Creativity: Generating Diverse Questions using Variational Autoencoders

Generating diverse questions for given images is an important task for computational education, entertainment and AI assistants. Different from many conventional prediction techniques is the need for algorithms to generate a diverse set of plausible questions, which we refer to as "creativity". In this paper we propose a creative algorithm for visual question generation which combines the advantages of variational autoencoders with long short-term memory networks. We demonstrate that our framework is able to generate a large set of varying questions given a single input image.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201

Blending Learning and Inference in Structured Prediction

In this paper we derive an efficient algorithm to learn the parameters of structured predictors in general graphical models. This algorithm blends the learning and inference tasks, which results in a significant speedup over traditional approaches, such as conditional random fields and structured support vector machines. For this purpose we utilize the structures of the predictors to describe a low dimensional structured prediction task which encourages local consistencies within the different structures while learning the parameters of the model. Convexity of the learning task provides the means to enforce the consistencies between the different parts. The inference-learning blending algorithm that we propose is guaranteed to converge to the optimum of the low dimensional primal and dual programs. Unlike many of the existing approaches, the inference-learning blending allows us to learn efficiently high-order graphical models, over regions of any size, and very large number of parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, while presenting state-of-the-art results in stereo estimation, semantic segmentation, shape reconstruction, and indoor scene understanding

Learning Deep Structured Models

Many problems in real-world applications involve predicting several random variables which are statistically related. Markov random fields (MRFs) are a great mathematical tool to encode such relationships. The goal of this paper is to combine MRFs with deep learning algorithms to estimate complex representations while taking into account the dependencies between the output random variables. Towards this goal, we propose a training algorithm that is able to learn structured models jointly with deep features that form the MRF potentials. Our approach is efficient as it blends learning and inference and makes use of GPU acceleration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in the tasks of predicting words from noisy images, as well as multi-class classification of Flickr photographs. We show that joint learning of the deep features and the MRF parameters results in significant performance gains.Comment: 11 pages including referenc