Publications

Generating Character Descriptions for Automatic Summarization of Fiction
Weiwei Zhang
Jackie Cheung
J. Oren
Summaries of fictional stories allow readers to quickly decide whether or not a story catches their interest. A major challenge in automatic… (see more) summarization of fiction is the lack of standardized evaluation methodology or high-quality datasets for experimentation. In this work, we take a bottomup approach to this problem by assuming that story authors are uniquely qualified to inform such decisions. We collect a dataset of one million fiction stories with accompanying author-written summaries from Wattpad, an online story sharing platform. We identify commonly occurring summary components, of which a description of the main characters is the most frequent, and elicit descriptions of main characters directly from the authors for a sample of the stories. We propose two approaches to generate character descriptions, one based on ranking attributes found in the story text, the other based on classifying into a list of pre-defined attributes. We find that the classification-based approach performs the best in predicting character descriptions.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
Learning Multi-Task Communication with Message Passing for Sequence Learning
Pengfei Liu
Jie Fu
Yue Dong
Xipeng Qiu
Jackie Cheung
We present two architectures for multi-task learning with neural sequence models. Our approach allows the relationships between different ta… (see more)sks to be learned dynamically, rather than using an ad-hoc pre-defined structure as in previous work. We adopt the idea from message-passing graph neural networks, and propose a general graph multi-task learning framework in which different tasks can communicate with each other in an effective and interpretable way. We conduct extensive experiments in text classification and sequence labelling to evaluate our approach on multi-task learning and transfer learning. The empirical results show that our models not only outperform competitive baselines, but also learn interpretable and transferable patterns across tasks.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
Learning Options with Interest Functions
Khimya Khetarpal
Doina Precup
Learning temporal abstractions which are partial solutions to a task and could be reused for solving other tasks is an ingredient that can h… (see more)elp agents to plan and learn efficiently. In this work, we tackle this problem in the options framework. We aim to autonomously learn options which are specialized in different state space regions by proposing a notion of interest functions, which generalizes initiation sets from the options framework for function approximation. We build on the option-critic framework to derive policy gradient theorems for interest functions, leading to a new interest-option-critic architecture.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
Leveraging Observations in Bandits: Between Risks and Benefits
Andrei-Stefan Lupu
Audrey Durand
Doina Precup
Imitation learning has been widely used to speed up learning in novice agents, by allowing them to leverage existing data from experts. Allo… (see more)wing an agent to be influenced by external observations can benefit to the learning process, but it also puts the agent at risk of following sub-optimal behaviours. In this paper, we study this problem in the context of bandits. More specifically, we consider that an agent (learner) is interacting with a bandit-style decision task, but can also observe a target policy interacting with the same environment. The learner observes only the target’s actions, not the rewards obtained. We introduce a new bandit optimism modifier that uses conditional optimism contingent on the actions of the target in order to guide the agent’s exploration. We analyze the effect of this modification on the well-known Upper Confidence Bound algorithm by proving that it preserves a regret upper-bound of order O(lnT), even in the presence of a very poor target, and we derive the dependency of the expected regret on the general target policy. We provide empirical results showing both great benefits as well as certain limitations inherent to observational learning in the multi-armed bandit setting. Experiments are conducted using targets satisfying theoretical assumptions with high probability, thus narrowing the gap between theory and application.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
Online Adaptative Curriculum Learning for GANs
Thang Doan
Joao Monteiro
Isabela Albuquerque
Bogdan Mazoure
Audrey Durand
Joelle Pineau
(Rex) Devon Hjelm
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can successfully approximate a probability distribution and produce realistic samples. However, open … (see more)questions such as sufficient convergence conditions and mode collapse still persist. In this paper, we build on existing work in the area by proposing a novel framework for training the generator against an ensemble of discriminator networks, which can be seen as a one-student/multiple-teachers setting. We formalize this problem within the full-information adversarial bandit framework, where we evaluate the capability of an algorithm to select mixtures of discriminators for providing the generator with feedback during learning. To this end, we propose a reward function which reflects the progress made by the generator and dynamically update the mixture weights allocated to each discriminator. We also draw connections between our algorithm and stochastic optimization methods and then show that existing approaches using multiple discriminators in literature can be recovered from our framework. We argue that less expressive discriminators are smoother and have a general coarse grained view of the modes map, which enforces the generator to cover a wide portion of the data distribution support. On the other hand, highly expressive discriminators ensure samples quality. Finally, experimental results show that our approach improves samples quality and diversity over existing baselines by effectively learning a curriculum. These results also support the claim that weaker discriminators have higher entropy improving modes coverage.
2019-07-17
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
A Cross-Domain Transferable Neural Coherence Model
Peng Xu
H. Saghir
Jin Sung Kang
Teng Long
Avishek Joey Bose
Yanshuai Cao
Jackie Cheung
Coherence is an important aspect of text quality and is crucial for ensuring its readability. One important limitation of existing coherence… (see more) models is that training on one domain does not easily generalize to unseen categories of text. Previous work advocates for generative models for cross-domain generalization, because for discriminative models, the space of incoherent sentence orderings to discriminate against during training is prohibitively large. In this work, we propose a local discriminative neural model with a much smaller negative sampling space that can efficiently learn against incorrect orderings. The proposed coherence model is simple in structure, yet it significantly outperforms previous state-of-art methods on a standard benchmark dataset on the Wall Street Journal corpus, as well as in multiple new challenging settings of transfer to unseen categories of discourse on Wikipedia articles.
2019-07-01
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
EditNTS: An Neural Programmer-Interpreter Model for Sentence Simplification through Explicit Editing
Yue Dong
Zichao Li
Mehdi Rezagholizadeh
Jackie Cheung
We present the first sentence simplification model that learns explicit edit operations (ADD, DELETE, and KEEP) via a neural programmer-inte… (see more)rpreter approach. Most current neural sentence simplification systems are variants of sequence-to-sequence models adopted from machine translation. These methods learn to simplify sentences as a byproduct of the fact that they are trained on complex-simple sentence pairs. By contrast, our neural programmer-interpreter is directly trained to predict explicit edit operations on targeted parts of the input sentence, resembling the way that humans perform simplification and revision. Our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art neural sentence simplification models (without external knowledge) by large margins on three benchmark text simplification corpora in terms of SARI (+0.95 WikiLarge, +1.89 WikiSmall, +1.41 Newsela), and is judged by humans to produce overall better and simpler output sentences.
2019-07-01
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org
GAIT: A Geometric Approach to Information Theory
Jose Gallego-Posada
Ankit Vani
Max Schwarzer
Simon Lacoste-Julien
We advocate the use of a notion of entropy that reflects the relative abundances of the symbols in an alphabet, as well as the similarities … (see more)between them. This concept was originally introduced in theoretical ecology to study the diversity of ecosystems. Based on this notion of entropy, we introduce geometry-aware counterparts for several concepts and theorems in information theory. Notably, our proposed divergence exhibits performance on par with state-of-the-art methods based on the Wasserstein distance, but enjoys a closed-form expression that can be computed efficiently. We demonstrate the versatility of our method via experiments on a broad range of domains: training generative models, computing image barycenters, approximating empirical measures and counting modes.
2019-06-19
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
On the interplay between noise and curvature and its effect on optimization and generalization
Valentin Thomas
Fabian Pedregosa
Bart van Merriënboer
Pierre-Antoine Mangazol
Yoshua Bengio
Nicolas Le Roux
The speed at which one can minimize an expected loss using stochastic methods depends on two properties: the curvature of the loss and the v… (see more)ariance of the gradients. While most previous works focus on one or the other of these properties, we explore how their interaction affects optimization speed. Further, as the ultimate goal is good generalization performance, we clarify how both curvature and noise are relevant to properly estimate the generalization gap. Realizing that the limitations of some existing works stems from a confusion between these matrices, we also clarify the distinction between the Fisher matrix, the Hessian, and the covariance matrix of the gradients.
2019-06-19
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Information matrices and generalization
Valentin Thomas
Fabian Pedregosa
Bart van Merriënboer
Pierre-Antoine Manzagol
Yoshua Bengio
Nicolas Le Roux
This work revisits the use of information criteria to characterize the generalization of deep learning models. In particular, we empirically… (see more) demonstrate the effectiveness of the Takeuchi information criterion (TIC), an extension of the Akaike information criterion (AIC) for misspecified models, in estimating the generalization gap, shedding light on why quantities such as the number of parameters cannot quantify generalization. The TIC depends on both the Hessian of the loss H and the covariance of the gradients C. By exploring the similarities and differences between these two matrices as well as the Fisher information matrix F, we study the interplay between noise and curvature in deep models. We also address the question of whether C is a reasonable approximation to F, as is commonly assumed.
2019-06-18
arXiv.org (preprint)
dblp.uni-trier.de
Information matrices and generalization
Valentin Thomas
Fabian Pedregosa
Bart van Merriënboer
Pierre-Antoine Manzagol
Yoshua Bengio
Nicolas Le Roux
This work revisits the use of information criteria to characterize the generalization of deep learning models. In particular, we empirically… (see more) demonstrate the effectiveness of the Takeuchi information criterion (TIC), an extension of the Akaike information criterion (AIC) for misspecified models, in estimating the generalization gap, shedding light on why quantities such as the number of parameters cannot quantify generalization. The TIC depends on both the Hessian of the loss H and the covariance of the gradients C. By exploring the similarities and differences between these two matrices as well as the Fisher information matrix F, we study the interplay between noise and curvature in deep models. We also address the question of whether C is a reasonable approximation to F, as is commonly assumed.
2019-06-18
arXiv.org (preprint)
dblp.uni-trier.de
Anomaly Detection with Joint Representation Learning of Content and Connection
Junhao Wang
Renhao Wang
Aayushi Kulshrestha
Reihaneh Rabbany
Social media sites are becoming a key factor in politics. These platforms are easy to manipulate for the purpose of distorting information s… (see more)pace to confuse and distract voters. Past works to identify disruptive patterns are mostly focused on analyzing the content of tweets. In this study, we jointly embed the information from both user posted content as well as a user's follower network, to detect groups of densely connected users in an unsupervised fashion. We then investigate these dense sub-blocks of users to flag anomalous behavior. In our experiments, we study the tweets related to the upcoming 2019 Canadian Elections, and observe a set of densely-connected users engaging in local politics in different provinces, and exhibiting troll-like behavior.
2019-06-16
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org