13 accepted papers
The vast applications of deep generative models are anchored in three core capabilities---*generating* new instances, *reconstructing* inputs, and learning compact *representations*---across various data types, such as discrete text/protein sequences and continuous images. Existing model families, l…
While large language models (LMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across numerous tasks, they often struggle with simple reasoning and planning in physical environments, such as understanding object permanence or planning household activities. The limitation arises from the fact that LMs are trai…
Neural text generation models are typically trained by maximizing log-likelihood with the sequence cross entropy (CE) loss, which encourages an exact token-by-token match between a target sequence with a generated sequence. Such training objective is sub-optimal when the target sequence is not perfe…
Data augmentation is an effective approach to tackle over-fitting. Many previous works have proposed different data augmentations strategies for NLP, such as noise injection, word replacement, back-translation etc. Though effective, they missed one important characteristic of language–compositionali…
Large-scale language models (LMs) pretrained on massive corpora of text, such as GPT-2, are powerful open-domain text generators. However, as our systematic examination reveals, it is still challenging for such models to generate coherent long passages of text (e.g., 1000 tokens), especially when th…
The broad set of deep generative models (DGMs) has achieved remarkable advances. However, it is often difficult to incorporate rich structured domain knowledge with the end-to-end DGMs. Posterior regularization (PR) offers a principled framework to impose structured constraints on probabilistic mode…
Deep generative models have achieved impressive success in recent years. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), as powerful frameworks for deep generative model learning, have largely been considered as two distinct paradigms and received extensive independent st…
Binary classifiers are employed as discriminators in GAN-based unsupervised style transfer models to ensure that transferred sentences are similar to sentences in the target domain. One difficulty with the binary discriminator is that error signal is sometimes insufficient to train the model to prod…
Recent work on generative text modeling has found that variational autoencoders (VAE) with LSTM decoders perform worse than simpler LSTM language models (Bowman et al., 2015). This negative result is so far poorly understood, but has been attributed to the propensity of LSTM decoders to ignore condi…
Generic generation and manipulation of text is challenging and has limited success compared to recent deep generative modeling in visual domain. This paper aims at generating plausible text sentences, whose attributes are controlled by learning disentangled latent representations with designated sem…
This paper presents stacked attention networks (SANs)that learn to answer natural language questions from images. SANs use semantic representation of a question as query to search for the regions in an image that are related to the answer. We argue that image question answering (QA) often requires m…
Kernel methods have great promise for learning rich statistical representations of large modern datasets. However, compared to neural networks, kernel methods have been perceived as lacking in scalability and flexibility. We introduce a family of fast, flexible, general purpose, and lightly parametr…
The fully connected layers of a deep convolutional neural network typically contain over 90% of the network parameters, and consume the majority of the memory required to store the network. Reducing the number of parameters while preserving predictive performance is critically important for deployin…