Lightweight Facial Attractiveness Prediction Using Dual Label Distribution

Facial attractiveness prediction (FAP) aims to assess the facial attractiveness automatically based on human aesthetic perception. Previous methods using deep convolutional neural networks have boosted the performance, but their giant models lead to a deficiency in flexibility. Besides, most of them fail to take full advantage of the dataset. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end FAP approach integrating dual label distribution and lightweight design. To make the best use of the dataset, the manual ratings, attractiveness score, and standard deviation are aggregated explicitly to construct a dual label distribution, including the attractiveness distribution and the rating distribution. Such distributions, as well as the attractiveness score, are optimized under a joint learning framework based on the label distribution learning (LDL) paradigm. As for the lightweight design, the data processing is simplified to minimum, and MobileNetV2 is selected as our backbone. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets, where our approach achieves promising results and succeeds in striking a balance between performance and efficiency. Ablation studies demonstrate that our delicately designed learning modules are indispensable and correlated. Additionally, the visualization indicates that our approach is capable of perceiving facial attractiveness and capturing attractive facial regions to facilitate semantic predictions.

Multi-Vector Retrieval as Sparse Alignment

Multi-vector retrieval models improve over single-vector dual encoders on many information retrieval tasks. In this paper, we cast the multi-vector retrieval problem as sparse alignment between query and document tokens. We propose AligneR, a novel multi-vector retrieval model that learns sparsified pairwise alignments between query and document tokens (e.g. `dog' vs. `puppy') and per-token unary saliences reflecting their relative importance for retrieval. We show that controlling the sparsity of pairwise token alignments often brings significant performance gains. While most factoid questions focusing on a specific part of a document require a smaller number of alignments, others requiring a broader understanding of a document favor a larger number of alignments. Unary saliences, on the other hand, decide whether a token ever needs to be aligned with others for retrieval (e.g. `kind' from `kind of currency is used in new zealand}'). With sparsified unary saliences, we are able to prune a large number of query and document token vectors and improve the efficiency of multi-vector retrieval. We learn the sparse unary saliences with entropy-regularized linear programming, which outperforms other methods to achieve sparsity. In a zero-shot setting, AligneR scores 51.1 points nDCG@10, achieving a new retriever-only state-of-the-art on 13 tasks in the BEIR benchmark. In addition, adapting pairwise alignments with a few examples (<= 8) further improves the performance up to 15.7 points nDCG@10 for argument retrieval tasks. The unary saliences of AligneR helps us to keep only 20% of the document token representations with minimal performance loss. We further show that our model often produces interpretable alignments and significantly improves its performance when initialized from larger language models.

Training Language Models with Memory Augmentation

Recent work has improved language models remarkably by equipping them with a non-parametric memory component. However, most existing approaches only introduce memories at testing time, or represent them using a separately trained encoder -- resulting in sub-optimal training of the language model. In this work, we present TRIME, a novel yet simple training approach designed for training language models with memory augmentation. Our approach uses a training objective that directly takes in-batch examples as accessible memory. We also present new methods for memory construction and data batching, which are used for adapting to different sets of memories -- local, long-term, and external memory -- at testing time. We evaluate our approach on multiple language modeling and machine translation benchmarks. We find that simply replacing the vanilla language modeling objective by ours greatly reduces the perplexity, without modifying the model architecture or incorporating extra context (e.g., 18.70 $\to$ 17.76 on WikiText-103). We further augment language models with long-range contexts and external knowledge and demonstrate significant gains over previous memory-augmented approaches.

Simple Recurrence Improves Masked Language Models

In this work, we explore whether modeling recurrence into the Transformer architecture can both be beneficial and efficient, by building an extremely simple recurrent module into the Transformer. We compare our model to baselines following the training and evaluation recipe of BERT. Our results confirm that recurrence can indeed improve Transformer models by a consistent margin, without requiring low-level performance optimizations, and while keeping the number of parameters constant. For example, our base model achieves an absolute improvement of 2.1 points averaged across 10 tasks and also demonstrates increased stability in fine-tuning over a range of learning rates.

Mixture-of-Experts with Expert Choice Routing

Sparsely-activated Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models allow the number of parameters to greatly increase while keeping the amount of computation for a given token or a given sample unchanged. However, a poor expert routing strategy (e.g. one resulting in load imbalance) can cause certain experts to be under-trained, leading to an expert being under or over-specialized. Prior work allocates a fixed number of experts to each token using a top-k function regardless of the relative importance of different tokens. To address this, we propose a heterogeneous mixture-of-experts employing an expert choice method. Instead of letting tokens select the top-k experts, we have experts selecting the top-k tokens. As a result, each token can be routed to a variable number of experts and each expert can have a fixed bucket size. We systematically study pre-training speedups using the same computational resources of the Switch Transformer top-1 and GShard top-2 gating of prior work and find that our method improves training convergence time by more than 2x. For the same computational cost, our method demonstrates higher performance in fine-tuning 11 selected tasks in the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks. For a smaller activation cost, our method outperforms the T5 dense model in 7 out of the 11 tasks.

SRU++: Pioneering Fast Recurrence with Attention for Speech Recognition

The Transformer architecture has been well adopted as a dominant architecture in most sequence transduction tasks including automatic speech recognition (ASR), since its attention mechanism excels in capturing long-range dependencies. While models built solely upon attention can be better parallelized than regular RNN, a novel network architecture, SRU++, was recently proposed. By combining the fast recurrence and attention mechanism, SRU++ exhibits strong capability in sequence modeling and achieves near-state-of-the-art results in various language modeling and machine translation tasks with improved compute efficiency. In this work, we present the advantages of applying SRU++ in ASR tasks by comparing with Conformer across multiple ASR benchmarks and study how the benefits can be generalized to long-form speech inputs. On the popular LibriSpeech benchmark, our SRU++ model achieves 2.0% / 4.7% WER on test-clean / test-other, showing competitive performances compared with the state-of-the-art Conformer encoder under the same set-up. Specifically, SRU++ can surpass Conformer on long-form speech input with a large margin, based on our analysis.

Channel-Temporal Attention for First-Person Video Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) can transfer knowledge from labeled source data to unlabeled target data of the same categories. However, UDA for first-person action recognition is an under-explored problem, with lack of datasets and limited consideration of first-person video characteristics. This paper focuses on addressing this problem. Firstly, we propose two small-scale first-person video domain adaptation datasets: ADL$_{small}$ and GTEA-KITCHEN. Secondly, we introduce channel-temporal attention blocks to capture the channel-wise and temporal-wise relationships and model their inter-dependencies important to first-person vision. Finally, we propose a Channel-Temporal Attention Network (CTAN) to integrate these blocks into existing architectures. CTAN outperforms baselines on the two proposed datasets and one existing dataset EPIC$_{cvpr20}$.

Team PyKale (xy9) Submission to the EPIC-Kitchens 2021 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Challenge for Action Recognition

This report describes the technical details of our submission to the EPIC-Kitchens 2021 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Challenge for Action Recognition. The EPIC-Kitchens dataset is more difficult than other video domain adaptation datasets due to multi-tasks with more modalities. Firstly, to participate in the challenge, we employ a transformer to capture the spatial information from each modality. Secondly, we employ a temporal attention module to model temporal-wise inter-dependency. Thirdly, we employ the adversarial domain adaptation network to learn the general features between labeled source and unlabeled target domain. Finally, we incorporate multiple modalities to improve the performance by a three-stream network with late fusion. Our network achieves the comparable performance with the state-of-the-art baseline T$A^3$N and outperforms the baseline on top-1 accuracy for verb class and top-5 accuracies for all three tasks which are verb, noun and action. Under the team name xy9, our submission achieved 5th place in terms of top-1 accuracy for verb class and all top-5 accuracies.

Nutribullets Hybrid: Multi-document Health Summarization

We present a method for generating comparative summaries that highlights similarities and contradictions in input documents. The key challenge in creating such summaries is the lack of large parallel training data required for training typical summarization systems. To this end, we introduce a hybrid generation approach inspired by traditional concept-to-text systems. To enable accurate comparison between different sources, the model first learns to extract pertinent relations from input documents. The content planning component uses deterministic operators to aggregate these relations after identifying a subset for inclusion into a summary. The surface realization component lexicalizes this information using a text-infilling language model. By separately modeling content selection and realization, we can effectively train them with limited annotations. We implemented and tested the model in the domain of nutrition and health -- rife with inconsistencies. Compared to conventional methods, our framework leads to more faithful, relevant and aggregation-sensitive summarization -- while being equally fluent.

Nutri-bullets: Summarizing Health Studies by Composing Segments

We introduce \emph{Nutri-bullets}, a multi-document summarization task for health and nutrition. First, we present two datasets of food and health summaries from multiple scientific studies. Furthermore, we propose a novel \emph{extract-compose} model to solve the problem in the regime of limited parallel data. We explicitly select key spans from several abstracts using a policy network, followed by composing the selected spans to present a summary via a task specific language model. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach leads to more faithful, relevant and diverse summarization -- properties imperative to this application. For instance, on the BreastCancer dataset our approach gets a more than 50\% improvement on relevance and faithfulness.\footnote{Our code and data is available at \url{https://github.com/darsh10/Nutribullets.}}