Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it. Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned; and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive models.Comment: In press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Open call for commentary proposals (until Nov. 22, 2016). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/information/calls-for-commentary/open-calls-for-commentar

Independent Prototype Propagation for Zero-Shot Compositionality

Humans are good at compositional zero-shot reasoning; someone who has never seen a zebra before could nevertheless recognize one when we tell them it looks like a horse with black and white stripes. Machine learning systems, on the other hand, usually leverage spurious correlations in the training data, and while such correlations can help recognize objects in context, they hurt generalization. To be able to deal with underspecified datasets while still leveraging contextual clues during classification, we propose ProtoProp, a novel prototype propagation graph method. First we learn prototypical representations of objects (e.g., zebra) that are conditionally independent w.r.t. their attribute labels (e.g., stripes) and vice versa. Next we propagate the independent prototypes through a compositional graph, to learn compositional prototypes of novel attribute-object combinations that reflect the dependencies of the target distribution. The method does not rely on any external data, such as class hierarchy graphs or pretrained word embeddings. We evaluate our approach on AO-Clever, a synthetic and strongly visual dataset with clean labels, and UT-Zappos, a noisy real-world dataset of fine-grained shoe types. We show that in the generalized compositional zero-shot setting we outperform state-of-the-art results, and through ablations we show the importance of each part of the method and their contribution to the final results

Deconfounding Causal Inference for Zero-shot Action Recognition

Zero-shot action recognition (ZSAR) aims to recognize unseen action categories in the test set without corresponding training examples. Most existing zero-shot methods follow the feature generation framework to transfer knowledge from seen action categories to model the feature distribution of unseen categories. However, due to the complexity and diversity of actions, it remains challenging to generate unseen feature distribution, especially for the cross-dataset scenario when there is potentially larger domain shift. This paper proposes a De confounding Ca usa l GAN (DeCalGAN) for generating unseen action video features with the following technical contributions: 1) Our model unifies compositional ZSAR with traditional visual-semantic models to incorporate local object information with global semantic information for feature generation. 2) A GAN-based architecture is proposed for causal inference and unseen distribution discovery. 3) A deconfounding module is proposed to refine representations of local object and global semantic information confounder in the training data. Action descriptions and random object feature after causal inference are then used to discover unseen distributions of novel actions in different datasets. Our extensive experiments on C ross- D ataset Z ero- S hot A ction R ecognition (CD-ZSAR) demonstrate substantial improvement over the UCF101 and HMDB51 standard benchmarks for this problem

ComCLIP: Training-Free Compositional Image and Text Matching

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated great zero-shot performance for image-text matching because of its holistic use of natural language supervision that covers large-scale, open-world visual concepts. However, it is still challenging to adapt CLIP to compositional image and text matching -- a more challenging image and matching mask requiring the model understanding of compositional word concepts and visual components. Towards better compositional generalization in zero-shot image and text matching, in this paper, we study the problem from a causal perspective: the erroneous semantics of individual entities are essentially confounders that cause the matching failure. Therefore, we propose a novel training-free compositional CLIP model (ComCLIP). ComCLIP disentangles input images into subjects, objects, and action sub-images and composes CLIP's vision encoder and text encoder to perform evolving matching over compositional text embedding and sub-image embeddings. In this way, ComCLIP can mitigate spurious correlations introduced by the pretrained CLIP models and dynamically assess the contribution of each entity when performing image and text matching. Experiments on compositional image-text matching on SVO and ComVG and general image-text retrieval on Flickr8K demonstrate the effectiveness of our plug-and-play method, which boosts the zero-shot inference ability of CLIP even without further training or fine-tuning of CLIP

Learning Conditional Attributes for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) aims to train models to recognize novel compositional concepts based on learned concepts such as attribute-object combinations. One of the challenges is to model attributes interacted with different objects, e.g., the attribute ``wet" in ``wet apple" and ``wet cat" is different. As a solution, we provide analysis and argue that attributes are conditioned on the recognized object and input image and explore learning conditional attribute embeddings by a proposed attribute learning framework containing an attribute hyper learner and an attribute base learner. By encoding conditional attributes, our model enables to generate flexible attribute embeddings for generalization from seen to unseen compositions. Experiments on CZSL benchmarks, including the more challenging C-GQA dataset, demonstrate better performances compared with other state-of-the-art approaches and validate the importance of learning conditional attributes. Code is available at https://github.com/wqshmzh/CANet-CZSLComment: 10 pages, 4 figures, accepted in CVPR202

A Short Survey of Systematic Generalization

This survey includes systematic generalization and a history of how machine learning addresses it. We aim to summarize and organize the related information of both conventional and recent improvements. We first look at the definition of systematic generalization, then introduce Classicist and Connectionist. We then discuss different types of Connectionists and how they approach the generalization. Two crucial problems of variable binding and causality are discussed. We look into systematic generalization in language, vision, and VQA fields. Recent improvements from different aspects are discussed. Systematic generalization has a long history in artificial intelligence. We could cover only a small portion of many contributions. We hope this paper provides a background and is beneficial for discoveries in future work

DRPT: Disentangled and Recurrent Prompt Tuning for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning

Compositional Zero-shot Learning (CZSL) aims to recognize novel concepts composed of known knowledge without training samples. Standard CZSL either identifies visual primitives or enhances unseen composed entities, and as a result, entanglement between state and object primitives cannot be fully utilized. Admittedly, vision-language models (VLMs) could naturally cope with CZSL through tuning prompts, while uneven entanglement leads prompts to be dragged into local optimum. In this paper, we take a further step to introduce a novel Disentangled and Recurrent Prompt Tuning framework termed DRPT to better tap the potential of VLMs in CZSL. Specifically, the state and object primitives are deemed as learnable tokens of vocabulary embedded in prompts and tuned on seen compositions. Instead of jointly tuning state and object, we devise a disentangled and recurrent tuning strategy to suppress the traction force caused by entanglement and gradually optimize the token parameters, leading to a better prompt space. Notably, we develop a progressive fine-tuning procedure that allows for incremental updates to the prompts, optimizing the object first, then the state, and vice versa. Meanwhile, the optimization of state and object is independent, thus clearer features can be learned to further alleviate the issue of entangling misleading optimization. Moreover, we quantify and analyze the entanglement in CZSL and supplement entanglement rebalancing optimization schemes. DRPT surpasses representative state-of-the-art methods on extensive benchmark datasets, demonstrating superiority in both accuracy and efficiency

Simple Primitives with Feasibility- and Contextuality-Dependence for Open-World Compositional Zero-shot Learning

The task of Compositional Zero-Shot Learning (CZSL) is to recognize images of novel state-object compositions that are absent during the training stage. Previous methods of learning compositional embedding have shown effectiveness in closed-world CZSL. However, in Open-World CZSL (OW-CZSL), their performance tends to degrade significantly due to the large cardinality of possible compositions. Some recent works separately predict simple primitives (i.e., states and objects) to reduce cardinality. However, they consider simple primitives as independent probability distributions, ignoring the heavy dependence between states, objects, and compositions. In this paper, we model the dependence of compositions via feasibility and contextuality. Feasibility-dependence refers to the unequal feasibility relations between simple primitives, e.g., \textit{hairy} is more feasible with \textit{cat} than with \textit{building} in the real world. Contextuality-dependence represents the contextual variance in images, e.g., \textit{cat} shows diverse appearances under the state of \textit{dry} and \textit{wet}. We design Semantic Attention (SA) and generative Knowledge Disentanglement (KD) to learn the dependence of feasibility and contextuality, respectively. SA captures semantics in compositions to alleviate impossible predictions, driven by the visual similarity between simple primitives. KD disentangles images into unbiased feature representations, easing contextual bias in predictions. Moreover, we complement the current compositional probability model with feasibility and contextuality in a compatible format. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments to analyze and validate the superior or competitive performance of our model, Semantic Attention and knowledge Disentanglement guided Simple Primitives (SAD-SP), on three widely-used benchmark OW-CZSL datasets