Publications

Learning Visual Reasoning Without Strong Priors

Ethan Perez

Harm de Vries

Florian Strub

Vincent Dumoulin

Achieving artificial visual reasoning - the ability to answer image-related questions which require a multi-step, high-level process - is an… (voir plus) important step towards artificial general intelligence. This multi-modal task requires learning a question-dependent, structured reasoning process over images from language. Standard deep learning approaches tend to exploit biases in the data rather than learn this underlying structure, while leading methods learn to visually reason successfully but are hand-crafted for reasoning. We show that a general-purpose, Conditional Batch Normalization approach achieves state-of-the-art results on the CLEVR Visual Reasoning benchmark with a 2.4% error rate. We outperform the next best end-to-end method (4.5%) and even methods that use extra supervision (3.1%). We probe our model to shed light on how it reasons, showing it has learned a question-dependent, multi-step process. Previous work has operated under the assumption that visual reasoning calls for a specialized architecture, but we show that a general architecture with proper conditioning can learn to visually reason effectively.

2017-07-10

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

Detecting Large Concept Extensions for Conceptual Analysis

L. Chartrand

Jackie Cheung

Mohamed Bouguessa

2017-07-02

Machine Learning and Data Mining in Pattern Recognition (publié)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Modulating early visual processing by language

Harm de Vries

Florian Strub

Jérémie Mary

Hugo Larochelle

Olivier Pietquin

Aaron Courville

It is commonly assumed that language refers to high-level visual concepts while leaving low-level visual processing unaffected. This view do… (voir plus)minates the current literature in computational models for language-vision tasks, where visual and linguistic input are mostly processed independently before being fused into a single representation. In this paper, we deviate from this classic pipeline and propose to modulate the \emph{entire visual processing} by linguistic input. Specifically, we condition the batch normalization parameters of a pretrained residual network (ResNet) on a language embedding. This approach, which we call MOdulated RESnet (\MRN), significantly improves strong baselines on two visual question answering tasks. Our ablation study shows that modulating from the early stages of the visual processing is beneficial.

2017-07-02

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

A Closer Look at Memorization in Deep Networks

Devansh Arpit

Stanisław Jastrzębski

Nicolas Ballas

Maxinder S. Kanwal

Asja Fischer

We examine the role of memorization in deep learning, drawing connections to capacity, generalization, and adversarial robustness. While dee… (voir plus)p networks are capable of memorizing noise data, our results suggest that they tend to prioritize learning simple patterns first. In our experiments, we expose qualitative differences in gradient-based optimization of deep neural networks (DNNs) on noise vs. real data. We also demonstrate that for appropriately tuned explicit regularization (e.g., dropout) we can degrade DNN training performance on noise datasets without compromising generalization on real data. Our analysis suggests that the notions of effective capacity which are dataset independent are unlikely to explain the generalization performance of deep networks when trained with gradient based methods because training data itself plays an important role in determining the degree of memorization.

2017-06-16

ArXiv (prépublication)

arxiv.org

Time-Varying Mixtures of Markov Chains: An Application to Road Traffic Modeling

Sean F. Lawlor

Michael Rabbat

Time-varying mixture models are useful for representing complex, dynamic distributions. Components in the mixture model can appear and disap… (voir plus)pear, and persisting components can evolve. This allows great flexibility in streaming data applications where the model can be adjusted as new data arrives. Fitting a mixture model with computational guarantees which can meet real-time requirements is challenging with existing algorithms, especially when the model order can vary with time. Existing approximate inference methods may require multiple restarts to search for a good local solution. Monte-Carlo methods can be used to jointly estimate the model order and model parameters, but when the distribution of each mixand has a high-dimensional parameter space, they suffer from the curse of dimensionality and and from slow convergence. This paper proposes a generative model for time-varying mixture models, tailored for mixtures of discrete-time Markov chains. A novel, deterministic inference procedure is introduced and is shown to be suitable for applications requiring real-time estimation, and the method is guaranteed to converge at each time step. As a motivating application, we model and predict traffic patterns in a transportation network. Experiments illustrate the performance of the scheme and offer insights regarding tuning of the algorithm parameters. The experiments also investigate the predictive power of the proposed model compared to less complex models and demonstrate the superiority of the mixture model approach for prediction of traffic routes in real data.

2017-06-15

IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (publié)

doi.org

Time-Varying Mixtures of Markov Chains: An Application to Road Traffic Modeling

Sean Lawlor

Michael Rabbat

Time-varying mixture models are useful for representing complex, dynamic distributions. Components in the mixture model can appear and disap… (voir plus)pear, and persisting components can evolve. This allows great flexibility in streaming data applications where the model can be adjusted as new data arrives. Fitting a mixture model with computational guarantees which can meet real-time requirements is challenging with existing algorithms, especially when the model order can vary with time. Existing approximate inference methods may require multiple restarts to search for a good local solution. Monte-Carlo methods can be used to jointly estimate the model order and model parameters, but when the distribution of each mixand has a high-dimensional parameter space, they suffer from the curse of dimensionality and and from slow convergence. This paper proposes a generative model for time-varying mixture models, tailored for mixtures of discrete-time Markov chains. A novel, deterministic inference procedure is introduced and is shown to be suitable for applications requiring real-time estimation, and the method is guaranteed to converge at each time step. As a motivating application, we model and predict traffic patterns in a transportation network. Experiments illustrate the performance of the scheme and offer insights regarding tuning of the algorithm parameters. The experiments also investigate the predictive power of the proposed model compared to less complex models and demonstrate the superiority of the mixture model approach for prediction of traffic routes in real data.

2017-06-15

IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (publié)

doi.org

Deep Complex Networks

Chiheb Trabelsi

Olexa Bilaniuk

Dmitriy Serdyuk

Sandeep Subramanian

Joao Felipe Santos

Soroush Mehri

Negar Rostamzadeh

Yoshua Bengio