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Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar

Alumni

Publications

Towards Lifelong Self-Supervision For Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation
Victor Schmidt
Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar
Mostafa ElAraby
Irina Rish
Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation (I2IT) tasks often suffer from lack of data, a problem which self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently… (see more) been very popular and successful at tackling. Leveraging auxiliary tasks such as rotation prediction or generative colorization, SSL can produce better and more robust representations in a low data regime. Training such tasks along an I2IT task is however computationally intractable as model size and the number of task grow. On the other hand, learning sequentially could incur catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks. To alleviate this, we introduce Lifelong Self-Supervision (LiSS) as a way to pre-train an I2IT model (e.g., CycleGAN) on a set of self-supervised auxiliary tasks. By keeping an exponential moving average of past encoders and distilling the accumulated knowledge, we are able to maintain the network's validation performance on a number of tasks without any form of replay, parameter isolation or retraining techniques typically used in continual learning. We show that models trained with LiSS perform better on past tasks, while also being more robust than the CycleGAN baseline to color bias and entity entanglement (when two entities are very close).
2020-03-31
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
You could have said that instead: Improving Chatbots with Natural Language Feedback
Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar
Kun Ni
Siva Reddy
The ubiquitous nature of dialogue systems and their interaction with users generate an enormous amount of data. Can we improve chatbots usin… (see more)g this data? A self-feeding chatbot improves itself by asking natural language feedback when a user is dissatisfied with its response and uses this feedback as an additional training sample. However, user feedback in most cases contains extraneous sequences hindering their usefulness as a training sample. In this work, we propose a generative adversarial model that converts noisy feedback into a plausible natural response in a conversation. The generator’s goal is to convert the feedback into a response that answers the user’s previous utterance and to fool the discriminator which distinguishes feedback from natural responses. We show that augmenting original training data with these modified feedback responses improves the original chatbot performance from 69.94%to 75.96% in ranking correct responses on the PERSONACHATdataset, a large improvement given that the original model is already trained on 131k samples.
2020-01-01
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org