overview of GANs with a special focus on algorithms and applications for visual synthesis. We cover several important techniques to stabilize GAN training, which has a reputation for being notoriously difficult. We also discuss its applications to image translation, image processing, video synthesis, and neural rendering.
