Dynamic Attention Networks for Task Oriented Grounding

In order to successfully perform tasks specified by natural language instructions, an artificial agent operating in a visual world needs to map words, concepts, and actions from the instruction to visual elements in its environment. This association is termed as Task-Oriented Grounding. In this work, we propose a novel Dynamic Attention Network architecture for the efficient multi-modal fusion of text and visual representations which can generate a robust definition of state for the policy learner. Our model assumes no prior knowledge from visual and textual domains and is an end to end trainable. For a 3D visual world where the observation changes continuously, the attention on the visual elements tends to be highly co-related from a one-time step to the next. We term this as "Dynamic Attention". In this work, we show that Dynamic Attention helps in achieving grounding and also aids in the policy learning objective. Since most practical robotic applications take place in the real world where the observation space is continuous, our framework can be used as a generalized multi-modal fusion unit for robotic control through natural language. We show the effectiveness of using 1D convolution over Gated Attention Hadamard product on the rate of convergence of the network. We demonstrate that the cell-state of a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) is a natural choice for modeling Dynamic Attention and shows through visualization that the generated attention is very close to how humans tend to focus on the environment.

Granular Multimodal Attention Networks for Visual Dialog

Vision and language tasks have benefited from attention. There have been a number of different attention models proposed. However, the scale at which attention needs to be applied has not been well examined. Particularly, in this work, we propose a new method Granular Multi-modal Attention, where we aim to particularly address the question of the right granularity at which one needs to attend while solving the Visual Dialog task. The proposed method shows improvement in both image and text attention networks. We then propose a granular Multi-modal Attention network that jointly attends on the image and text granules and shows the best performance. With this work, we observe that obtaining granular attention and doing exhaustive Multi-modal Attention appears to be the best way to attend while solving visual dialog.

U-CAM: Visual Explanation using Uncertainty based Class Activation Maps

Understanding and explaining deep learning models is an imperative task. Towards this, we propose a method that obtains gradient-based certainty estimates that also provide visual attention maps. Particularly, we solve for visual question answering task. We incorporate modern probabilistic deep learning methods that we further improve by using the gradients for these estimates. These have two-fold benefits: a) improvement in obtaining the certainty estimates that correlate better with misclassified samples and b) improved attention maps that provide state-of-the-art results in terms of correlation with human attention regions. The improved attention maps result in consistent improvement for various methods for visual question answering. Therefore, the proposed technique can be thought of as a recipe for obtaining improved certainty estimates and explanation for deep learning models. We provide detailed empirical analysis for the visual question answering task on all standard benchmarks and comparison with state of the art methods.

Probabilistic framework for solving Visual Dialog

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic framework for solving the task of `Visual Dialog'. Solving this task requires reasoning and understanding of visual modality, language modality, and common sense knowledge to answer. Various architectures have been proposed to solve this task by variants of multi-modal deep learning techniques that combine visual and language representations. However, we believe that it is crucial to understand and analyze the sources of uncertainty for solving this task. Our approach allows for estimating uncertainty and also aids a diverse generation of answers. The proposed approach is obtained through a probabilistic representation module that provides us with representations for image, question and conversation history, a module that ensures that diverse latent representations for candidate answers are obtained given the probabilistic representations and an uncertainty representation module that chooses the appropriate answer that minimizes uncertainty. We thoroughly evaluate the model with a detailed ablation analysis, comparison with state of the art and visualization of the uncertainty that aids in the understanding of the method. Using the proposed probabilistic framework, we thus obtain an improved visual dialog system that is also more explainable.

A Baseline Neural Machine Translation System for Indian Languages

We present a simple, yet effective, Neural Machine Translation system for Indian languages. We demonstrate the feasibility for multiple language pairs, and establish a strong baseline for further research.

InfoRL: Interpretable Reinforcement Learning using Information Maximization

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have proved that given an environment we can learn to perform a task in that environment if we have access to some form of a reward function (dense, sparse or derived from IRL). But most of the algorithms focus on learning a single best policy to perform a given set of tasks. In this paper, we focus on an algorithm that learns to not just perform a task but different ways to perform the same task. As we know when the environment is complex enough there always exists multiple ways to perform a task. We show that using the concept of information maximization it is possible to learn latent codes for discovering multiple ways to perform any given task in an environment.

Play and Prune: Adaptive Filter Pruning for Deep Model Compression

While convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved impressive performance on various classification/recognition tasks, they typically consist of a massive number of parameters. This results in significant memory requirement as well as computational overheads. Consequently, there is a growing need for filter-level pruning approaches for compressing CNN based models that not only reduce the total number of parameters but reduce the overall computation as well. We present a new min-max framework for filter-level pruning of CNNs. Our framework, called Play and Prune (PP), jointly prunes and fine-tunes CNN model parameters, with an adaptive pruning rate, while maintaining the model's predictive performance. Our framework consists of two modules: (1) An adaptive filter pruning (AFP) module, which minimizes the number of filters in the model; and (2) A pruning rate controller (PRC) module, which maximizes the accuracy during pruning. Moreover, unlike most previous approaches, our approach allows directly specifying the desired error tolerance instead of pruning level. Our compressed models can be deployed at run-time, without requiring any special libraries or hardware. Our approach reduces the number of parameters of VGG-16 by an impressive factor of 17.5X, and number of FLOPS by 6.43X, with no loss of accuracy, significantly outperforming other state-of-the-art filter pruning methods.

Unsupervised Synthesis of Anomalies in Videos: Transforming the Normal

Abnormal activity recognition requires detection of occurrence of anomalous events that suffer from a severe imbalance in data. In a video, normal is used to describe activities that conform to usual events while the irregular events which do not conform to the normal are referred to as abnormal. It is far more common to observe normal data than to obtain abnormal data in visual surveillance. In this paper, we propose an approach where we can obtain abnormal data by transforming normal data. This is a challenging task that is solved through a multi-stage pipeline approach. We utilize a number of techniques from unsupervised segmentation in order to synthesize new samples of data that are transformed from an existing set of normal examples. Further, this synthesis approach has useful applications as a data augmentation technique. An incrementally trained Bayesian convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to carefully select the set of abnormal samples that can be added. Finally through this synthesis approach we obtain a comparable set of abnormal samples that can be used for training the CNN for the classification of normal vs abnormal samples. We show that this method generalizes to multiple settings by evaluating it on two real world datasets and achieves improved performance over other probabilistic techniques that have been used in the past for this task.