MA-LSTM: A Multi-Attention Based LSTM for Complex Pattern Extraction

Jingjie Guo, Kelang Tian, Kejiang Ye, Cheng-Zhong Xu

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Auto-TLDR; MA-LSTM: Multiple Attention based recurrent neural network for forget gate

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With the improvement of data, computing powerand algorithms, deep learning has achieved rapid developmentand showing excellent performance. Recently, many deep learn-ing models are proposed to solve the problems in different areas.A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neuralnetworks where connections between nodes form a directedgraph along a temporal sequence. This allows it to exhibittemporal dynamic behavior, which makes it applicable to taskssuch as handwriting recognition or speech recognition. How-ever, the RNN relies heavily on the automatic learning abilityto update parameters which concentrate on the data flow butseldom considers the feature extraction capability of the gatemechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture tobuild the forget gate which is generated by multiple bases.Instead of using the traditional single-layer fully-connectednetwork, we use a Multiple Attention (MA) based network togenerate the forget gate which refines the optimization spaceof gate function and improve the granularity of the recurrentneural network to approximate the map in the ground truth.Credit to the MA structure on the gate mechanism. Our modelhas a better feature extraction capability than other knownmodels. MA-LSTM is an alternative module which can directly replace the recurrent neural network and has achieved good performance in many areas that people are concerned about.

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Trajectory-User Link with Attention Recurrent Networks

Tao Sun, Yongjun Xu, Fei Wang, Lin Wu, 塘文 钱, Zezhi Shao

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Auto-TLDR; TULAR: Trajectory-User Link with Attention Recurrent Neural Networks

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The prevalent adoptions of GPS-enabled devices have witnessed an explosion of various location-based services which produces a huge amount of trajectories monitoring the individuals' movements. In this paper, we tackle Trajectory-User Link (TUL) problem, which identifies humans' movement patterns and links trajectories to the users who generated them. Existing solutions on TUL problem employ recurrent neural networks and variational autoencoder methods, which face the bottlenecks in the case of excessively long trajectories and fragmentary users' movements. However, these are common characteristics of trajectory data in reality, leading to performance degradation of the existing models. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end attention recurrent neural learning framework, called TULAR (Trajectory-User Link with Attention Recurrent Networks), which focus on selected parts of the source trajectories when linking. TULAR introduce the Trajectory Semantic Vector (TSV) via unsupervised location representation learning and recurrent neural networks, by which to reckon the weight of parts of source trajectory. Further, we employ three attention scores for the weight measurements. Experiments are conducted on two real world datasets and compared with several existing methods, and the results show that TULAR yields a new state-of-the-art performance. Source code is public available at GitHub: https://github.com/taos123/TULAR.

Multi-Graph Convolutional Network for Relationship-Driven Stock Movement Prediction

Jiexia Ye, Juanjuan Zhao, Kejiang Ye, Cheng-Zhong Xu

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-GCGRU: A Deep Learning Framework for Stock Price Prediction with Cross Effect

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Stock price movement prediction is commonly accepted as a very challenging task due to the volatile nature of financial markets. Previous works typically predict the stock price mainly based on its own information, neglecting the cross effect among involved stocks. However, it is well known that an individual stock price is correlated with prices of other stocks in complex ways. To take the cross effect into consideration, we propose a deep learning framework, called Multi-GCGRU, which comprises graph convolutional network (GCN) and gated recurrent units (GRU) to predict stock movement. Specifically, we first encode multiple relationships among stocks into graphs based on financial domain knowledge and utilize GCN to extract the cross effect based on the pre-defined graphs. The cross-correlation features produced by GCN are concatenated with historical records and fed into GRU to model the temporal pattern in stock price. To further get rid of prior knowledge, we explore an adaptive stock graph learned by data automatically. Experiments on two stock indexes in China market show that our model outperforms other baselines. Note that our model is rather feasible to incorporate more effective pre-defined stock relationships. What's more, it can also learn a data-driven relationship without any domain knowledge.

Constructing Geographic and Long-term Temporal Graph for Traffic Forecasting

Yiwen Sun, Yulu Wang, Kun Fu, Zheng Wang, Changshui Zhang, Jieping Ye

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Auto-TLDR; GLT-GCRNN: Geographic and Long-term Temporal Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network for Traffic Forecasting

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Traffic forecasting influences various intelligent transportation system (ITS) services and is of great significance for user experience as well as urban traffic control. It is challenging due to the fact that the road network contains complex and time-varying spatial-temporal dependencies. Recently, deep learning based methods have achieved promising results by adopting graph convolutional network (GCN) to extract the spatial correlations and recurrent neural network (RNN) to capture the temporal dependencies. However, the existing methods often construct the graph only based on road network connectivity, which limits the interaction between roads. In this work, we propose Geographic and Long-term Temporal Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (GLT-GCRNN), a novel framework for traffic forecasting that learns the rich interactions between roads sharing similar geographic or long-term temporal patterns. Extensive experiments on a real-world traffic state dataset validate the effectiveness of our method by showing that GLT-GCRNN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of different metrics.

PIN: A Novel Parallel Interactive Network for Spoken Language Understanding

Peilin Zhou, Zhiqi Huang, Fenglin Liu, Yuexian Zou

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Auto-TLDR; Parallel Interactive Network for Spoken Language Understanding

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Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is an essential part of the spoken dialogue system, which typically consists of intent detection (ID) and slot filling (SF) tasks. Recently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) based methods achieved the state-of-the-art for SLU. It is noted that, in the existing RNN-based approaches, ID and SF tasks are often jointly modeled to utilize the correlation information between them. However, we noted that, so far, the efforts to obtain better performance by supporting bidirectional and explicit information exchange between ID and SF are not well studied. In addition, few studies attempt to capture the local context information to enhance the performance of SF. Motivated by these findings, in this paper, Parallel Interactive Network (PIN) is proposed to model the mutual guidance between ID and SF. Specifically, given an utterance, a Gaussian self-attentive encoder is introduced to generate the context-aware feature embedding of the utterance which is able to capture local context information. Taking the feature embedding of the utterance, Slot2Intent module and Intent2Slot module are developed to capture the bidirectional information flow for ID and SF tasks. Finally, a cooperation mechanism is constructed to fuse the information obtained from Slot2Intent and Intent2Slot modules to further reduce the prediction bias. The experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., SNIPS and ATIS, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves a competitive result with state-of-the-art models. More encouragingly, by using the feature embedding of the utterance generated by the pre-trained language model BERT, our method achieves the state-of-the-art among all comparison approaches.

Global Context-Based Network with Transformer for Image2latex

Nuo Pang, Chun Yang, Xiaobin Zhu, Jixuan Li, Xu-Cheng Yin

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Auto-TLDR; Image2latex with Global Context block and Transformer

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Image2latex usually means converts mathematical formulas in images into latex markup. It is a very challenging job due to the complex two-dimensional structure, variant scales of input, and very long representation sequence. Many researchers use encoder-decoder based model to solve this task and achieved good results. However, these methods don't make full use of the structure and position information of the formula. %In this paper, we improve the encoder by employing Global Context block and Transformer. To solve this problem, we propose a global context-based network with transformer that can (1) learn a more powerful and robust intermediate representation via aggregating global features and (2) encode position information explicitly and (3) learn latent dependencies between symbols by using self-attention mechanism. The experimental results on the dataset IM2LATEX-100K demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Attentive Visual Semantic Specialized Network for Video Captioning

Jesus Perez-Martin, Benjamin Bustos, Jorge Pérez

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Auto-TLDR; Adaptive Visual Semantic Specialized Network for Video Captioning

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As an essential high-level task of video understanding topic, automatically describing a video with natural language has recently gained attention as a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Previous models for video captioning have several limitations, such as the existence of gaps in current semantic representations and the inexpressibility of the generated captions. To deal with these limitations, in this paper, we present a new architecture that we callAttentive Visual Semantic Specialized Network(AVSSN), which is an encoder-decoder model based on our Adaptive Attention Gate and Specialized LSTM layers. This architecture can selectively decide when to use visual or semantic information into the text generation process. The adaptive gate makes the decoder to automatically select the relevant information for providing a better temporal state representation than the existing decoders. Besides, the model is capable of learning to improve the expressiveness of generated captions attending to their length, using a sentence-length-related loss function. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the Microsoft Video Description(MSVD) and the Microsoft Research Video-to-Text (MSR-VTT) datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance with several popular evaluation metrics: BLEU-4, METEOR, CIDEr, and ROUGE_L.

Cross-Lingual Text Image Recognition Via Multi-Task Sequence to Sequence Learning

Zhuo Chen, Fei Yin, Xu-Yao Zhang, Qing Yang, Cheng-Lin Liu

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Auto-TLDR; Cross-Lingual Text Image Recognition with Multi-task Learning

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This paper considers recognizing texts shown in a source language and translating into a target language, without generating the intermediate source language text image recognition results. We call this problem Cross-Lingual Text Image Recognition (CLTIR). To solve this problem, we propose a multi-task system containing a main task of CLTIR and an auxiliary task of Mono-Lingual Text Image Recognition (MLTIR) simultaneously. Two different sequence to sequence learning methods, a convolution based attention model and a BLSTM model with CTC, are adopted for these tasks respectively. We evaluate the system on a newly collected Chinese-English bilingual movie subtitle image dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the multi-task learning framework performs superiorly in both languages.

SAT-Net: Self-Attention and Temporal Fusion for Facial Action Unit Detection

Zhihua Li, Zheng Zhang, Lijun Yin

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Auto-TLDR; Temporal Fusion and Self-Attention Network for Facial Action Unit Detection

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Research on facial action unit detection has shown remarkable performances by using deep spatial learning models in recent years, however, it is far from reaching its full capacity in learning due to the lack of use of temporal information of AUs across time. Since the AU occurrence in one frame is highly likely related to previous frames in a temporal sequence, exploring temporal correlation of AUs across frames becomes a key motivation of this work. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal fusion and AU-supervised self-attention network (a so-called SAT-Net) to address the AU detection problem. First of all, we input the deep features of a sequence into a convolutional LSTM network and fuse the previous temporal information into the feature map of the last frame, and continue to learn the AU occurrence. Second, considering the AU detection problem is a multi-label classification problem that individual label depends only on certain facial areas, we propose a new self-learned attention mask by focusing the detection of each AU on parts of facial areas through the learning of individual attention mask for each AU, thus increasing the AU independence without the loss of any spatial relations. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves better results of AU detection over the state-of-the-arts on two benchmark databases (BP4D and DISFA).

Transfer Learning with Graph Neural Networks for Short-Term Highway Traffic Forecasting

Tanwi Mallick, Prasanna Balaprakash, Eric Rask, Jane Macfarlane

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Auto-TLDR; Transfer Learning for Highway Traffic Forecasting on Unseen Traffic Networks

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Large-scale highway traffic forecasting approaches are critical for intelligent transportation systems. Recently, deep-learning-based traffic forecasting methods have emerged as promising approaches for a wide range of traffic forecasting tasks. However, these methods are specific to a given traffic network and consequently, they cannot be used for forecasting traffic on an unseen traffic network. Previous work has identified diffusion convolutional recurrent neural network (DCRNN), as a state-of-the-art method for highway traffic forecasting. It models the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of a highway network using a graph-based diffusion convolution operation within a recurrent neural network. Currently, DCRNN cannot perform transfer learning because it learns location-specific traffic patterns, which cannot be used for unseen regions of a network or new geographic locations. To that end, we develop TL-DCRNN, a new transfer learning approach for DCRNN, where a single model trained on a highway network can be used to forecast traffic on unseen highway networks. Given a traffic network with a large amount of traffic data, our approach consists of partitioning the traffic network into a number of subgraphs and using a new training scheme that utilizes subgraphs for the DCRNN to marginalize the location-specific information, thus learning the traffic as a function of network connectivity and temporal patterns alone. The resulting trained model can be used to forecast traffic on unseen networks. We demonstrate that TL-DCRNN can learn from San Francisco regional traffic data and forecast traffic on the Los Angeles region and vice versa.

Visual Oriented Encoder: Integrating Multimodal and Multi-Scale Contexts for Video Captioning

Bang Yang, Yuexian Zou

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Auto-TLDR; Visual Oriented Encoder for Video Captioning

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Video captioning is a challenging task which aims at automatically generating a natural language description of a given video. Recent researches have shown that exploiting the intrinsic multi-modalities of videos significantly promotes captioning performance. However, how to integrate multi-modalities to generate effective semantic representations for video captioning is still an open issue. Some researchers proposed to learn multimodal features in parallel during the encoding stage. The downside of these methods lies in the neglect of the interaction among multi-modalities and their rich contextual information. In this study, inspired by the fact that visual contents are generally more important for comprehending videos, we propose a novel Visual Oriented Encoder (VOE) to integrate multimodal features in an interactive manner. Specifically, VOE is designed as a hierarchical structure, where bottom layers are utilized to extract multi-scale contexts from auxiliary modalities while the top layer is exploited to generate joint representations by considering both visual and contextual information. Following the encoder-decoder framework, we systematically develop a VOE-LSTM model and evaluate it on two mainstream benchmarks: MSVD and MSR-VTT. Experimental results show that the proposed VOE surpasses conventional encoders and our VOE-LSTM model achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

Geographic-Semantic-Temporal Hypergraph Convolutional Network for Traffic Flow Prediction

Kesu Wang, Jing Chen, Shijie Liao, Jiaxin Hou, Qingyu Xiong

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Auto-TLDR; Geographic-semantic-temporal convolutional network for traffic flow prediction

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Traffic flow prediction is becoming an increasingly important part for intelligent transportation control and management. This task is challenging due to (1) complex geographic and non-geographic spatial correlation; (2) temporal correlations between time slices; (3) dynamics of semantic high-order correlations along temporal dimension. To address those difficulties, commonly-used methods apply graph convolutional networks for spatial correlations and recurrent neural networks for temporal dependencies. In this work, We distinguish the two aspects of spatial correlations and propose the two types of spatial graphes, named as geographic graph and semantic hypergraph. We extend the traditional convolution and propose geographic-temporal graph convolution to jointly capture geographic-temporal correlations and semantic-temporal hypergraph convolution to jointly capture semantic-temporal correlations. Then We propose a geographic-semantic-temporal convolutional network (GST-HCN) that combines our graph convolutions and GRU units hierarchically in a unified end-to-end network. The experiment results on the Caltrans Performance Measurement System (PeMS) dataset show that our proposed model significantly outperforms other popular spatio-temporal deep learning models and suggest the effectiveness to explore geographic-semantic-temporal dependencies on deep learning models for traffic flow prediction.

Context Visual Information-Based Deliberation Network for Video Captioning

Min Lu, Xueyong Li, Caihua Liu

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Auto-TLDR; Context visual information-based deliberation network for video captioning

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Video captioning is to automatically and accurately generate a textual description for a video. The typical methods following the encoder-decoder architecture directly utilized hidden states to predict words. Nevertheless, these methods did not amend the inaccurate hidden states before feeding those states into word prediction. This led to a cascade of errors on generating word by word. In this paper, the context visual information-based deliberation network is proposed, abbreviated as CVI-DelNet. Its key idea is to introduce the deliberator into the encoder-decoder framework. The encoder-decoder firstly generates a raw hidden state sequence. Unlike the existing methods, the raw hidden state is no more directly used for word prediction but is fed into the deliberator to generate the refined hidden state. The words are then predicted according to the refined hidden states and the contextual visual features. Results on two datasets shows that the proposed method significantly outperforms the baselines.

Global Feature Aggregation for Accident Anticipation

Mishal Fatima, Umar Karim Khan, Chong Min Kyung

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Auto-TLDR; Feature Aggregation for Predicting Accidents in Video Sequences

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Anticipation of accidents ahead of time in autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles aids in accident avoidance. In order to recognize abnormal events such as traffic accidents in a video sequence, it is important that the network takes into account interactions of objects in a given frame. We propose a novel Feature Aggregation (FA) block that refines each object's features by computing a weighted sum of the features of all objects in a frame. We use FA block along with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network to anticipate accidents in the video sequences. We report mean Average Precision (mAP) and Average Time-to-Accident (ATTA) on Street Accident (SA) dataset. Our proposed method achieves the highest score for risk anticipation by predicting accidents 0.32 sec and 0.75 sec earlier compared to the best results with Adaptive Loss and dynamic parameter prediction based methods respectively.

Exploring Spatial-Temporal Representations for fNIRS-based Intimacy Detection via an Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network

Chao Li, Qian Zhang, Ziping Zhao

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Auto-TLDR; Intimate Relationship Prediction by Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

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The detection of intimacy plays a crucial role in the improvement of intimate relationship, which contributes to promote the family and social harmony. Previous studies have shown that different degrees of intimacy have significant differences in brain imaging. Recently, a few of work has emerged to recognise intimacy automatically by using machine learning technique. Moreover, considering the temporal dynamic characteristics of intimacy relationship on neural mechanism, how to model spatio-temporal dynamics for intimacy prediction effectively is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel method to explore deep spatial-temporal representations for intimacy prediction by Attention-enhanced Cascade Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (ACCRNN). Given the advantages of time-frequency resolution in complex neuronal activities analysis, this paper utilizes functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to analyse and infer to intimate relationship. We collect a fNIRS-based dataset for the analysis of intimate relationship. Forty-two-channel fNIRS signals are recorded from the 44 subjects' prefrontal cortex when they watched a total of 18 photos of lovers, friends and strangers for 30 seconds per photo. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the others in terms of accuracy with the precision of 96.5%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a hybrid deep architecture has been employed for fNIRS-based intimacy prediction.

Emerging Relation Network and Task Embedding for Multi-Task Regression Problems

Schreiber Jens, Bernhard Sick

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Auto-TLDR; A Comparative Study of Multi-Task Learning for Non-linear Time Series Problems

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Multi-Task learning (MTL) provides state-of-the-art results in many applications of computer vision and natural language processing. In contrast to single-task learning (STL), MTL allows for leveraging knowledge between related tasks improving prediction results on all tasks. However, there is a limited number of comparative studies applied to MTL architectures for regression and time series problems taking recent advances of MTL into account. An intriguing, non-linear time-series problem are day ahead forecasts of the expected power generation for renewable power plants. Therefore, the main contribution of this article is a comparative study of the following recent and relevant MTL architectures: Hard-parameter sharing, cross-stitch network, and sluice network (SN). They are compared to a multi-layer peceptron (MLP) model of similar size in an STL setting. As a additional contribution, we provide a simple, yet practical approach to model task specific information through an embedding layer in an MLP, referred to as task embedding. Further, we contribute a new MTL architecture named emerging relation network (ERN), which can be considered as an extension of the SN. For a solar power dataset, the task embedding achieves the best mean improvement with 8.2%. For two wind and one additional solar dataset, the ERN is the best MTL architecture with improvements up to 11.3%.

Dual Path Multi-Modal High-Order Features for Textual Content Based Visual Question Answering

Yanan Li, Yuetan Lin, Hongrui Zhao, Donghui Wang

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Auto-TLDR; TextVQA: An End-to-End Visual Question Answering Model for Text-Based VQA

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As a typical cross-modal problem, visual question answering (VQA) has received increasing attention from the communities of computer vision and natural language processing. Reading and reasoning about texts and visual contents in the images is a burgeoning and important research topic in VQA, especially for the visually impaired assistance applications. Given an image, it aims to predict an answer to a provided natural language question closely related to its textual contents. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end textual content based VQA model, which grounds question answering both on the visual and textual information. After encoding the image, question and recognized text words, it uses multi-modal factorized high-order modules and the attention mechanism to fuse question-image and question-text features respectively. The complex correlations among different features can be captured efficiently. To ensure the model's extendibility, it embeds candidate answers and recognized texts in a semantic embedding space and adopts semantic embedding based classifier to perform answer prediction. Extensive experiments on the newly proposed benchmark TextVQA demonstrate that the proposed model can achieve promising results.

ConvMath : A Convolutional Sequence Network for Mathematical Expression Recognition

Zuoyu Yan, Xiaode Zhang, Liangcai Gao, Ke Yuan, Zhi Tang

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Auto-TLDR; Convolutional Sequence Modeling for Mathematical Expressions Recognition

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Despite the recent advances in optical character recognition (OCR), mathematical expressions still face a great challenge to recognize due to their two-dimensional graphical layout. In this paper, we propose a convolutional sequence modeling network, ConvMath, which converts the mathematical expression description in an image into a LaTeX sequence in an end-to-end way. The network combines an image encoder for feature extraction and a convolutional decoder for sequence generation. Compared with other Long Short Term Memory(LSTM) based encoder-decoder models, ConvMath is entirely based on convolution, thus it is easy to perform parallel computation. Besides, the network adopts multi-layer attention mechanism in the decoder, which allows the model to align output symbols with source feature vectors automatically, and alleviates the problem of lacking coverage while training the model. The performance of ConvMath is evaluated on an open dataset named IM2LATEX-100K, including 103556 samples. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed network achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and much better efficiency than previous methods.

Regularized Flexible Activation Function Combinations for Deep Neural Networks

Renlong Jie, Junbin Gao, Andrey Vasnev, Minh-Ngoc Tran

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Auto-TLDR; Flexible Activation in Deep Neural Networks using ReLU and ELUs

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Activation in deep neural networks is fundamental to achieving non-linear mappings. Traditional studies mainly focus on finding fixed activations for a particular set of learning tasks or model architectures. The research on flexible activation is quite limited in both designing philosophy and application scenarios. In this study, three principles of choosing flexible activation components are proposed and a general combined form of flexible activation functions is implemented. Based on this, a novel family of flexible activation functions that can replace sigmoid or tanh in LSTM cells are implemented, as well as a new family by combining ReLU and ELUs. Also, two new regularisation terms based on assumptions as prior knowledge are introduced. It has been shown that LSTM models with proposed flexible activations P-Sig-Ramp provide significant improvements in time series forecasting, while the proposed P-E2-ReLU achieves better and more stable performance on lossy image compression tasks with convolutional auto-encoders. In addition, the proposed regularization terms improve the convergence,performance and stability of the models with flexible activation functions. The code for this paper is available at https://github.com/9NXJRDDRQK/Flexible Activation.

Tackling Contradiction Detection in German Using Machine Translation and End-To-End Recurrent Neural Networks

Maren Pielka, Rafet Sifa, Lars Patrick Hillebrand, David Biesner, Rajkumar Ramamurthy, Anna Ladi, Christian Bauckhage

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Auto-TLDR; Contradiction Detection in Natural Language Inference using Recurrent Neural Networks

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Natural Language Inference, and specifically Contradiction Detection, is still an unexplored topic with respect to German text. In this paper, we apply Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) methods to learn contradiction-specific sentence embeddings. Our data set for evaluation is a machine-translated version of the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) corpus. The results are compared to a baseline using unsupervised vectorization techniques, namely tf-idf and Flair, as well as state-of-the art transformer-based (MBERT) methods. We find that the end-to-end models outperform the models trained on unsupervised embeddings, which makes them the better choice in an empirical use case. The RNN methods also perform superior to MBERT on the translated data set.

Flow-Guided Spatial Attention Tracking for Egocentric Activity Recognition

Tianshan Liu, Kin-Man Lam

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Auto-TLDR; flow-guided spatial attention tracking for egocentric activity recognition

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The popularity of wearable cameras has opened up a new dimension for egocentric activity recognition. While some methods introduce attention mechanisms into deep learning networks to capture fine-grained hand-object interactions, they often neglect exploring the spatio-temporal relationships. Generating spatial attention, without adequately exploiting temporal consistency, will result in potentially sub-optimal performance in the video-based task. In this paper, we propose a flow-guided spatial attention tracking (F-SAT) module, which is based on enhancing motion patterns and inter-frame information, to highlight the discriminative features from regions of interest across a video sequence. A new form of input, namely the optical-flow volume, is presented to provide informative cues from moving parts for spatial attention tracking. The proposed F-SAT module is deployed to a two-branch-based deep architecture, which fuses complementary information for egocentric activity recognition. Experimental results on three egocentric activity benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Automatic Student Network Search for Knowledge Distillation

Zhexi Zhang, Wei Zhu, Junchi Yan, Peng Gao, Guotong Xie

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Auto-TLDR; NAS-KD: Knowledge Distillation for BERT

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Pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as BERT, have achieved outstanding performance on multiple natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, such pre-trained models usually contain a huge number of parameters and are computationally expensive. The high resource demand hinders their application on resource-restricted devices like mobile phones. Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective compression approach, aiming at encouraging a light-weight student network to imitate the teacher network, and accordingly latent knowledge is transferred from the teacher to student. However, the great majority of student networks in previous KD methods are manually designed, normally a subnetwork of the teacher network. Transformer is generally utilized as the student for compressing BERT but still contains masses of parameters. Motivated by this, we propose a novel approach named NAS-KD, which automatically generates an optimal student network using neural architecture search (NAS) to enhance the distillation for BERT. Experiment on 7 classification tasks in NLP domain demonstrates that NAS-KD can substantially reduce the size of BERT without much performance sacrifice.

Audio-Visual Speech Recognition Using a Two-Step Feature Fusion Strategy

Hong Liu, Wanlu Xu, Bing Yang

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Auto-TLDR; A Two-Step Feature Fusion Network for Speech Recognition

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Lip-reading methods and fusion strategy are crucial for audio-visual speech recognition. In recent years, most approaches involve two separate audio and visual streams with early or late fusion strategies. Such a single-stage fusion method may fail to guarantee the integrity and representativeness of fusion information simultaneously. This paper extends a traditional single-stage fusion network to a two-step feature fusion network by adding an audio-visual early feature fusion (AV-EFF) stream to the baseline model. This method can learn the fusion information of different stages, preserving the original features as much as possible and ensuring the independence of different features. Besides, to capture long-range dependencies of video information, a non-local block is added to the feature extraction part of the visual stream (NL-Visual) to obtain the long-term spatio-temporal features. Experimental results on the two largest public datasets in English (LRW) and Mandarin (LRW-1000) demonstrate our method is superior to other state-of-the-art methods.

GCNs-Based Context-Aware Short Text Similarity Model

Xiaoqi Sun

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Auto-TLDR; Context-Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Text Similarity

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Semantic textual similarity is a fundamental task in text mining and natural language processing (NLP), which has profound research value. The essential step for text similarity is text representation learning. Recently, researches have explored the graph convolutional network (GCN) techniques on text representation, since GCN does well in handling complex structures and preserving syntactic information. However, current GCN models are usually limited to very shallow layers due to the vanishing gradient problem, which cannot capture non-local dependency information of sentences. In this paper, we propose a GCNs-based context-aware (GCSTS) model that applies iterated GCN blocks to train deeper GCNs. Recurrently employing the same GCN block prevents over-fitting and provides broad effective input width. Combined with dense connections, GCSTS can be trained more deeply. Besides, we use dynamic graph structures in the block, which further extend the receptive field of each vertex in graphs, learning better sentence representations. Experiments show that our model outperforms existing models on several text similarity datasets, while also verify that GCNs-based text representation models can be trained in a deeper manner, rather than being trained in two or three layers.

Moto: Enhancing Embedding with Multiple Joint Factors for Chinese Text Classification

Xunzhu Tang, Rujie Zhu, Tiezhu Sun

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Auto-TLDR; Moto: Enhancing Embedding with Multiple J\textbf{o}int Fac\textBF{to}rs

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Recently, language representation techniques have achieved great performances in text classification. However, most existing representation models are specifically designed for English materials, which may fail in Chinese because of the huge difference between these two languages. Actually, few existing methods for Chinese text classification process texts at a single level. However, as a special kind of hieroglyphics, radicals of Chinese characters are good semantic carriers. In addition, Pinyin codes carry the semantic of tones, and Wubi reflects the stroke structure information, \textit{etc}. Unfortunately, previous researches neglected to find an effective way to distill the useful parts of these four factors and to fuse them. In our works, we propose a novel model called Moto: Enhancing Embedding with \textbf{M}ultiple J\textbf{o}int Fac\textbf{to}rs. Specifically, we design an attention mechanism to distill the useful parts by fusing the four-level information above more effectively. We conduct extensive experiments on four popular tasks. The empirical results show that our Moto achieves SOTA 0.8316 ($F_1$-score, 2.11\% improvement) on Chinese news titles, 96.38 (1.24\% improvement) on Fudan Corpus and 0.9633 (3.26\% improvement) on THUCNews.

Road Network Metric Learning for Estimated Time of Arrival

Yiwen Sun, Kun Fu, Zheng Wang, Changshui Zhang, Jieping Ye

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Auto-TLDR; Road Network Metric Learning for Estimated Time of Arrival (RNML-ETA)

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Recently, deep learning have achieved promising results in Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA), which is considered as predicting the travel time from the origin to the destination along a given path. One of the key techniques is to use embedding vectors to represent the elements of road network, such as the links (road segments). However, the embedding suffers from the data sparsity problem that many links in the road network are traversed by too few floating cars even in large ride-hailing platforms like Uber and DiDi. Insufficient data makes the embedding vectors in an under-fitting status, which undermines the accuracy of ETA prediction. To address the data sparsity problem, we propose the Road Network Metric Learning framework for ETA (RNML ETA). It consists of two components: (1) a main regression task to predict the travel time, and (2) an auxiliary metric learning task to improve the quality of link embedding vectors. We further propose the triangle loss, a novel loss function to improve the efficiency of metric learning. We validated the effectiveness of RNML-ETA on large scale real-world datasets, by showing that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art model and the promotion concentrates on the cold links with few data.

Zero-Shot Text Classification with Semantically Extended Graph Convolutional Network

Tengfei Liu, Yongli Hu, Junbin Gao, Yanfeng Sun, Baocai Yin

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Auto-TLDR; Semantically Extended Graph Convolutional Network for Zero-shot Text Classification

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As a challenging task of Natural Language Processing(NLP), zero-shot text classification has attracted more and more attention recently. It aims to detect classes that the model has never seen in the training set. For this purpose, a feasible way is to construct connection between the seen and unseen classes by semantic extension and classify the unseen classes by information propagation over the connection. Although many related zero-shot text classification methods have been exploited, how to realize semantic extension properly and propagate information effectively is far from solved. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot text classification method called Semantically Extended Graph Convolutional Network (SEGCN). In the proposed method, the semantic category knowledge from ConceptNet is utilized to semantic extension for linking seen classes to unseen classes and constructing a graph of all classes. Then, we build upon Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) for predicting the textual classifier for each category, which transfers the category knowledge by the convolution operators on the constructed graph and is trained in a semi-supervised manner using the samples of the seen classes. The experimental results on Dbpedia and 20newsgroup datasets show that our method outperforms the state of the art zero-shot text classification methods.

End-To-End Multi-Task Learning of Missing Value Imputation and Forecasting in Time-Series Data

Jinhee Kim, Taesung Kim, Jang-Ho Choi, Jaegul Choo

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Auto-TLDR; Time-Series Prediction with Denoising and Imputation of Missing Data

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Multivariate time-series prediction is a common task, but it often becomes challenging due to missing values involved in data caused by unreliable sensors and other issues. In fact, inaccurate imputation of missing values can degrade the downstream prediction performance, so it may be better not to rely on the estimated values of missing data. Furthermore, observed data may contain noise, so denoising them can be helpful for the main task at hand. In response, we propose a novel approach that can automatically utilize the optimal combination of the observed and the estimated values to generate not only complete, but also noise-reduced data by our own gating mechanism. We evaluate our model on real-world time-series datasets and achieved state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating that our method successfully handle the incomplete datasets. Moreover, we present in-depth studies using a carefully designed, synthetic multivariate time-series dataset to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model. The ablation studies and the experimental analysis of the proposed gating mechanism show that the proposed method works as an effective denoising as well as imputation method for time-series classification tasks.

RNN Training along Locally Optimal Trajectories via Frank-Wolfe Algorithm

Yun Yue, Ming Li, Venkatesh Saligrama, Ziming Zhang

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Auto-TLDR; Frank-Wolfe Algorithm for Efficient Training of RNNs

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We propose a novel and efficient training method for RNNs by iteratively seeking a local minima on the loss surface within a small region, and leverage this directional vector for the update, in an outer-loop. We propose to utilize the Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm in this context. Although, FW implicitly involves normalized gradients, which can lead to a slow convergence rate, we develop a novel RNN training method that, surprisingly, even with the additional cost, the overall training cost is empirically observed to be lower than back-propagation. Our method leads to a new Frank-Wolfe method, that is in essence an SGD algorithm with a restart scheme. We prove that under certain conditions our algorithm has a sublinear convergence rate of $O(1/\epsilon)$ for $\epsilon$ error. We then conduct empirical experiments on several benchmark datasets including those that exhibit long-term dependencies, and show significant performance improvement. We also experiment with deep RNN architectures and show efficient training performance. Finally, we demonstrate that our training method is robust to noisy data.

Multi-Scanning Based Recurrent Neural Network for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Weilian Zhou, Sei-Ichiro Kamata

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Auto-TLDR; Spatial-Spectral Unification for Hyperspectral Image Classification

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As the specialty of hyperspectral image (HSI), it consists of 2D spatial and 1D spectral information. In the field of deep learning, HSI classification is an appealing research topic. Many existing methods process the HSI in spatial or spectral domain separately, which cannot fully extract the representative features and the most used 3D convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) will suffer from mixing up complex spectral information. In this paper, we propose a spatial-spectral unified method by using recurrent neural networks (RNN) and multi-scanning direction strategy to construct spatial-spectral information sequences for learning the spatial dependencies among the central pixel and neighboring pixels. Meanwhile, residual connections and dense connections are introduced into multi-scanning direction sequences to overcome the memory problem in the RNN. The proposed method is tested on two benchmark datasets: the Pavia University dataset and the Pavia Center dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve better classification rate than other state-of-the-art methods.

Detective: An Attentive Recurrent Model for Sparse Object Detection

Amine Kechaou, Manuel Martinez, Monica Haurilet, Rainer Stiefelhagen

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Auto-TLDR; Detective: An attentive object detector that identifies objects in images in a sequential manner

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In this work, we present Detective – an attentive object detector that identifies objects in images in a sequential manner. Our network is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder is a convolutional neural network, and the decoder is a convolutional recurrent neural network coupled with an attention mechanism. At each iteration, our decoder focuses on the relevant parts of the image using an attention mechanism, and then estimates the object’s class and the bounding box coordinates. Current object detection models generate dense predictions and rely on post-processing to remove duplicate predictions. Detective is a sparse object detector that generates a single bounding box per object instance. However, training a sparse object detector is challenging, as it requires the model to reason at the instance level and not just at the class and spatial levels. We propose a training mechanism based on the Hungarian Algorithm and a loss that balances the localization and classification tasks. This allows Detective to achieve promising results on the PASCAL VOC object detection dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that sparse object detection is possible and has a great potential for future developments in applications where the order of the objects to be predicted is of interest.

ReADS: A Rectified Attentional Double Supervised Network for Scene Text Recognition

Qi Song, Qianyi Jiang, Xiaolin Wei, Nan Li, Rui Zhang

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Auto-TLDR; ReADS: Rectified Attentional Double Supervised Network for General Scene Text Recognition

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In recent years, scene text recognition is always regarded as a sequence-to-sequence problem. Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and Attentional sequence recognition (Attn) are two very prevailing approaches to tackle this problem while they may fail in some scenarios respectively. CTC concentrates more on every individual character but is weak in text semantic dependency modeling. Attn based methods have better context semantic modeling ability while tends to overfit on limited training data. In this paper, we elaborately design a Rectified Attentional Double Supervised Network (ReADS) for general scene text recognition. To overcome the weakness of CTC and Attn, both of them are applied in our method but with different modules in two supervised branches which can make a complementary to each other. Moreover, effective spatial and channel attention mechanisms are introduced to eliminate background noise and extract valid foreground information. Finally, a simple rectified network is implemented to rectify irregular text. The ReADS can be trained end-to-end and only word-level annotations are required. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks verify the effectiveness of ReADS which achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Context Matters: Self-Attention for Sign Language Recognition

Fares Ben Slimane, Mohamed Bouguessa

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Auto-TLDR; Attentional Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition

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This paper proposes an attentional network for the task of Continuous Sign Language Recognition. The proposed approach exploits co-independent streams of data to model the sign language modalities. These different channels of information can share a complex temporal structure between each other. For that reason, we apply attention to synchronize and help capture entangled dependencies between the different sign language components. Even though Sign Language is multi-channel, handshapes represent the central entities in sign interpretation. Seeing handshapes in their correct context defines the meaning of a sign. Taking that into account, we utilize the attention mechanism to efficiently aggregate the hand features with their appropriate Spatio-temporal context for better sign recognition. We found that by doing so the model is able to identify the essential Sign Language components that revolve around the dominant hand and the face areas. We test our model on the benchmark dataset RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014, yielding competitive results.

Adversarial Training for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with BERT

Akbar Karimi, Andrea Prati, Leonardo Rossi

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Auto-TLDR; Adversarial Training of BERT for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

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Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) studies the extraction of sentiments and their targets. Collecting labeled data for this task in order to help neural networks generalize better can be laborious and time-consuming. As an alternative, similar data to the real-world examples can be produced artificially through an adversarial process which is carried out in the embedding space. Although these examples are not real sentences, they have been shown to act as a regularization method which can make neural networks more robust. In this work, we fine-tune the general purpose BERT and domain specific post-trained BERT (BERT-PT) using adversarial training. After improving the results of post-trained BERT with different hyperparameters, we propose a novel architecture called BERT Adversarial Training (BAT) to utilize adversarial training for the two major tasks of Aspect Extraction and Aspect Sentiment Classification in sentiment analysis. The proposed model outperforms the general BERT as well as the in-domain post-trained BERT in both tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the application of adversarial training in ABSA. The code is publicly available on a GitHub repository at https://github.com/IMPLabUniPr/Adversarial-Training-fo r-ABSA

Enhanced User Interest and Expertise Modeling for Expert Recommendation

Tongze He, Caili Guo, Yunfei Chu

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Auto-TLDR; A Unified Framework for Expert Recommendation in Community Question Answering

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The rapid development of Community Question Answering (CQA) satisfies users' request for professional and personal knowledge. In CQA, one key issue is to recommend users with high expertise and willingness to answer the given questions, namely expert recommendation. However, most of existing methods for expert recommendation ignore some key information, such as time information and historical feedback information, degrading the performance. On the one hand, users' interest are changing over time. It is biased if we don't consider the dynamics. On the other hand, feedback information is critical to estimate users' expertise. To solve these problems, we propose a unified framework for expert recommendation to exploit user interest and expertise more precisely. Considering the inconsistency between them, we propose to learn their embeddings separately. We leverage Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to model user's short-term interest and combine it with long-term interest. The user expertise is learned by the designed user expertise network, which explicitly models feedback on users' historical behavior. The extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset from a real-world CQA site demonstrate the superior performance of our method than state-of-the-art solutions to the problem.

Predicting Chemical Properties Using Self-Attention Multi-Task Learning Based on SMILES Representation

Sangrak Lim, Yong Oh Lee

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Auto-TLDR; Self-attention based Transformer-Variant Model for Chemical Compound Properties Prediction

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In the computational prediction of chemical compound properties, molecular descriptors and fingerprints encoded to low dimensional vectors are used. The selection of proper molecular descriptors and fingerprints is both important and challenging as the performance of such models is highly dependent on descriptors. To overcome this challenge, natural language processing models that utilize simplified molecular input line entry system as input were studied, and several transformer variant models achieved superior results when compared with conventional methods. In this study, we explored the structural differences of the transformer-variant model and proposed a new self-attention based model. The representation learning performance of the self-attention module was evaluated in a multi-task learning environment using imbalanced chemical datasets. The experiment results showed that our model achieved competitive outcomes on several benchmark datasets. The source code of our experiment is available at https://github.com/arwhirang/sa-mtl and the dataset is available from the same URL.

Reinforcement Learning with Dual Attention Guided Graph Convolution for Relation Extraction

Zhixin Li, Yaru Sun, Suqin Tang, Canlong Zhang, Huifang Ma

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Auto-TLDR; Dual Attention Graph Convolutional Network for Relation Extraction

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To better learn the dependency relationship between nodes, we address the relationship extraction task by capturing rich contextual dependencies based on the attention mechanism, and using distributional reinforcement learning to generate optimal relation information representation. This method is called Dual Attention Graph Convolutional Network (DAGCN), to adaptively integrate local features with their global dependencies. Specifically, we append two types of attention modules on top of GCN, which model the semantic interdependencies in spatial and relational dimensions respectively. The position attention module selectively aggregates the feature at each position by a weighted sum of the features at all positions of nodes internal features. Meanwhile, the relation attention module selectively emphasizes interdependent node relations by integrating associated features among all nodes. We sum the outputs of the two attention modules and use reinforcement learning to predict the classification of nodes relationship to further improve feature representation which contributes to more precise extraction results. The results on the TACRED and SemEval datasets show that the model can obtain more useful information for relational extraction tasks, and achieve better performances on various evaluation indexes.

Label Incorporated Graph Neural Networks for Text Classification

Yuan Xin, Linli Xu, Junliang Guo, Jiquan Li, Xin Sheng, Yuanyuan Zhou

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Auto-TLDR; Graph Neural Networks for Semi-supervised Text Classification

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Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success on graph-structured data, and their applications on traditional data structures such as natural language processing and semi-supervised text classification have been extensively explored in recent years. While previous works only consider the text information while building the graph, heterogeneous information such as labels is ignored. In this paper, we consider to incorporate the label information while building the graph by adding text-label-text paths, through which the supervision information will propagate among the graph more directly. Specifically, we treat labels as nodes in the graph which also contains text and word nodes, and then connect labels with texts belonging to that label. Through graph convolutions, label embeddings are jointly learned with text embeddings in the same latent semantic space. The newly incorporated label nodes will facilitate learning more accurate text embeddings by introducing the label information, and thus benefit the downstream text classification tasks. Extensive results on several benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms baseline methods by a significant margin.

Stroke Based Posterior Attention for Online Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

Changjie Wu, Qing Wang, Jianshu Zhang, Jun Du, Jiaming Wang, Jiajia Wu, Jin-Shui Hu

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Auto-TLDR; Posterior Attention for Online Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition

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Recently, many researches propose to employ attention based encoder-decoder models to convert a sequence of trajectory points into a LaTeX string for online handwritten mathematical expression recognition (OHMER), and the recognition performance of these models critically relies on the accuracy of the attention. In this paper, unlike previous methods which basically employ a soft attention model, we propose to employ a posterior attention model, which modifies the attention probabilities after observing the output probabilities generated by the soft attention model. In order to further improve the posterior attention mechanism, we propose a stroke average pooling layer to aggregate point-level features obtained from the encoder into stroke-level features. We argue that posterior attention is better to be implemented on stroke-level features than point-level features as the output probabilities generated by stroke is more convincing than generated by point, and we prove that through experimental analysis. Validated on the CROHME competition task, we demonstrate that stroke based posterior attention achieves expression recognition rates of 54.26% on CROHME 2014 and 51.75% on CROHME 2016. According to attention visualization analysis, we empirically demonstrate that the posterior attention mechanism can achieve better alignment accuracy than the soft attention mechanism.

Cross-People Mobile-Phone Based Airwriting Character Recognition

Yunzhe Li, Hui Zheng, He Zhu, Haojun Ai, Xiaowei Dong

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Auto-TLDR; Cross-People Airwriting Recognition via Motion Sensor Signal via Deep Neural Network

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Airwriting using mobile phones has many applications in human-computer interaction. However, the recognition of airwriting character needs a lot of training data from user, which brings great difficulties to the pratical application. The model learnt from a specific person often cannot yield satisfied results when used on another person. The data gap between people is mainly caused by the following factors: personal writing styles, mobile phone sensors, and ways to hold mobile phones. To address the cross-people problem, we propose a deep neural network(DNN) that combines convolutional neural network(CNN) and bilateral long short-term memory(BLSTM). In each layer of the network, we also add an AdaBN layer which is able to increase the generalization ability of the DNN. Different from the original AdaBN method, we explore the feasibility for semi-supervised learning. We implement it to our design and conduct comprehensive experiments. The evaluation results show that our system can achieve an accuracy of 99% for recognition and an improvement of 10% on average for transfer learning between various factors such as people, devices and postures. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to implement cross-people airwriting recognition via motion sensor signal, which is a fundamental step towards ubiquitous sensing.

2D License Plate Recognition based on Automatic Perspective Rectification

Hui Xu, Zhao-Hong Guo, Da-Han Wang, Xiang-Dong Zhou, Yu Shi

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Auto-TLDR; Perspective Rectification Network for License Plate Recognition

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License plate recognition (LPR) remains a challenging task in face of some difficulties such as image deformation and multi-line character distribution. Text rectification that is crucial to eliminate the effects of image deformation has attracted increasing attentions in scene text recognition. However, current text rectification methods are not designed specifically for LPR, which did not take the features of plate deformation into account. Considering the fact that a license plate (LP) can only generate perspective distortion in the image due to its rigid feature, in this paper we propose a novel perspective rectification network (PRN) to automatically estimate the perspective transformation and rectify the distorted LP accordingly. For recognition, we propose a location-aware 2D attention based recognition network that is capable of recognizing both single-line and double-line plates with perspective deformation. The rectification network and recognition network are connected for end-to-end training. Experiments on common datasets show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Cross-Media Hash Retrieval Using Multi-head Attention Network

Zhixin Li, Feng Ling, Chuansheng Xu, Canlong Zhang, Huifang Ma

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Auto-TLDR; Unsupervised Cross-Media Hash Retrieval Using Multi-Head Attention Network

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The cross-media hash retrieval method is to encode multimedia data into a common binary hash space, which can effectively measure the correlation between samples from different modalities. In order to further improve the retrieval accuracy, this paper proposes an unsupervised cross-media hash retrieval method based on multi-head attention network. First of all, we use a multi-head attention network to make better matching images and texts, which contains rich semantic information. At the same time, an auxiliary similarity matrix is constructed to integrate the original neighborhood information from different modalities. Therefore, this method can capture the potential correlations between different modalities and within the same modality, so as to make up for the differences between different modalities and within the same modality. Secondly, the method is unsupervised and does not require additional semantic labels, so it has the potential to achieve large-scale cross-media retrieval. In addition, batch normalization and replacement hash code generation functions are adopted to optimize the model, and two loss functions are designed, which make the performance of this method exceed many supervised deep cross-media hash methods. Experiments on three datasets show that the average performance of this method is about 5 to 6 percentage points higher than the state-of-the-art unsupervised method, which proves the effectiveness and superiority of this method.

Switching Dynamical Systems with Deep Neural Networks

Cesar Ali Ojeda Marin, Kostadin Cvejoski, Bogdan Georgiev, Ramses J. Sanchez

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Auto-TLDR; Variational RNN for Switching Dynamics

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The problem of uncovering different dynamicalregimes is of pivotal importance in time series analysis. Switchingdynamical systems provide a solution for modeling physical phe-nomena whose time series data exhibit different dynamical modes.In this work we propose a novel variational RNN model forswitching dynamics allowing for both non-Markovian and non-linear dynamical behavior between and within dynamic modes.Attention mechanisms are provided to inform the switchingdistribution. We evaluate our model on synthetic and empiricaldatasets of diverse nature and successfully uncover differentdynamical regimes and predict the switching dynamics.

PSDNet: A Balanced Architecture of Accuracy and Parameters for Semantic Segmentation

Yue Liu, Zhichao Lian

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Auto-TLDR; Pyramid Pooling Module with SE1Cblock and D2SUpsample Network (PSDNet)

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Abstract—In this paper, we present our Pyramid Pooling Module (PPM) with SE1Cblock and D2SUpsample Network (PSDNet), a novel architecture for accurate semantic segmentation. Started from the known work called Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSPNet), PSDNet takes advantage of pyramid pooling structure with channel attention module and feature transform module in Pyramid Pooling Module (PPM). The enhanced PPM with these two components can strengthen context information flowing in the network instead of damaging it. The channel attention module we mentioned is an improved “Squeeze and Excitation with 1D Convolution” (SE1C) block which can explicitly model interrelationship between channels with fewer number of parameters. We propose a feature transform module named “Depth to Space Upsampling” (D2SUpsample) in the PPM which keeps integrity of features by transforming features while interpolating features, at the same time reducing parameters. In addition, we introduce a joint strategy in SE1Cblock which combines two variants of global pooling without increasing parameters. Compared with PSPNet, our work achieves higher accuracy on public datasets with 73.97% mIoU and 82.89% mAcc accuracy on Cityscapes Dataset based on ResNet50 backbone.

Watch Your Strokes: Improving Handwritten Text Recognition with Deformable Convolutions

Iulian Cojocaru, Silvia Cascianelli, Lorenzo Baraldi, Massimiliano Corsini, Rita Cucchiara

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Auto-TLDR; Deformable Convolutional Neural Networks for Handwritten Text Recognition

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Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in free-layout pages is a valuable yet challenging task which aims to automatically understand handwritten texts. State-of-the-art approaches in this field usually encode input images with Convolutional Neural Networks, whose kernels are typically defined on a fixed grid and focus on all input pixels independently. However, this is in contrast with the sparse nature of handwritten pages, in which only pixels representing the ink of the writing are useful for the recognition task. Furthermore, the standard convolution operator is not explicitly designed to take into account the great variability in shape, scale, and orientation of handwritten characters. To overcome these limitations, we investigate the use of deformable convolutions for handwriting recognition. This type of convolution deform the convolution kernel according to the content of the neighborhood, and can therefore be more adaptable to geometric variations and other deformations of the text. Experiments conducted on the IAM and RIMES datasets demonstrate that the use of deformable convolutions is a promising direction for the design of novel architectures for handwritten text recognition.

Gaussian Constrained Attention Network for Scene Text Recognition

Zhi Qiao, Xugong Qin, Yu Zhou, Fei Yang, Weiping Wang

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Auto-TLDR; Gaussian Constrained Attention Network for Scene Text Recognition

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Scene text recognition has been a hot topic in computer vision. Recent methods adopt the attention mechanism for sequence prediction which achieve convincing results. However, we argue that the existing attention mechanism faces the problem of attention diffusion, in which the model may not focus on a certain character area. In this paper, we propose Gaussian Constrained Attention Network to deal with this problem. It is a 2D attention-based method integrated with a novel Gaussian Constrained Refinement Module, which predicts an additional Gaussian mask to refine the attention weights. Different from adopting an additional supervision on the attention weights simply, our proposed method introduce an explicit refinement. In this way, the attention weights will be more concentrated and the attention-based recognition network achieves better performance. The proposed Gaussian Constrained Refinement Module is flexible and can be applied to existing attention-based methods directly. The experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our code has been available at https://github.com/Pay20Y/GCAN.

Enriching Video Captions with Contextual Text

Philipp Rimle, Pelin Dogan, Markus Gross

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Auto-TLDR; Contextualized Video Captioning Using Contextual Text

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Understanding video content and generating caption with context is an important and challenging task. Unlike prior methods that typically attempt to generate generic video captions without context, our architecture contextualizes captioning by infusing extracted information from relevant text data. We propose an end-to-end sequence-to-sequence model which generates video captions based on visual input, and mines relevant knowledge such as names and locations from contextual text. In contrast to previous approaches, we do not preprocess the text further, and let the model directly learn to attend over it. Guided by the visual input, the model is able to copy words from the contextual text via a pointer-generator network, allowing to produce more specific video captions. We show competitive performance on the News Video Dataset and, through ablation studies, validate the efficacy of contextual video captioning as well as individual design choices in our model architecture.

Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Iterative Spatiotemporal Fine-Tuning

Kenessary Koishybay, Medet Mukushev, Anara Sandygulova

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Auto-TLDR; A Deep Neural Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Iterative Gloss Recognition

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This paper aims to develop a deep neural network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) with iterative Gloss Recognition (GR) fine-tuning. CSLR has been a popular research field in the last years and iterative optimization methods are well established. This paper introduces our proposed architecture involving Spatiotemporal feature-extraction model to segment useful ``gloss-unit" features and BiLSTM with CTC as a sequence model. Spatiotemporal Feature Extractor is used for both image features extraction and sequence length reduction. To this end, we compare different architectures for feature extraction and sequence model. In addition, we iteratively fine-tune feature extractor on gloss-unit video segments with alignments from the end2end model. During the iterative training, we use novel alignment correction technique, which is based on minimum transformations of Levenshtein distance. All the experiments were conducted on the RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014 dataset.

Enhancing Handwritten Text Recognition with N-Gram Sequencedecomposition and Multitask Learning

Vasiliki Tassopoulou, George Retsinas, Petros Maragos

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Auto-TLDR; Multi-task Learning for Handwritten Text Recognition

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Current state-of-the-art approaches in the field of Handwritten Text Recognition are predominately single task with unigram, character level target units. In our work, we utilize a Multi-task Learning scheme, training the model to perform decompositions of the target sequence with target units of different granularity, from fine tocoarse. We consider this method as a way to utilize n-gram information, implicitly, in the training process, while the final recognition is performed using only the unigram output. Unigram decoding of sucha multi-task approach highlights the capability of the learned internal representations, imposed by the different n-grams at the training step. We select n-grams as our target units and we experiment from unigrams till fourgrams, namely subword level granularities.These multiple decompositions are learned from the network with task-specific CTC losses. Concerning network architectures, we pro-pose two alternatives, namely the Hierarchical and the Block Multi-task. Overall, our proposed model, even though evaluated only onthe unigram task, outperforms its counterpart single-task by absolute 2.52% WER and 1.02% CER, in the greedy decoding, without any computational overhead during inference, hinting towards success-fully imposing an implicit language model