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Chris Pal

16 accepted papers

2021

DuoRAT: Towards Simpler Text-to-SQL Models

NAACL 2021long

Recent neural text-to-SQL models can effectively translate natural language questions to corresponding SQL queries on unseen databases. Working mostly on the Spider dataset, researchers have proposed increasingly sophisticated solutions to the problem. Contrary to this trend, in this paper we focus…

2020

Adversarial Soft Advantage Fitting: Imitation Learning without Policy Optimization

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Adversarial Imitation Learning alternates between learning a discriminator -- which tells apart expert's demonstrations from generated ones -- and a generator's policy to produce trajectories that can fool this discriminator. This alternated optimization is known to be delicate in practice since it…

2020

Measuring Systematic Generalization in Neural Proof Generation with Transformers

NeurIPS 2020poster

We are interested in understanding how well Transformer language models (TLMs) can perform reasoning tasks when trained on knowledge encoded in the form of natural language. We investigate their systematic generalization abilities on a logical reasoning task in natural language, which involves reaso…

2020

Promoting Coordination through Policy Regularization in Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2020poster

In multi-agent reinforcement learning, discovering successful collective behaviors is challenging as it requires exploring a joint action space that grows exponentially with the number of agents. While the tractability of independent agent-wise exploration is appealing, this approach fails on tasks…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar
2019

Navigation Agents for the Visually Impaired: A Sidewalk Simulator and Experiments

CoRL 2019

Millions of blind and visually-impaired (BVI) people navigate urban environments everyday, using smartphones for high-level path-planning and white canes or guide dogs for local information. However, many BVI people still struggle to travel to new places. In our endeavour to create a navigation assi

2019

Neural Multisensory Scene Inference

NeurIPS 2019poster

For embodied agents to infer representations of the underlying 3D physical world they inhabit, they should efficiently combine multisensory cues from numerous trials, e.g., by looking at and touching objects. Despite its importance, multisensory 3D scene representation learning has received less att…

2019

On Adversarial Mixup Resynthesis

NeurIPS 2019poster

In this paper, we explore new approaches to combining information encoded within the learned representations of auto-encoders. We explore models that are capable of combining the attributes of multiple inputs such that a resynthesised output is trained to fool an adversarial discriminator for real v…

2019

Probabilistic Planning with Sequential Monte Carlo methods

ICLR 2019poster

In this work, we propose a novel formulation of planning which views it as a probabilistic inference problem over future optimal trajectories. This enables us to use sampling methods, and thus, tackle planning in continuous domains using a fixed computational budget. We design a new algorithm, Se…

Cited by 58SourcePDFScholar
2018

Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Temporal Credit Assignment Through Reminding

NeurIPS 2018spotlight

Learning long-term dependencies in extended temporal sequences requires credit assignment to events far back in the past. The most common method for training recurrent neural networks, back-propagation through time (BPTT), requires credit information to be propagated backwards through every single s…

Cited by 113SourcePDFScholar
2018

Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations

NeurIPS 2018poster

There has been growing interest in using neural networks and deep learning techniques to create dialogue systems. Conversational recommendation is an interesting setting for the scientific exploration of dialogue with natural language as the associated discourse involves goal-driven dialogue that of…

Cited by 484SourcePDFScholar
2018

Towards Text Generation with Adversarially Learned Neural Outlines

NeurIPS 2018poster

Recent progress in deep generative models has been fueled by two paradigms -- autoregressive and adversarial models. We propose a combination of both approaches with the goal of learning generative models of text. Our method first produces a high-level sentence outline and then generates words seque…

2018

Twin Networks: Matching the Future for Sequence Generation

ICLR 2018poster

We propose a simple technique for encouraging generative RNNs to plan ahead. We train a ``backward'' recurrent network to generate a given sequence in reverse order, and we encourage states of the forward model to predict cotemporal states of the backward model. The backward network is used only dur…

2018

Unsupervised Depth Estimation, 3D Face Rotation and Replacement

NeurIPS 2018poster

We present an unsupervised approach for learning to estimate three dimensional (3D) facial structure from a single image while also predicting 3D viewpoint transformations that match a desired pose and facial geometry. We achieve this by inferring the depth of facial keypoints of an input image in a…

2017

ExtremeWeather: A large-scale climate dataset for semi-supervised detection, localization, and understanding of extreme weather events

NeurIPS 2017poster

Then detection and identification of extreme weather events in large-scale climate simulations is an important problem for risk management, informing governmental policy decisions and advancing our basic understanding of the climate system. Recent work has shown that fully supervised convolutional n…

2017

On orthogonality and learning recurrent networks with long term dependencies

ICML 2017poster

It is well known that it is challenging to train deep neural networks and recurrent neural networks for tasks that exhibit long term dependencies. The vanishing or exploding gradient problem is a well known issue associated with these challenges. One approach to addressing vanishing and exploding gr…