3,399 research outputs found
Literal Perceptual Inference
In this paper, I argue that theories of perception that appeal to Helmholtz’s idea of unconscious inference (“Helmholtzian” theories) should be taken literally, i.e. that the inferences appealed to in such theories are inferences in the full sense of the term, as employed elsewhere in philosophy and in ordinary discourse.
In the course of the argument, I consider constraints on inference based on the idea that inference is a deliberate acton, and on the idea that inferences depend on the syntactic structure of representations. I argue that inference is a personal-level but sometimes unconscious process that cannot in general be distinguished from association on the basis of the structures of the representations over which it’s defined. I also critique arguments against representationalist interpretations of Helmholtzian theories, and argue against the view that perceptual inference is encapsulated in a module
Hypothesis Only Baselines in Natural Language Inference
We propose a hypothesis only baseline for diagnosing Natural Language
Inference (NLI). Especially when an NLI dataset assumes inference is occurring
based purely on the relationship between a context and a hypothesis, it follows
that assessing entailment relations while ignoring the provided context is a
degenerate solution. Yet, through experiments on ten distinct NLI datasets, we
find that this approach, which we refer to as a hypothesis-only model, is able
to significantly outperform a majority class baseline across a number of NLI
datasets. Our analysis suggests that statistical irregularities may allow a
model to perform NLI in some datasets beyond what should be achievable without
access to the context.Comment: Accepted at *SEM 2018 as long paper. 12 page
Visual Commonsense R-CNN
We present a novel unsupervised feature representation learning method,
Visual Commonsense Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (VC R-CNN), to
serve as an improved visual region encoder for high-level tasks such as
captioning and VQA. Given a set of detected object regions in an image (e.g.,
using Faster R-CNN), like any other unsupervised feature learning methods
(e.g., word2vec), the proxy training objective of VC R-CNN is to predict the
contextual objects of a region. However, they are fundamentally different: the
prediction of VC R-CNN is by using causal intervention: P(Y|do(X)), while
others are by using the conventional likelihood: P(Y|X). This is also the core
reason why VC R-CNN can learn "sense-making" knowledge like chair can be sat --
while not just "common" co-occurrences such as chair is likely to exist if
table is observed. We extensively apply VC R-CNN features in prevailing models
of three popular tasks: Image Captioning, VQA, and VCR, and observe consistent
performance boosts across them, achieving many new state-of-the-arts. Code and
feature are available at https://github.com/Wangt-CN/VC-R-CNN.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 202
Hearing meanings: the revenge of context
According to the perceptual view of language comprehension, listeners typically recover high-level linguistic properties such as utterance meaning without inferential work. The perceptual view is subject to the Objection from Context: since utterance meaning is massively context-sensitive, and context-sensitivity requires cognitive inference, the perceptual view is false. In recent work, Berit Brogaard provides a challenging reply to this objection. She argues that in language comprehension context-sensitivity is typically exercised not through inferences, but rather through top-down perceptual modulations or perceptual learning. This paper provides a complete formulation of the Objection from Context and evaluates Brogaards reply to it. Drawing on conceptual considerations and empirical examples, we argue that the exercise of context-sensitivity in language comprehension does, in fact, typically involve inference
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