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• NAACL 2016
Jayant Krishnamurthy

We introduce several probabilistic models for learning the lexicon of a semantic parser. Lexicon learning is the first step of training a semantic parser for a new application domain and the quality of the learned lexicon significantly affects both the accuracy and efficiency of the final semantic parser. Existing work on lexicon learning has focused on heuristic methods that lack convergence guarantees and require significant human input in the form of lexicon templates or annotated logical forms. In contrast, our probabilistic models are trained directly from question/answer pairs using EM and our simplest model has a concave objective that guarantees convergence to a global optimum. An experimental evaluation on a set of 4th grade science questions demonstrates that our models improve semantic parser accuracy (35-70% error reduction) and efficiency (4-25x more sentences per second) relative to prior work despite using less human input. Our models also obtain competitive results on GEO880 without any dataset- specific engineering.

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• IJCAI 2016 Code Demo
Daniel Khashabi, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Peter Clark, Oren Etzioni, and Dan Roth

Answering science questions posed in natural language is an important AI challenge. Answering such questions often requires non-trivial inference and knowledge that goes beyond factoid retrieval. Yet, most systems for this task are based on relatively shallow Information Retrieval (IR) and statistical correlation techniques operating on large unstructured corpora. We propose a structured inference system for this task, formulated as an Integer Linear Program (ILP), that answers natural language questions using a semi-structured knowledge base derived from text, including questions requiring multi-step inference and a combination of multiple facts. On a dataset of real, unseen science questions, our system significantly outperforms (+14%) the best previous attempt at structured reasoning for this task, which used Markov Logic Networks (MLNs). It also improves upon a previous ILP formulation by 17.7%. When combined with unstructured inference methods, the ILP system significantly boosts overall performance (+10%). Finally, we show our approach is substantially more robust to a simple answer perturbation compared to statistical correlation methods.

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• CVPR 2016
Mark Yatskar, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Ali Farhadi

This paper introduces situation recognition, the problem of producing a concise summary of the situation an image depicts including: (1) the main activity (e.g., clipping), (2) the participating actors, objects, substances, and locations (e.g., man, shears, sheep, wool, and field) and most importantly (3) the roles these participants play in the activity (e.g., the man is clipping, the shears are his tool, the wool is being clipped from the sheep, and the clipping is in a field). We use FrameNet, a verb and role lexicon devel- oped by linguists, to define a large space of possible sit- uations and collect a large-scale dataset containing over 500 activities, 1,700 roles, 11,000 objects, 125,000 images, and 200,000 unique situations. We also introduce struc- tured prediction baselines and show that, in activity-centric images, situation-driven prediction of objects and activities outperforms independent object and activity recognition.

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• CVPR 2016

In this paper, we study the challenging problem of predicting the dynamics of objects in static images. Given a query object in an image, our goal is to provide a physical understanding of the object in terms of the forces acting upon it and its long term motion as response to those forces. Direct and explicit estimation of the forces and the motion of objects from a single image is extremely challenging. We define intermediate physical abstractions called Newtonian scenarios and introduce Newtonian Neural Network (N3) that learns to map a single image to a state in a Newto- nian scenario. Our evaluations show that our method can reliably predict dynamics of a query object from a single image. In addition, our approach can provide physical rea- soning that supports the predicted dynamics in terms of ve- locity and force vectors. To spur research in this direction we compiled Visual Newtonian Dynamics (VIND) dataset that includes more than 6000 videos aligned with Newto- nian scenarios represented using game engines, and more than 4500 still images with their ground truth dynamics.

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• OpenCV People's Choice Award
CVPR 2016
Joseph Redmon, Santosh Divvala, Ross Girshick, and Ali Farhadi

We present YOLO, a new approach to object detection. Prior work on object detection repurposes classifiers to perform detection. Instead, we frame object detection as a regression problem to spatially separated bounding boxes and associated class probabilities. A single neural network pre- dicts bounding boxes and class probabilities directly from full images in one evaluation. Since the whole detection pipeline is a single network, it can be optimized end-to-end directly on detection performance. Our unified architecture is extremely fast. Our base YOLO model processes images in real-time at 45 frames per second. A smaller version of the network, Fast YOLO, processes an astounding 155 frames per second while still achieving double the mAP of other real-time detec- tors. Compared to state-of-the-art detection systems, YOLO makes more localization errors but is less likely to predict false positives on background. Finally, YOLO learns very general representations of objects. It outperforms other detection methods, including DPM and R-CNN, when generalizing from natural images to other domains like artwork.

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• CVPR 2016
Xiaolong Wang, Ali Farhadi, and Abhinav Gupta

What defines an action like “kicking ball”? We argue that the true meaning of an action lies in the change or transformation an action brings to the environment. In this paper, we propose a novel representation for actions by modeling an action as a transformation which changes the state of the environment before the action happens (pre-condition) to the state after the action (effect). Motivated by recent advancements of video representation using deep learning, we design a Siamese network which models the action as a transformation on a high-level feature space. We show that our model gives improvements on standard action recognition datasets including UCF101 and HMDB51. More importantly, our approach is able to generalize beyond learned action categories and shows significant performance improvement on cross-category generalization on our new ACT dataset.

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• CVPR 2016
Roozbeh Mottaghi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Ali Fahradi

With the recent progress in visual recognition, we have already started to see a surge of vision related real-world applications. These applications, unlike general scene understanding, are task oriented and require specific information from visual data. Considering the current growth in new sensory devices, feature designs, feature learning methods, and algorithms, the search in the space of features and models becomes combinatorial. In this paper, we propose a novel cost-sensitive task-oriented recognition method that is based on a combination of linguistic semantics and visual cues. Our task-oriented framework is able to generalize to unseen tasks for which there is no training data and outperforms state-of-the-art cost-based recognition baselines on our new task-based dataset.

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• JCDL 2016
Christopher Clark and Santosh Divvala

Figures and tables are key sources of information in many scholarly documents. However, current academic search engines do not make use of figures and tables when semantically parsing documents or presenting document summaries to users. To facilitate these applications we develop an algorithm that extracts figures, tables, and captions from documents called "PDFFigures 2.0."Our proposed approach analyzes the structure of individual pages by detecting captions, graphical elements, and chunks of body text, and then locates gures and tables by reasoning about the empty regions within that text. To evaluate our work, we introduce a new dataset of computer science papers, along with ground truth labels for the locations of the gures, tables, and captions within them. Our algorithm achieves impressive results (94% precision at 90% recall) on this dataset surpassing previous state of the art. Further, we show how our framework was used to extract gures from a corpus of over one million papers, and how the resulting extractions were integrated into the user interface of a smart academic search engine, Semantic Scholar (www.semanticscholar.org). Finally, we present results of exploratory data analysis completed on the extracted gures as well as an extension of our method for the task of section title extraction. We release our dataset and code on our project webpage for enabling future research (http://pdgures2.allenai.org).

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• AKBC 2016
Bhavana Dalvi, Sumithra Bhakthavatsalam, Chris Clark, Peter Clark, Oren Etzioni, Anthony Fader, and Dirk Groeneveld

Recent work on information extraction has suggested that fast, interactive tools can be highly effective; however, creating a usable system is challenging, and few publicly available tools exist. In this paper we present IKE, a new extraction tool that performs fast, interactive bootstrapping to develop high quality extraction patterns for targeted relations. Central to IKE is the notion that an extraction pattern can be treated as a search query over a corpus. To operationalize this, IKE uses a novel query language that is expressive, easy to understand, and fast to execute - essential requirements for a practical system. It is also the first interactive extraction tool to seamlessly integrate symbolic (boolean) and distributional (similarity-based) methods for search. An initial evaluation suggests that relation tables can be populated substantially faster than by manual pattern authoring while retaining accuracy, and more reliably than fully automated tools, an important step towards practical KB construction. We are making IKE publicly available.

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• CACM 2016 Video
Carissa Schoenick, Peter Clark, Oyvind Tafjord, Peter Turney, and Oren Etzioni

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• SEM 2016
Saif M. Mohammad, Ekaterina Shutova, and Peter D. Turney

It is generally believed that a metaphor tends to have a stronger emotional impact than a literal statement; however, there is no quantitative study establishing the extent to which this is true. Further, the mechanisms through which metaphors convey emotions are not well understood. We present the first data-driven study comparing the emotionality of metaphorical expressions with that of their literal counterparts. Our results indicate that metaphorical usages are, on average, significantly more emotional than literal usages. We also show that this emotional content is not simply transferred from the source domain into the target, but rather is a result of meaning composition and interaction of the two domains in the metaphor.

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• ICML 2016
Junyuan Xie, Ross Girshick, and Ali Farhadi

Clustering is central to many data-driven application domains and has been studied extensively in terms of distance functions and grouping algorithms. Relatively little work has focused on learning representations for clustering. In this paper, we propose Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC), a method that simultaneously learns feature representations and cluster assignments using deep neural networks. DEC learns a mapping from the data space to a lower-dimensional feature space in which it iteratively optimizes a clustering objective. Our experimental evaluations on image and text corpora show significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

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• ECCV 2016
Aniruddha Kembhavi, Mike Salvato, Eric Kolve, Minjoon Seo, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Ali Farhadi

Diagrams are common tools for representing complex concepts, relationships and events, often when it would be difficult to portray the same information with natural images. Understanding natural images has been extensively studied in computer vision, while diagram understanding has received little attention. In this paper, we study the problem of diagram interpretation, the challenging task of identifying the structure of a diagram and the semantics of its constituents and their relationships. We introduce Diagram Parse Graphs (DPG) as our representation to model the structure of diagrams. We define syntactic parsing of diagrams as learning to infer DPGs for diagrams and study semantic interpretation and reasoning of diagrams in the context of diagram question answering. We devise an LSTM-based method for syntactic parsing of diagrams and introduce a DPG-based attention model for diagram question answering. We compile a new dataset of diagrams with exhaustive annotations of constituents and relationships for about 5,000 diagrams and 15,000 questions and answers. Our results show the significance of our models for syntactic parsing and question answering in diagrams using DPGs.

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• ECCV 2016

What happens if one pushes a cup sitting on a table toward the edge of the table? How about pushing a desk against a wall? In this paper, we study the problem of understanding the movements of objects as a result of applying external forces to them. For a given force vector applied to a specific location in an image, our goal is to predict long-term sequential movements caused by that force. Doing so entails reasoning about scene geometry, objects, their attributes, and the physical rules that govern the movements of objects. We design a deep neural network model that learns long-term sequential dependencies of object movements while taking into account the geometry and appearance of the scene by combining Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks. Training our model requires a large-scale dataset of object movements caused by external forces. To build a dataset of forces in scenes, we reconstructed all images in SUN RGB-D dataset in a physics simulator to estimate the physical movements of objects caused by external forces applied to them. Our Forces in Scenes (ForScene) dataset contains 65,000 object movements in 3D which represent a variety of external forces applied to different types of objects. Our experimental evaluations show that the challenging task of predicting long-term movements of objects as their reaction to external forces is possible from a single image. The code and dataset are available at: https://prior.allenai.org/projects/what-happens-if

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• ECCV 2016

We propose two efficient approximations to standard convolutional neural networks: Binary-Weight-Networks and XNOR-Networks. In Binary-Weight-Networks, the filters are approximated with binary values resulting in $32\times$ memory saving. In XNOR-Networks, both the filters and the input to convolutional layers are binary. XNOR-Networks approximate convolutions using primarily binary operations. This results in 58x faster convolutional operations (in terms of number of the high precision operations) and 32x memory savings. XNOR-Nets offer the possibility of running state-of-the-art networks on CPUs (rather than GPUs) in real-time. Our binary networks are simple, accurate, efficient, and work on challenging visual tasks. We evaluate our approach on the ImageNet classification task. The classification accuracy with a Binary-Weight-Network version of AlexNet is the same as the full-precision AlexNet. We compare our method with recent network binarization methods, BinaryConnect and BinaryNets, and outperform these methods by large margins on ImageNet, more than 16% in top-1 accuracy.

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• ECCV 2016
Gunnar A. Sigurdsson, Gül Varol, Xiaolong Wang, Ali Farhadi, Ivan Laptev, and Abhinav Gupta

Computer vision has a great potential to help our daily lives by searching for lost keys, watering flowers or reminding us to take a pill. To succeed with such tasks, computer vision methods need to be trained from real and diverse examples of our daily dynamic scenes. While most of such scenes are not particularly exciting, they typically do not appear on YouTube, in movies or TV broadcasts. So how do we collect sufficiently many diverse but boring samples representing our lives? We propose a novel Hollywood in Homes approach to collect such data. Instead of shooting videos in the lab, we ensure diversity by distributing and crowdsourcing the whole process of video creation from script writing to video recording and annotation. Following this procedure we collect a new dataset, Charades, with hundreds of people recording videos in their own homes, acting out casual everyday activities. The dataset is composed of 9,848 annotated videos with an average length of 30 seconds, showing activities of 267 people from three continents. Each video is annotated by multiple free-text descriptions, action labels, action intervals and classes of interacted objects. In total, Charades provides 27,847 video descriptions, 66,500 temporally localized intervals for 157 action classes and 41,104 labels for 46 object classes. Using this rich data, we evaluate and provide baseline results for several tasks including action recognition and automatic description generation. We believe that the realism, diversity, and casual nature of this dataset will present unique challenges and new opportunities for computer vision community.

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• HCOMP 2016
Gunnar A. Sigurdsson, Olga Russakovsky, Ali Farhadi, Ivan Laptev, and Abhinav Gupta

Large-scale annotated datasets allow AI systems to learn from and build upon the knowledge of the crowd. Many crowdsourcing techniques have been developed for collecting image annotations. These techniques often implicitly rely on the fact that a new input image takes a negligible amount of time to perceive. In contrast, we investigate and determine the most cost-effective way of obtaining high-quality multi-label annotations for temporal data such as videos. Watching even a short 30-second video clip requires a significant time investment from a crowd worker; thus, requesting multiple annotations following a single viewing is an important cost-saving strategy. But how many questions should we ask per video? We conclude that the optimal strategy is to ask as many questions as possible in a HIT (up to 52 binary questions after watching a 30-second video clip in our experiments). We demonstrate that while workers may not correctly answer all questions, the cost-benefit analysis nevertheless favors consensus from multiple such cheap-yet-imperfect iterations over more complex alternatives. When compared with a one-question-per-video baseline, our method is able to achieve a 10% improvement in recall (76.7% ours versus 66.7% baseline) at comparable precision (83.8% ours versus 83.0% baseline) in about half the annotation time (3.8 minutes ours compared to 7.1 minutes baseline). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by collecting multi-label annotations of 157 human activities on 1,815 videos.

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• ECCV 2016
Noah Siegel, Zachary Horvitz, Roie Levin, Santosh Divvala, and Ali Farhadi

‘Which are the pedestrian detectors that yield a precision above 95% at 25% recall?’ Answering such a complex query involves identifying and analyzing the results reported in figures within several research papers. Despite the availability of excellent academic search engines, retrieving such information poses a cumbersome challenge today as these systems have primarily focused on understanding the text content of scholarly documents. In this paper, we introduce FigureSeer, an end-to-end framework for parsing result-figures, that enables powerful search and retrieval of results in research papers. Our proposed approach automatically localizes figures from research papers, classifies them, and analyses the content of the result-figures. The key challenge in analyzing the figure content is the extraction of the plotted data and its association with the legend entries. We address this challenge by formulating a novel graph-based reasoning approach using a CNN-based similarity metric. We present a thorough evaluation on a real-word annotated dataset to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

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• ECCV 2016
Junyuan Xie, Ross Girshick, and Ali Farhadi

We propose Deep3D, a fully automatic 2D-to-3D conversion algorithm that takes 2D images or video frames as input and outputs stereo 3D image pairs. The stereo images can be viewed with 3D glasses or head-mounted VR displays. Deep3D is trained directly on stereo pairs from a dataset of 3D movies to minimize the pixel-wise reconstruction error of the right view when given the left view. Internally, the Deep3D network estimates a probabilistic disparity map that is used by a differentiable depth image-based rendering layer to produce the right view. Thus Deep3D does not require collecting depth sensor data for supervision.

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• CVPR 2016
Mahyar Najibi, Mohammad Rastegari, and Larry Davis

We introduce G-CNN, an object detection technique based on CNNs which works without proposal algorithms. G-CNN starts with a multi-scale grid of fixed bounding boxes. We train a regressor to move and scale elements of the grid towards objects iteratively. G-CNN models the problem of object detection as finding a path from a fixed grid to boxes tightly surrounding the objects. G-CNN with around 180 boxes in a multi-scale grid performs comparably to Fast R-CNN which uses around 2K bounding boxes generated with a proposal technique. This strategy makes detection faster by removing the object proposal stage as well as reducing the number of boxes to be processed.

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