Multimodal Compact Bilinear Pooling for Visual Question Answering and Visual Grounding

Modeling textual or visual information with vector representations trained from large language or visual datasets has been successfully explored in recent years. However, tasks such as visual question answering require combining these vector representations with each other. Approaches to multimodal pooling include element-wise product or sum, as well as concatenation of the visual and textual representations. We hypothesize that these methods are not as expressive as an outer product of the visual and textual vectors. As the outer product is typically infeasible due to its high dimensionality, we instead propose utilizing Multimodal Compact Bilinear pooling (MCB) to efficiently and expressively combine multimodal features. We extensively evaluate MCB on the visual question answering and grounding tasks. We consistently show the benefit of MCB over ablations without MCB. For visual question answering, we present an architecture which uses MCB twice, once for predicting attention over spatial features and again to combine the attended representation with the question representation. This model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Visual7W dataset and the VQA challenge.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 201

Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis

Automatic synthesis of realistic images from text would be interesting and useful, but current AI systems are still far from this goal. However, in recent years generic and powerful recurrent neural network architectures have been developed to learn discriminative text feature representations. Meanwhile, deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (GANs) have begun to generate highly compelling images of specific categories, such as faces, album covers, and room interiors. In this work, we develop a novel deep architecture and GAN formulation to effectively bridge these advances in text and image model- ing, translating visual concepts from characters to pixels. We demonstrate the capability of our model to generate plausible images of birds and flowers from detailed text descriptions.Comment: ICML 201

Deep Learning based Recommender System: A Survey and New Perspectives

With the ever-growing volume of online information, recommender systems have been an effective strategy to overcome such information overload. The utility of recommender systems cannot be overstated, given its widespread adoption in many web applications, along with its potential impact to ameliorate many problems related to over-choice. In recent years, deep learning has garnered considerable interest in many research fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, owing not only to stellar performance but also the attractive property of learning feature representations from scratch. The influence of deep learning is also pervasive, recently demonstrating its effectiveness when applied to information retrieval and recommender systems research. Evidently, the field of deep learning in recommender system is flourishing. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on deep learning based recommender systems. More concretely, we provide and devise a taxonomy of deep learning based recommendation models, along with providing a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art. Finally, we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to this new exciting development of the field.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ACM Computing Surveys. https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/328502

A Taxonomy of Deep Convolutional Neural Nets for Computer Vision

Traditional architectures for solving computer vision problems and the degree of success they enjoyed have been heavily reliant on hand-crafted features. However, of late, deep learning techniques have offered a compelling alternative -- that of automatically learning problem-specific features. With this new paradigm, every problem in computer vision is now being re-examined from a deep learning perspective. Therefore, it has become important to understand what kind of deep networks are suitable for a given problem. Although general surveys of this fast-moving paradigm (i.e. deep-networks) exist, a survey specific to computer vision is missing. We specifically consider one form of deep networks widely used in computer vision - convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We start with "AlexNet" as our base CNN and then examine the broad variations proposed over time to suit different applications. We hope that our recipe-style survey will serve as a guide, particularly for novice practitioners intending to use deep-learning techniques for computer vision.Comment: Published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI (http://goo.gl/6691Bm