For downstream applications of vision-language pre-trained models, there has been significant interest in constructing effective prompts. Existing works on prompt engineering, which either require laborious manual designs or optimize the prompt tuning as a point estimation problem, may fail to describe diverse characteristics of categories and limit their applications. We introduce a Bayesian probabilistic resolution to prompt learning, where the label-specific stochastic prompts are generated hierarchically by first sampling a latent vector from an underlying distribution and then employing a lightweight generative model. Importantly, we semantically regularize prompt learning with the visual knowledge and view images and the corresponding prompts as patch and token sets under optimal transport, which pushes the prompt tokens to faithfully capture the label-specific visual concepts, instead of overfitting the training categories. Moreover, the proposed model can also be straightforwardly extended to the conditional case where the instance-conditional prompts are generated to improve the generalizability. Extensive experiments on 15 datasets show promising transferability and generalization performance of our proposed model.
Embedded topic models are able to learn interpretable topics even with large and heavy-tailed vocabularies. However, they generally hold the Euclidean embedding space assumption, leading to a basic limitation in capturing hierarchical relations. To this end, we present a novel framework that introduces hyperbolic embeddings to represent words and topics. With the tree-likeness property of hyperbolic space, the underlying semantic hierarchy among words and topics can be better exploited to mine more interpretable topics. Furthermore, due to the superiority of hyperbolic geometry in representing hierarchical data, tree-structure knowledge can also be naturally injected to guide the learning of a topic hierarchy. Therefore, we further develop a regularization term based on the idea of contrastive learning to inject prior structural knowledge efficiently. Experiments on both topic taxonomy discovery and document representation demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves improved performance against existing embedded topic models.
We propose a Bayesian generative model for incorporating prior domain knowledge into hierarchical topic modeling. Although embedded topic models (ETMs) and its variants have gained promising performance in text analysis, they mainly focus on mining word co-occurrence patterns, ignoring potentially easy-to-obtain prior topic hierarchies that could help enhance topic coherence. While several knowledge-based topic models have recently been proposed, they are either only applicable to shallow hierarchies or sensitive to the quality of the provided prior knowledge. To this end, we develop a novel deep ETM that jointly models the documents and the given prior knowledge by embedding the words and topics into the same space. Guided by the provided knowledge, the proposed model tends to discover topic hierarchies that are organized into interpretable taxonomies. Besides, with a technique for adapting a given graph, our extended version allows the provided prior topic structure to be finetuned to match the target corpus. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model efficiently integrates the prior knowledge and improves both hierarchical topic discovery and document representation.
Existing deep hierarchical topic models are able to extract semantically meaningful topics from a text corpus in an unsupervised manner and automatically organize them into a topic hierarchy. However, it is unclear how to incorporate prior beliefs such as knowledge graph to guide the learning of the topic hierarchy. To address this issue, we introduce TopicNet as a deep hierarchical topic model that can inject prior structural knowledge as an inductive bias to influence learning. TopicNet represents each topic as a Gaussian-distributed embedding vector, projects the topics of all layers into a shared embedding space, and explores both the symmetric and asymmetric similarities between Gaussian embedding vectors to incorporate prior semantic hierarchies. With an auto-encoding variational inference network, the model parameters are optimized by minimizing the evidence lower bound and a regularization term via stochastic gradient descent. Experiments on widely used benchmarks show that TopicNet outperforms related deep topic models on discovering deeper interpretable topics and mining better document~representations.
Hierarchical topic models such as the gamma belief network (GBN) have delivered promising results in mining multi-layer document representations and discovering interpretable topic taxonomies. However, they often assume in the prior that the topics at each layer are independently drawn from the Dirichlet distribution, ignoring the dependencies between the topics both at the same layer and across different layers. To relax this assumption, we propose sawtooth factorial topic embedding guided GBN, a deep generative model of documents that captures the dependencies and semantic similarities between the topics in the embedding space. Specifically, both the words and topics are represented as embedding vectors of the same dimension. The topic matrix at a layer is factorized into the product of a factor loading matrix and a topic embedding matrix, the transpose of which is set as the factor loading matrix of the layer above. Repeating this particular type of factorization, which shares components between adjacent layers, leads to a structure referred to as sawtooth factorization. An auto-encoding variational inference network is constructed to optimize the model parameter via stochastic gradient descent. Experiments on big corpora show that our models outperform other neural topic models on extracting deeper interpretable topics and deriving better document representations.