Due to the complex layouts of documents, it is challenging to extract information for documents. Most previous studies develop multimodal pre-trained models in a self-supervised way. In this paper, we focus on the embedding learning of word blocks containing text and layout information, and propose UTel, a language model with Unified TExt and Layout pre-training. Specifically, we propose two pre-training tasks: Surrounding Word Prediction (SWP) for the layout learning, and Contrastive learning of Word Embeddings (CWE) for identifying different word blocks. Moreover, we replace the commonly used 1D position embedding with a 1D clipped relative position embedding. In this way, the joint training of Masked Layout-Language Modeling (MLLM) and two newly proposed tasks enables the interaction between semantic and spatial features in a unified way. Additionally, the proposed UTel can process arbitrary-length sequences by removing the 1D position embedding, while maintaining competitive performance. Extensive experimental results show UTel learns better joint representations and achieves superior performance than previous methods on various downstream tasks, though requiring no image modality. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/taosong2019/UTel}.
Reliable methods for automatic readability assessment have the potential to impact a variety of fields, ranging from machine translation to self-informed learning. Recently, large language models for the German language (such as GBERT and GPT-2-Wechsel) have become available, allowing to develop Deep Learning based approaches that promise to further improve automatic readability assessment. In this contribution, we studied the ability of ensembles of fine-tuned GBERT and GPT-2-Wechsel models to reliably predict the readability of German sentences. We combined these models with linguistic features and investigated the dependence of prediction performance on ensemble size and composition. Mixed ensembles of GBERT and GPT-2-Wechsel performed better than ensembles of the same size consisting of only GBERT or GPT-2-Wechsel models. Our models were evaluated in the GermEval 2022 Shared Task on Text Complexity Assessment on data of German sentences. On out-of-sample data, our best ensemble achieved a root mean squared error of 0.435.
Existing data-driven methods can well handle short text generation. However, when applied to the long-text generation scenarios such as story generation or advertising text generation in the commercial scenario, these methods may generate illogical and uncontrollable texts. To address these aforementioned issues, we propose a graph-based grouping planner(GGP) following the idea of first-plan-then-generate. Specifically, given a collection of key phrases, GGP firstly encodes these phrases into an instance-level sequential representation and a corpus-level graph-based representation separately. With these two synergic representations, we then regroup these phrases into a fine-grained plan, based on which we generate the final long text. We conduct our experiments on three long text generation datasets and the experimental results reveal that GGP significantly outperforms baselines, which proves that GGP can control the long text generation by knowing how to say and in what order.
Semantic text matching is a critical problem in information retrieval. Recently, deep learning techniques have been widely used in this area and obtained significant performance improvements. However, most models are black boxes and it is hard to understand what happened in the matching process, due to the poor interpretability of deep learning. This paper aims at tackling this problem. The key idea is to test whether existing deep text matching methods satisfy some fundamental heuristics in information retrieval. Specifically, four heuristics are used in our study, i.e., term frequency constraint, term discrimination constraint, length normalization constraints, and TF-length constraint. Since deep matching models usually contain many parameters, it is difficult to conduct a theoretical study for these complicated functions. In this paper, We propose an empirical testing method. Specifically, We first construct some queries and documents to make them satisfy the assumption in a constraint, and then test to which extend a deep text matching model trained on the original dataset satisfies the corresponding constraint. Besides, a famous attribution based interpretation method, namely integrated gradient, is adopted to conduct detailed analysis and guide for feasible improvement. Experimental results on LETOR 4.0 and MS Marco show that all the investigated deep text matching methods, both representation and interaction based methods, satisfy the above constraints with high probabilities in statistics. We further extend these constraints to the semantic settings, which are shown to be better satisfied for all the deep text matching models. These empirical findings give clear understandings on why deep text matching models usually perform well in information retrieval. We believe the proposed evaluation methodology will be useful for testing future deep text matching models.
Most neuroimaging experiments are under-powered, limited by the number of subjects and cognitive processes that an individual study can investigate. Nonetheless, over decades of research, neuroscience has accumulated an extensive wealth of results. It remains a challenge to digest this growing knowledge base and obtain new insights since existing meta-analytic tools are limited to keyword queries. In this work, we propose Text2Brain, a neural network approach for coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies to synthesize brain activation maps from open-ended text queries. Combining a transformer-based text encoder and a 3D image generator, Text2Brain was trained on variable-length text snippets and their corresponding activation maps sampled from 13,000 published neuroimaging studies. We demonstrate that Text2Brain can synthesize anatomically-plausible neural activation patterns from free-form textual descriptions of cognitive concepts. Text2Brain is available at https://braininterpreter.com as a web-based tool for retrieving established priors and generating new hypotheses for neuroscience research.
Existing detection methods commonly use a parameterized bounding box (BBox) to model and detect (horizontal) objects and an additional rotation angle parameter is used for rotated objects. We argue that such a mechanism has fundamental limitations in building an effective regression loss for rotation detection, especially for high-precision detection with high IoU (e.g. 0.75). Instead, we propose to model the rotated objects as Gaussian distributions. A direct advantage is that our new regression loss regarding the distance between two Gaussians e.g. Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KLD), can well align the actual detection performance metric, which is not well addressed in existing methods. Moreover, the two bottlenecks i.e. boundary discontinuity and square-like problem also disappear. We also propose an efficient Gaussian metric-based label assignment strategy to further boost the performance. Interestingly, by analyzing the BBox parameters' gradients under our Gaussian-based KLD loss, we show that these parameters are dynamically updated with interpretable physical meaning, which help explain the effectiveness of our approach, especially for high-precision detection. We extend our approach from 2-D to 3-D with a tailored algorithm design to handle the heading estimation, and experimental results on twelve public datasets (2-D/3-D, aerial/text/face images) with various base detectors show its superiority.
Text encoding is one of the most important steps in Natural Language Processing (NLP). It has been done well by the self-attention mechanism in the current state-of-the-art Transformer encoder, which has brought about significant improvements in the performance of many NLP tasks. Though the Transformer encoder may effectively capture general information in its resulting representations, the backbone information, meaning the gist of the input text, is not specifically focused on. In this paper, we propose explicit and implicit text compression approaches to enhance the Transformer encoding and evaluate models using this approach on several typical downstream tasks that rely on the encoding heavily. Our explicit text compression approaches use dedicated models to compress text, while our implicit text compression approach simply adds an additional module to the main model to handle text compression. We propose three ways of integration, namely backbone source-side fusion, target-side fusion, and both-side fusion, to integrate the backbone information into Transformer-based models for various downstream tasks. Our evaluation on benchmark datasets shows that the proposed explicit and implicit text compression approaches improve results in comparison to strong baselines. We therefore conclude, when comparing the encodings to the baseline models, text compression helps the encoders to learn better language representations.
To bridge the gap between supervised semantic segmentation and real-world applications that acquires one model to recognize arbitrary new concepts, recent zero-shot segmentation attracts a lot of attention by exploring the relationships between unseen and seen object categories, yet requiring large amounts of densely-annotated data with diverse base classes. In this paper, we propose a new open-world semantic segmentation pipeline that makes the first attempt to learn to segment semantic objects of various open-world categories without any efforts on dense annotations, by purely exploiting the image-caption data that naturally exist on the Internet. Our method, Vision-language-driven Semantic Segmentation (ViL-Seg), employs an image and a text encoder to generate visual and text embeddings for the image-caption data, with two core components that endow its segmentation ability: First, the image encoder is jointly trained with a vision-based contrasting and a cross-modal contrasting, which encourage the visual embeddings to preserve both fine-grained semantics and high-level category information that are crucial for the segmentation task. Furthermore, an online clustering head is devised over the image encoder, which allows to dynamically segment the visual embeddings into distinct semantic groups such that they can be classified by comparing with various text embeddings to complete our segmentation pipeline. Experiments show that without using any data with dense annotations, our method can directly segment objects of arbitrary categories, outperforming zero-shot segmentation methods that require data labeling on three benchmark datasets.
Faces generated using generative adversarial networks (GANs) have reached unprecedented realism. These faces, also known as "Deep Fakes", appear as realistic photographs with very little pixel-level distortions. While some work has enabled the training of models that lead to the generation of specific properties of the subject, generating a facial image based on a natural language description has not been fully explored. For security and criminal identification, the ability to provide a GAN-based system that works like a sketch artist would be incredibly useful. In this paper, we present a novel approach to generate facial images from semantic text descriptions. The learned model is provided with a text description and an outline of the type of face, which the model uses to sketch the features. Our models are trained using an Affine Combination Module (ACM) mechanism to combine the text embedding from BERT and the GAN latent space using a self-attention matrix. This avoids the loss of features due to inadequate "attention", which may happen if text embedding and latent vector are simply concatenated. Our approach is capable of generating images that are very accurately aligned to the exhaustive textual descriptions of faces with many fine detail features of the face and helps in generating better images. The proposed method is also capable of making incremental changes to a previously generated image if it is provided with additional textual descriptions or sentences.
We present HelpViz, a tool for generating contextual visual mobile tutorials from text-based instructions that are abundant on the web. HelpViz transforms text instructions to graphical tutorials in batch, by extracting a sequence of actions from each text instruction through an instruction parsing model, and executing the extracted actions on a simulation infrastructure that manages an array of Android emulators. The automatic execution of each instruction produces a set of graphical and structural assets, including images, videos, and metadata such as clicked elements for each step. HelpViz then synthesizes a tutorial by combining parsed text instructions with the generated assets, and contextualizes the tutorial to user interaction by tracking the user's progress and highlighting the next step. Our experiments with HelpViz indicate that our pipeline improved tutorial execution robustness and that participants preferred tutorials generated by HelpViz over text-based instructions. HelpViz promises a cost-effective approach for generating contextual visual tutorials for mobile interaction at scale.