Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in code representation learning, which aims to represent the semantics of source code into distributed vectors. Currently, various works have been proposed to represent the complex semantics of source code from different views, including plain text, Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), and several kinds of code graphs (e.g., Control/Data Flow Graph). However, most of them only consider a single view of source code independently, ignoring the correspondences among different views. In this paper, we propose to integrate different views with the natural-language description of source code into a unified framework with Multi-View contrastive Pre-training, and name our model as CODE-MVP. Specifically, we first extract multiple code views using compiler tools, and learn the complementary information among them under a contrastive learning framework. Inspired by the type checking in compilation, we also design a fine-grained type inference objective in the pre-training. Experiments on three downstream tasks over five datasets demonstrate the superiority of CODE-MVP when compared with several state-of-the-art baselines. For example, we achieve 2.4/2.3/1.1 gain in terms of MRR/MAP/Accuracy metrics on natural language code retrieval, code similarity, and code defect detection tasks, respectively.
We propose a streaming non-autoregressive (non-AR) decoding algorithm to deliberate the hypothesis alignment of a streaming RNN-T model. Our algorithm facilitates a simple greedy decoding procedure, and at the same time is capable of producing the decoding result at each frame with limited right context, thus enjoying both high efficiency and low latency. These advantages are achieved by converting the offline Align-Refine algorithm to be streaming-compatible, with a novel transformer decoder architecture that performs local self-attentions for both text and audio, and a time-aligned cross-attention at each layer. Furthermore, we perform discriminative training of our model with the minimum word error rate (MWER) criterion, which has not been done in the non-AR decoding literature. Experiments on voice search datasets and Librispeech show that with reasonable right context, our streaming model performs as well as the offline counterpart, and discriminative training leads to further WER gain when the first-pass model has small capacity.
We study the effect of applying a language model (LM) on the output of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for Indic languages. We fine-tune wav2vec $2.0$ models for $18$ Indic languages and adjust the results with language models trained on text derived from a variety of sources. Our findings demonstrate that the average Character Error Rate (CER) decreases by over $28$ \% and the average Word Error Rate (WER) decreases by about $36$ \% after decoding with LM. We show that a large LM may not provide a substantial improvement as compared to a diverse one. We also demonstrate that high quality transcriptions can be obtained on domain-specific data without retraining the ASR model and show results on biomedical domain.
The use of attention models for automated image captioning has enabled many systems to produce accurate and meaningful descriptions for images. Over the years, many novel approaches have been proposed to enhance the attention process using different feature representations. In this paper, we extend this approach by creating a guided attention network mechanism, that exploits the relationship between the visual scene and text-descriptions using spatial features from the image, high-level information from the topics, and temporal context from caption generation, which are embedded together in an ordered embedding space. A pairwise ranking objective is used for training this embedding space which allows similar images, topics and captions in the shared semantic space to maintain a partial order in the visual-semantic hierarchy and hence, helps the model to produce more visually accurate captions. The experimental results based on MSCOCO dataset shows the competitiveness of our approach, with many state-of-the-art models on various evaluation metrics.
Neural transducers have been widely used in automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we introduce it to streaming end-to-end speech translation (ST), which aims to convert audio signals to texts in other languages directly. Compared with cascaded ST that performs ASR followed by text-based machine translation (MT), the proposed Transformer transducer (TT)-based ST model drastically reduces inference latency, exploits speech information, and avoids error propagation from ASR to MT. To improve the modeling capacity, we propose attention pooling for the joint network in TT. In addition, we extend TT-based ST to multilingual ST, which generates texts of multiple languages at the same time. Experimental results on a large-scale 50 thousand (K) hours pseudo-labeled training set show that TT-based ST not only significantly reduces inference time but also outperforms non-streaming cascaded ST for English-German translation.
Linguistic knowledge is of great benefit to scene text recognition. However, how to effectively model linguistic rules in end-to-end deep networks remains a research challenge. In this paper, we argue that the limited capacity of language models comes from: 1) implicitly language modeling; 2) unidirectional feature representation; and 3) language model with noise input. Correspondingly, we propose an autonomous, bidirectional and iterative ABINet for scene text recognition. Firstly, the autonomous suggests to block gradient flow between vision and language models to enforce explicitly language modeling. Secondly, a novel bidirectional cloze network (BCN) as the language model is proposed based on bidirectional feature representation. Thirdly, we propose an execution manner of iterative correction for language model which can effectively alleviate the impact of noise input. Additionally, based on the ensemble of iterative predictions, we propose a self-training method which can learn from unlabeled images effectively. Extensive experiments indicate that ABINet has superiority on low-quality images and achieves state-of-the-art results on several mainstream benchmarks. Besides, the ABINet trained with ensemble self-training shows promising improvement in realizing human-level recognition. Code is available at https://github.com/FangShancheng/ABINet.
Leaderboards have eased model development for many NLP datasets by standardizing their evaluation and delegating it to an independent external repository. Their adoption, however, is so far limited to tasks that can be reliably evaluated in an automatic manner. This work introduces GENIE, an extensible human evaluation leaderboard, which brings the ease of leaderboards to text generation tasks. GENIE automatically posts leaderboard submissions to crowdsourcing platforms asking human annotators to evaluate them on various axes (e.g., correctness, conciseness, fluency) and compares their answers to various automatic metrics. We introduce several datasets in English to GENIE, representing four core challenges in text generation: machine translation, summarization, commonsense reasoning, and machine comprehension. We provide formal granular evaluation metrics and identify areas for future research. We make GENIE publicly available and hope that it will spur progress in language generation models as well as their automatic and manual evaluation.
Methods for linking individuals across historical data sets, typically in combination with AI based transcription models, are developing rapidly. Probably the single most important identifier for linking is personal names. However, personal names are prone to enumeration and transcription errors and although modern linking methods are designed to handle such challenges these sources of errors are critical and should be minimized. For this purpose, improved transcription methods and large-scale databases are crucial components. This paper describes and provides documentation for HANA, a newly constructed large-scale database which consists of more than 1.1 million images of handwritten word-groups. The database is a collection of personal names, containing more than 105 thousand unique names with a total of more than 3.3 million examples. In addition, we present benchmark results for deep learning models that automatically can transcribe the personal names from the scanned documents. Focusing mainly on personal names, due to its vital role in linking, we hope to foster more sophisticated, accurate, and robust models for handwritten text recognition through making more challenging large-scale databases publicly available. This paper describes the data source, the collection process, and the image-processing procedures and methods that are involved in extracting the handwritten personal names and handwritten text in general from the forms.
Videos are created to express emotion, exchange information, and share experiences. Video synthesis has intrigued researchers for a long time. Despite the rapid progress driven by advances in visual synthesis, most existing studies focus on improving the frames' quality and the transitions between them, while little progress has been made in generating longer videos. In this paper, we present a method that builds on 3D-VQGAN and transformers to generate videos with thousands of frames. Our evaluation shows that our model trained on 16-frame video clips from standard benchmarks such as UCF-101, Sky Time-lapse, and Taichi-HD datasets can generate diverse, coherent, and high-quality long videos. We also showcase conditional extensions of our approach for generating meaningful long videos by incorporating temporal information with text and audio. Videos and code can be found at https://songweige.github.io/projects/tats/index.html.
In this paper, we propose Semantic Supervision (SemSup) - a unified paradigm for training classifiers that generalize over output spaces. In contrast to standard classification, which treats classes as discrete symbols, SemSup represents them as dense vector features obtained from descriptions of classes (e.g., "The cat is a small carnivorous mammal"). This allows the output space to be unbounded (in the space of descriptions) and enables models to generalize both over unseen inputs and unseen outputs (e.g. "The aardvark is a nocturnal burrowing mammal with long ears"). Specifically, SemSup enables four types of generalization, to -- (1) unseen class descriptions, (2) unseen classes, (3) unseen super-classes, and (4) unseen tasks. Through experiments on four classification datasets across two variants (multi-class and multi-label), two input modalities (text and images), and two output description modalities (text and JSON), we show that our SemSup models significantly outperform standard supervised models and existing models that leverage word embeddings over class names. For instance, our model outperforms baselines by 40% and 20% precision points on unseen descriptions and classes, respectively, on a news categorization dataset (RCV1). SemSup can serve as a pathway for scaling neural models to large unbounded output spaces and enabling better generalization and model reuse for unseen tasks and domains.