12,007 research outputs found
Neural Ranking Models with Weak Supervision
Despite the impressive improvements achieved by unsupervised deep neural
networks in computer vision and NLP tasks, such improvements have not yet been
observed in ranking for information retrieval. The reason may be the complexity
of the ranking problem, as it is not obvious how to learn from queries and
documents when no supervised signal is available. Hence, in this paper, we
propose to train a neural ranking model using weak supervision, where labels
are obtained automatically without human annotators or any external resources
(e.g., click data). To this aim, we use the output of an unsupervised ranking
model, such as BM25, as a weak supervision signal. We further train a set of
simple yet effective ranking models based on feed-forward neural networks. We
study their effectiveness under various learning scenarios (point-wise and
pair-wise models) and using different input representations (i.e., from
encoding query-document pairs into dense/sparse vectors to using word embedding
representation). We train our networks using tens of millions of training
instances and evaluate it on two standard collections: a homogeneous news
collection(Robust) and a heterogeneous large-scale web collection (ClueWeb).
Our experiments indicate that employing proper objective functions and letting
the networks to learn the input representation based on weakly supervised data
leads to impressive performance, with over 13% and 35% MAP improvements over
the BM25 model on the Robust and the ClueWeb collections. Our findings also
suggest that supervised neural ranking models can greatly benefit from
pre-training on large amounts of weakly labeled data that can be easily
obtained from unsupervised IR models.Comment: In proceedings of The 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR2017
Weakly-Supervised Temporal Localization via Occurrence Count Learning
We propose a novel model for temporal detection and localization which allows
the training of deep neural networks using only counts of event occurrences as
training labels. This powerful weakly-supervised framework alleviates the
burden of the imprecise and time-consuming process of annotating event
locations in temporal data. Unlike existing methods, in which localization is
explicitly achieved by design, our model learns localization implicitly as a
byproduct of learning to count instances. This unique feature is a direct
consequence of the model's theoretical properties. We validate the
effectiveness of our approach in a number of experiments (drum hit and piano
onset detection in audio, digit detection in images) and demonstrate
performance comparable to that of fully-supervised state-of-the-art methods,
despite much weaker training requirements.Comment: Accepted at ICML 201
Memory vectors for similarity search in high-dimensional spaces
We study an indexing architecture to store and search in a database of
high-dimensional vectors from the perspective of statistical signal processing
and decision theory. This architecture is composed of several memory units,
each of which summarizes a fraction of the database by a single representative
vector. The potential similarity of the query to one of the vectors stored in
the memory unit is gauged by a simple correlation with the memory unit's
representative vector. This representative optimizes the test of the following
hypothesis: the query is independent from any vector in the memory unit vs. the
query is a simple perturbation of one of the stored vectors.
Compared to exhaustive search, our approach finds the most similar database
vectors significantly faster without a noticeable reduction in search quality.
Interestingly, the reduction of complexity is provably better in
high-dimensional spaces. We empirically demonstrate its practical interest in a
large-scale image search scenario with off-the-shelf state-of-the-art
descriptors.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Big Dat
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