Deconstructing the Ladder Network Architecture
Linxi Fan
Philemon Brakel
The Ladder Network is a recent new approach to semi-supervised learning that turned out to be very successful. While showing impressive perf… (voir plus)ormance, the Ladder Network has many components intertwined, whose contributions are not obvious in such a complex architecture. This paper presents an extensive experimental investigation of variants of the Ladder Network in which we replaced or removed individual components to learn about their relative importance. For semi-supervised tasks, we conclude that the most important contribution is made by the lateral connections, followed by the application of noise, and the choice of what we refer to as the 'combinator function'. As the number of labeled training examples increases, the lateral connections and the reconstruction criterion become less important, with most of the generalization improvement coming from the injection of noise in each layer. Finally, we introduce a combinator function that reduces test error rates on Permutation-Invariant MNIST to 0.57% for the supervised setting, and to 0.97% and 1.0% for semi-supervised settings with 1000 and 100 labeled examples, respectively.
First Result on Arabic Neural Machine Translation
Amjad Almahairi
Kyunghyun Cho
Nizar Habash
Neural machine translation has become a major alternative to widely used phrase-based statistical machine translation. We notice however tha… (voir plus)t much of research on neural machine translation has focused on European languages despite its language agnostic nature. In this paper, we apply neural machine translation to the task of Arabic translation (Ar En) and compare it against a standard phrase-based translation system. We run extensive comparison using various configurations in preprocessing Arabic script and show that the phrase-based and neural translation systems perform comparably to each other and that proper preprocessing of Arabic script has a similar effect on both of the systems. We however observe that the neural machine translation significantly outperform the phrase-based system on an out-of-domain test set, making it attractive for real-world deployment.
Zoneout: Regularizing RNNs by Randomly Preserving Hidden Activations
J'anos Kram'ar
Nicolas Ballas
Nan Rosemary Ke
Anirudh Goyal
We propose zoneout, a novel method for regularizing RNNs. At each timestep, zoneout stochastically forces some hidden units to maintain thei… (voir plus)r previous values. Like dropout, zoneout uses random noise to train a pseudo-ensemble, improving generalization. But by preserving instead of dropping hidden units, gradient information and state information are more readily propagated through time, as in feedforward stochastic depth networks. We perform an empirical investigation of various RNN regularizers, and find that zoneout gives significant performance improvements across tasks. We achieve competitive results with relatively simple models in character- and word-level language modelling on the Penn Treebank and Text8 datasets, and combining with recurrent batch normalization yields state-of-the-art results on permuted sequential MNIST.
Movie Description
Anna Rohrbach
Atousa Torabi
Marcus Rohrbach
Niket Tandon
Bernt Schiele
Movie Description
Anna Rohrbach
Atousa Torabi
Marcus Rohrbach
Niket Tandon
Bernt Schiele
Movie Description
Anna Rohrbach
Atousa Torabi
Marcus Rohrbach
Niket Tandon
Bernt Schiele
Audio description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their pee… (voir plus)rs. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. We introduce the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) which contains a parallel corpus of 128,118 sentences aligned to video clips from 200 movies (around 150 h of video in total). The goal of the challenge is to automatically generate descriptions for the movie clips. First we characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are more visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we present and compare the results of several teams who participated in the challenges organized in the context of two workshops at ICCV 2015 and ECCV 2016.
Movie Description
Anna Rohrbach
Atousa Torabi
Marcus Rohrbach
Niket Tandon
Bernt Schiele
Audio description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their pee… (voir plus)rs. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. We introduce the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) which contains a parallel corpus of 128,118 sentences aligned to video clips from 200 movies (around 150 h of video in total). The goal of the challenge is to automatically generate descriptions for the movie clips. First we characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are more visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we present and compare the results of several teams who participated in the challenges organized in the context of two workshops at ICCV 2015 and ECCV 2016.
Movie Description
Anna Rohrbach
Atousa Torabi
Marcus Rohrbach
Niket Tandon
Bernt Schiele
Audio description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their pee… (voir plus)rs. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. We introduce the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) which contains a parallel corpus of 128,118 sentences aligned to video clips from 200 movies (around 150 h of video in total). The goal of the challenge is to automatically generate descriptions for the movie clips. First we characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are more visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we present and compare the results of several teams who participated in the challenges organized in the context of two workshops at ICCV 2015 and ECCV 2016.
Movie Description
Anna Rohrbach
Atousa Torabi
Marcus Rohrbach
Niket Tandon
Bernt Schiele
Movie Description
Anna Rohrbach
Atousa Torabi
Marcus Rohrbach
Niket Tandon
Bernt Schiele
Movie Description
Anna Rohrbach
Atousa Torabi
Marcus Rohrbach
Niket Tandon
Bernt Schiele
Movie Description
Anna Rohrbach
Atousa Torabi
Marcus Rohrbach
Niket Tandon
Bernt Schiele
Audio description (AD) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their pee… (voir plus)rs. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed ADs, which are temporally aligned to full length movies. In addition we also collected and aligned movie scripts used in prior work and compare the two sources of descriptions. We introduce the Large Scale Movie Description Challenge (LSMDC) which contains a parallel corpus of 128,118 sentences aligned to video clips from 200 movies (around 150 h of video in total). The goal of the challenge is to automatically generate descriptions for the movie clips. First we characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing ADs to scripts, we find that ADs are more visual and describe precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production. Furthermore, we present and compare the results of several teams who participated in the challenges organized in the context of two workshops at ICCV 2015 and ECCV 2016.