Posts in category: Google AI

Read More

Posted by Jaqui Herman and Cat Armato, Program Managers

Machine learning is a key strategic focus at Google, with highly active groups pursuing research in virtually all aspects of the field, including deep learning and more classical algorithms, exploring theory as well as application. We utilize scalable tools and architectures to build machine learning systems that enable us to solve deep scientific and engineering challenges in areas of language, speech, translation, music, visual processing and more.

As a leader in machine learning research, Google is proud to be a Platinum Sponsor of the thirty-seventh International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020), a premier annual event taking place virtually this week. With over 100 accepted publications and Googlers participating in workshops, we look forward to our continued collaboration with the larger machine learning research community.

If you’re registered for ICML 2020, we hope you’ll visit the Google virtual booth to learn more about the exciting work, creativity and fun that goes into solving some of the field’s most interesting challenges. You can also learn more about the Google research being presented at ICML 2020 in the list below (Google affiliations bolded).

ICML Expo
Google Dataset Search: Building an Open Ecosystem for Dataset Discovery
Natasha Noy

End-to-end Bayesian inference workflows in TensorFlow Probability
Colin Carroll

Publications
Population-Based Black-Box Optimization for Biological Sequence Design
Christof Angermueller, David Belanger, Andreea Gane, Zelda Mariet, David Dohan, Kevin Murphy, Lucy Colwell, D Sculley

Predictive Coding for Locally-Linear Control
Rui Shu, Tung Nguyen, Yinlam Chow, Tuan Pham, Khoat Than, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Stefano Ermon, Hung Bui

FedBoost: A Communication-Efficient Algorithm for Federated Learning
Jenny Hamer, Mehryar Mohri, Ananda Theertha Suresh

Faster Graph Embeddings via Coarsening
Matthew Fahrbach, Gramoz Goranci, Richard Peng, Sushant Sachdeva, Chi Wang

Revisiting Fundamentals of Experience Replay
William Fedus, Prajit Ramachandran, Rishabh Agarwal, Yoshua Bengio, Hugo Larochelle, Mark Rowland, Will Dabney

Boosting for Control of Dynamical Systems
Naman Agarwal, Nataly Brukhim, Elad Hazan, Zhou Lu

Neural Clustering Processes
Ari Pakman, Yueqi Wang, Catalin Mitelut, JinHyung Lee, Liam Paninski

The Tree Ensemble Layer: Differentiability Meets Conditional Computation
Hussein Hazimeh, Natalia Ponomareva, Petros Mol, Zhenyu Tan, Rahul Mazumder

Representations for Stable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning
Dibya Ghosh, Marc Bellemare

REALM: Retrieval-Augmented Language Model Pre-Training
Kelvin Guu, Kenton Lee, Zora Tung, Panupong Pasupat, Ming-Wei Chang

Context Aware Local Differential Privacy
Jayadev Acharya, Keith Bonawitz, Peter Kairouz, Daniel Ramage, Ziteng Sun

Scalable Deep Generative Modeling for Sparse Graphs
Hanjun Dai, Azade Nazi, Yujia Li, Bo Dai, Dale Schuurmans

Deep k-NN for Noisy Labels
Dara Bahri, Heinrich Jiang, Maya Gupta^†

Revisiting Spatial Invariance with Low-Rank Local Connectivity
Gamaleldin F. Elsayed, Prajit Ramachandran, Jonathon Shlens, Simon Kornblith

SCAFFOLD: Stochastic Controlled Averaging for Federated Learning
Sai Praneeth Karimireddy, Satyen Kale, Mehryar Mohri, Sashank J. Reddi, Sebastian U. Stich, Ananda Theertha Suresh

Incremental Sampling Without Replacement for Sequence Models
Kensen Shi, David Bieber, Charles Sutton

SoftSort: A Continuous Relaxation for the argsort Operator
Sebastian Prillo, Julian Martin Eisenschlos

XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalisation (see blog post)
Junjie Hu, Sebastian Ruder, Aditya Siddhant, Graham Neubig, Orhan Firat, Melvin Johnson

Learning to Stop While Learning to Predict
Xinshi Chen, Hanjun Dai, Yu Li, Xin Gao, Le Song

Bandits with Adversarial Scaling
Thodoris Lykouris, Vahab Mirrokni, Renato Paes Leme

SimGANs: Simulator-Based Generative Adversarial Networks for ECG Synthesis to Improve Deep ECG Classification
Tomer Golany, Daniel Freedman, Kira Radinsky

Stochastic Frank-Wolfe for Constrained Finite-Sum Minimization
Geoffrey Negiar, Gideon Dresdner, Alicia Yi-Ting Tsai, Laurent El Ghaoui, Francesco Locatello, Robert M. Freund, Fabian Pedregosa

Implicit differentiation of Lasso-type models for hyperparameter optimization
Quentin Bertrand, Quentin Klopfenstein, Mathieu Blondel, Samuel Vaiter, Alexandre Gramfort, Joseph Salmon

Infinite attention: NNGP and NTK for deep attention networks
Jiri Hron, Yasaman Bahri, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Roman Novak

Logarithmic Regret for Learning Linear Quadratic Regulators Efficiently
Asaf Cassel, Alon Cohen, Tomer Koren

Adversarial Learning Guarantees for Linear Hypotheses and Neural Networks
Pranjal Awasthi, Natalie Frank, Mehryar Mohri

Random Hypervolume Scalarizations for Provable Multi-Objective Black Box Optimization
Daniel Golovin, Qiuyi (Richard) Zhang

Generating Programmatic Referring Expressions via Program Synthesis
Jiani Huang, Calvin Smith, Osbert Bastani, Rishabh Singh, Aws Albarghouthi, Mayur Naik

Optimizing Long-term Social Welfare in Recommender Systems: A Constrained Matching Approach
Martin Mladenov, Elliot Creager, Omer Ben-Porat, Kevin Swersky, Richard Zemel, Craig Boutilier

AutoML-Zero: Evolving Machine Learning Algorithms From Scratch (see blog post)
Esteban Real, Chen Liang, David R. So, Quoc V. Le

How Good is the Bayes Posterior in Deep Neural Networks Really?
Florian Wenzel, Kevin Roth, Bastiaan S. Veeling, Jakub Swiatkowski, Linh Tran, Stephan Mandt, Jasper Snoek, Tim Salimans, Rodolphe Jenatton, Sebastian Nowozin^†

Which Tasks Should Be Learned Together in Multi-task Learning?
Trevor Standley, Amir R. Zamir, Dawn Chen, Leonidas Guibas, Jitendra Malik, Silvio Savarese

Influence Diagram Bandits: Variational Thompson Sampling for Structured Bandit Problems
Tong Yu, Branislav Kveton, Zheng Wen, Ruiyi Zhang, Ole J. Mengshoel

Disentangling Trainability and Generalization in Deep Neural Networks
Lechao Xiao, Jeffrey Pennington, Samuel S. Schoenholz

The Many Shapley Values for Model Explanation
Mukund Sundararajan, Amir Najmi

Neural Contextual Bandits with UCB-based Exploration
Dongruo Zhou, Lihong Li, Quanquan Gu

Automatic Shortcut Removal for Self-Supervised Representation Learning
Matthias Minderer, Olivier Bachem, Neil Houlsby, Michael Tschannen

Federated Learning with Only Positive Labels
Felix X. Yu, Ankit Singh Rawat, Aditya Krishna Menon, Sanjiv Kumar

How Recurrent Networks Implement Contextual Processing in Sentiment Analysis
Niru Maheswaranathan, David Sussillo

Supervised Learning: No Loss No Cry
Richard Nock, Aditya Krishna Menon

Ready Policy One: World Building Through Active Learning
Philip Ball, Jack Parker-Holder, Aldo Pacchiano, Krzysztof Choromanski, Stephen Roberts

Weakly-Supervised Disentanglement Without Compromises
Francesco Locatello, Ben Poole, Gunnar Raetsch, Bernhard Schölkopf, Olivier Bachem, Michael Tschannen

Fast Differentiable Sorting and Ranking
Mathieu Blondel, Olivier Teboul, Quentin Berthet, Josip Djolonga

Debiased Sinkhorn barycenters
Hicham Janati, Marco Cuturi, Alexandre Gramfort

Interpretable, Multidimensional, Multimodal Anomaly Detection with Negative Sampling for Detection of Device Failure
John Sipple

Accelerating Large-Scale Inference with Anisotropic Vector Quantization
Ruiqi Guo, Philip Sun, Erik Lindgren, Quan Geng^†, David Simcha, Felix Chern, Sanjiv Kumar

An Optimistic Perspective on Offline Reinforcement Learning (see blog post)
Rishabh Agarwal, Dale Schuurmans, Mohammad Norouzi

The Neural Tangent Kernel in High Dimensions: Triple Descent and a Multi-Scale Theory of Generalization
Ben Adlam, Jeffrey Pennington

Private Query Release Assisted by Public Data
Raef Bassily, Albert Cheu, Shay Moran, Aleksandar Nikolov, Jonathan Ullman, Zhiwei Steven Wu

Learning and Evaluating Contextual Embedding of Source Code
Aditya Kanade, Petros Maniatis, Gogul Balakrishnan, Kensen Shi

Evaluating Machine Accuracy on ImageNet
Vaishaal Shankar, Rebecca Roelofs, Horia Mania, Alex Fang, Benjamin Recht, Ludwig Schmidt

Imputer: Sequence Modelling via Imputation and Dynamic Programming
William Chan, Chitwan Saharia, Geoffrey Hinton, Mohammad Norouzi, Navdeep Jaitly

Domain Aggregation Networks for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation
Junfeng Wen, Russell Greiner, Dale Schuurmans

Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models
Ramanan Sekar, Oleh Rybkin, Kostas Daniilidis, Pieter Abbeel, Danijar Hafner, Deepak Pathak

Context-Aware Dynamics Model for Generalization in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Kimin Lee, Younggyo Seo, Seunghyun Lee, Honglak Lee, Jinwoo Shin

Retro*: Learning Retrosynthetic Planning with Neural Guided A* Search
Binghong Chen, Chengtao Li, Hanjun Dai, Le Song

On the Consistency of Top-k Surrogate Losses
Forest Yang, Sanmi Koyejo

Dual Mirror Descent for Online Allocation Problems
Haihao Lu, Santiago Balseiro, Vahab Mirrokni

Efficient and Scalable Bayesian Neural Nets with Rank-1 Factors
Michael W. Dusenberry, Ghassen Jerfel, Yeming Wen, Yi-An Ma^†, Jasper Snoek, Katherine Heller, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Dustin Tran

Batch Stationary Distribution Estimation
Junfeng Wen, Bo Dai, Lihong Li, Dale Schuurmans

Small-GAN: Speeding Up GAN Training Using Core-Sets
Samarth Sinha, Han Zhang, Anirudh Goyal, Yoshua Bengio, Hugo Larochelle, Augustus Odena

Data Valuation Using Reinforcement Learning
Jinsung Yoon, Sercan ‎Ö. Arik, Tomas Pfister

A Game Theoretic Perspective on Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Aravind Rajeswaran, Igor Mordatch, Vikash Kumar

Encoding Musical Style with Transformer Autoencoders
Kristy Choi, Curtis Hawthorne, Ian Simon, Monica Dinculescu, Jesse Engel

The Shapley Taylor Interaction Index
Kedar Dhamdhere, Mukund Sundararajan, Ashish Agarwal

Multidimensional Shape Constraints
Maya Gupta^†, Erez Louidor, Olexander Mangylov^†, Nobu Morioka, Taman Narayan, Sen Zhao

Private Counting from Anonymous Messages: Near-Optimal Accuracy with Vanishing Communication Overhead
Badih Ghazi, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi, Rasmus Pagh

Learning to Score Behaviors for Guided Policy Optimization
Aldo Pacchiano, Jack Parker-Holder, Yunhao Tang, Anna Choromanska, Krzysztof Choromanski, Michael I. Jordan

Fundamental Tradeoffs between Invariance and Sensitivity to Adversarial Perturbations
Florian Tramèr, Jens Behrmann, Nicholas Carlini, Nicolas Papernot, Jörn-Henrik Jacobsen

Optimizing Black-Box Metrics with Adaptive Surrogates
Qijia Jiang, Olaoluwa Adigun, Harikrishna Narasimhan, Mahdi Milani Fard, Maya Gupta^†

Circuit-Based Intrinsic Methods to Detect Overfitting
Sat Chatterjee, Alan Mishchenko

Automatic Reparameterisation of Probabilistic Programs
Maria I. Gorinova, Dave Moore, Matthew D. Hoffman

Stochastic Flows and Geometric Optimization on the Orthogonal Group
Krzysztof Choromanski, David Cheikhi, Jared Davis, Valerii Likhosherstov, Achille Nazaret, Achraf Bahamou, Xingyou Song, Mrugank Akarte, Jack Parker-Holder, Jacob Bergquist, Yuan Gao, Aldo Pacchiano, Tamas Sarlos, Adrian Weller, Vikas Sindhwani

Black-Box Variational Inference as a Parametric Approximation to Langevin Dynamics
Matthew Hoffman, Yi-An Ma^†

Concise Explanations of Neural Networks Using Adversarial Training
Prasad Chalasani, Jiefeng Chen, Amrita Roy Chowdhury, Somesh Jha, Xi Wu

p-Norm Flow Diffusion for Local Graph Clustering
Shenghao Yang, Di Wang, Kimon Fountoulakis

Empirical Study of the Benefits of Overparameterization in Learning Latent Variable Models
Rares-Darius Buhai, Yoni Halpern, Yoon Kim, Andrej Risteski, David Sontag

Robust Pricing in Dynamic Mechanism Design
Yuan Deng, Sébastien Lahaie, Vahab Mirrokni

Differentiable Product Quantization for Learning Compact Embedding Layers
Ting Chen, Lala Li, Yizhou Sun

Adaptive Region-Based Active Learning
Corinna Cortes, Giulia DeSalvo, Claudio Gentile, Mehryar Mohri, Ningshan Zhang

Countering Language Drift with Seeded Iterated Learning
Yuchen Lu, Soumye Singhal, Florian Strub, Olivier Pietquin, Aaron Courville

Does Label Smoothing Mitigate Label Noise?
Michal Lukasik, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Aditya Krishna Menon, Sanjiv Kumar

Acceleration Through Spectral Density Estimation
Fabian Pedregosa, Damien Scieur

Momentum Improves Normalized SGD
Ashok Cutkosky, Harsh Mehta

ConQUR: Mitigating Delusional Bias in Deep Q-Learning
Andy Su, Jayden Ooi, Tyler Lu, Dale Schuurmans, Craig Boutilier

Online Learning with Imperfect Hints
Aditya Bhaskara, Ashok Cutkosky, Ravi Kumar, Manish Purohit

Go Wide, Then Narrow: Efficient Training of Deep Thin Networks
Denny Zhou, Mao Ye, Chen Chen, Tianjian Meng, Mingxing Tan, Xiaodan Song, Quoc Le, Qiang Liu, Dale Schuurmans

On Implicit Regularization in β-VAEs
Abhishek Kumar, Ben Poole

Is Local SGD Better than Minibatch SGD?
Blake Woodworth, Kumar Kshitij Patel, Sebastian U. Stich, Zhen Dai, Brian Bullins, H. Brendan McMahan, Ohad Shamir, Nathan Sreb

A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations
Ting Chen, Simon Kornblith, Mohammad Norouzi, Geoffrey Hinton

Universal Average-Case Optimality of Polyak Momentum
Damien Scieur, Fabian Pedregosa

An Imitation Learning Approach for Cache Replacement
Evan Zheran Liu, Milad Hashemi, Kevin Swersky, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Junwhan Ahn

Collapsed Amortized Variational Inference for Switching Nonlinear Dynamical Systems
Zhe Dong, Bryan A. Seybold, Kevin P. Murphy, Hung H. Bui

Beyond Synthetic Noise: Deep Learning on Controlled Noisy Labels
Lu Jiang, Di Huang, Mason Liu, Weilong Yang

Optimizing Data Usage via Differentiable Rewards
Xinyi Wang, Hieu Pham, Paul Michel, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Jaime Carbonell, Graham Neubig

Sparse Sinkhorn Attention
Yi Tay, Dara Bahri, Liu Yang, Donald Metzler, Da-Cheng Juan

One Policy to Control Them All: Shared Modular Policies for Agent-Agnostic Control
Wenlong Huang, Igor Mordatch, Deepak Pathak

On Thompson Sampling with Langevin Algorithms
Eric Mazumdar, Aldo Pacchiano, Yi-An Ma^†, Peter L. Bartlett, Michael I. Jordan

Good Subnetworks Provably Exist: Pruning via Greedy Forward Selection
Mao Ye, Chengyue Gong, Lizhen Nie, Denny Zhou, Adam Klivans, Qiang Liu

On the Global Convergence Rates of Softmax Policy Gradient Methods
Jincheng Mei, Chenjun Xiao, Csaba Szepesvari, Dale Schuurmans

Concept Bottleneck Models
Pang Wei Koh, Thao Nguyen, Yew Siang Tang, Stephen Mussmann, Emma Pierson, Been Kim, Percy Liang

Supervised Quantile Normalization for Low-Rank Matrix Approximation
Marco Cuturi, Olivier Teboul, Jonathan Niles-Weed, Jean-Philippe Vert

Missing Data Imputation Using Optimal Transport
Boris Muzellec, Julie Josse, Claire Boyer, Marco Cuturi

Learning to Combine Top-Down and Bottom-Up Signals in Recurrent Neural Networks with Attention Over Modules
Sarthak Mittal, Alex Lamb, Anirudh Goyal, Vikram Voleti, Murray Shanahan, Guillaume Lajoie, Michael Mozer, Yoshua Bengio

Stochastic Optimization for Regularized Wasserstein Estimators
Marin Ballu, Quentin Berthet, Francis Bach

Low-Rank Bottleneck in Multi-head Attention Models
Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Chulhee Yun, Ankit Singh Rawat, Sashank Jakkam Reddi, Sanjiv Kumar

Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners
Utku Evci, Trevor Gale, Jacob Menick, Pablo Samuel Castro, Erich Elsen

Online Learning with Dependent Stochastic Feedback Graphs
Corinna Cortes, Giulia DeSalvo, Claudio Gentile, Mehryar Mohri, Ningshan Zhang

Calibration, Entropy Rates, and Memory in Language Models
Mark Braverman, Xinyi Chen, Sham Kakade, Karthik Narasimhan, Cyril Zhang, Yi Zhang

Composable Sketches for Functions of Frequencies: Beyond the Worst Case
Edith Cohen, Ofir Geri, Rasmus Pagh

Energy-Based Processes for Exchangeable Data
Mengjiao Yang, Bo Dai, Hanjun Dai, Dale Schuurmans

Near-Optimal Regret Bounds for Stochastic Shortest Path
Alon Cohen, Haim Kaplan, Yishay Mansour, Aviv Rosenberg

PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization (see blog post)
Jingqing Zhang, Yao Zhao, Mohammad Saleh, Peter J. Liu

The Complexity of Finding Stationary Points with Stochastic Gradient Descent
Yoel Drori, Ohad Shamir

The k-tied Normal Distribution: A Compact Parameterization of Gaussian Mean Field Posteriors in Bayesian Neural Networks
Jakub Swiatkowski, Kevin Roth, Bas Veeling, Linh Tran, Josh Dillon, Stephan Mandt, Jasper Snoek, Tim Salimans, Rodolphe Jenatton, Sebastian Nowozin^†

Regularized Optimal Transport is Ground Cost Adversarial
François-Pierre Paty, Marco Cuturi

Workshops
New In ML
Invited Speaker: Nicolas Le Roux
Organizers: Zhen Xu, Sparkle Russell-Puleri, Zhengying Liu, Sinead A Williamson, Matthias W Seeger, Wei-Wei Tu, Samy Bengio, Isabelle Guyon

LatinX in AI
Workshop Advisor: Pablo Samuel Castro

Women in Machine Learning Un-Workshop
Invited Speaker: Doina Precup
Sponsor Expo Speaker: Jennifer Wei

Queer in AI
Invited Speaker: Shakir Mohamed

Workshop on Continual Learning
Organizers: Haytham Fayek, Arslan Chaudhry, David Lopez-Paz, Eugene Belilovsky, Jonathan Schwarz, Marc Pickett, Rahaf Aljundi, Sayna Ebrahimi, Razvan Pascanu, Puneet Dokania

5th ICML Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (WHI)
Organizers: Kush Varshney, Adrian Weller, Alice Xiang, Amit Dhurandhar, Been Kim, Dennis Wei, Umang Bhatt

Self-supervision in Audio and Speech
Organizers: Mirco Ravanelli, Dmitriy Serdyuk, R Devon Hjelm, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Titouan Parcollet

Workshop on eXtreme Classification: Theory and Applications
Invited Speakers: Sanjiv Kumar

Healthcare Systems, Population Health, and the Role of Health-tech
Organizers: Krzysztof Choromanski, David Cheikhi, Jared Davis, Valerii Likhosherstov, Achille Nazaret, Achraf Bahamou, Xingyou Song, Mrugank Akarte, Jack Parker-Holder, Jacob Bergquist, Yuan Gao, Aldo Pacchiano, Tamas Sarlos, Adrian Weller, Vikas Sindhwani

Theoretical Foundations of Reinforcement Learning
Program Committee: Alon Cohen, Chris Dann

Uncertainty and Robustness in Deep Learning Workshop (UDL)
Invited Speaker: Justin Gilmer

Organizers: Sharon Li, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Dan Hendrycks, Thomas Dietterich, Jasper Snoek
Program Committee: Jeremiah Liu, Jie Ren, Rodolphe Jenatton, Zack Nado, Alexander Alemi, Florian Wenzel, Mike Dusenberry, Raphael Lopes

Beyond First Order Methods in Machine Learning Systems
Industry Panel: Jonathan Hseu

Object-Oriented Learning: Perception, Representation, and Reasoning
Invited Speakers: Thomas Kipf, Igor Mordatch

Graph Representation Learning and Beyond (GRL+)
Organizers: Michael Bronstein, Andreea Deac, William L. Hamilton, Jessica B. Hamrick, Milad Hashemi, Stefanie Jegelka, Jure Leskovec, Renjie Liao, Federico Monti, Yizhou Sun, Kevin Swersky, Petar Veličković, Rex Ying, Marinka Žitnik
Speakers: Thomas Kipf
Program Committee: Bryan Perozzi, Kevin Swersky, Milad Hashemi, Thomas Kipf, Ting Cheng

ML Interpretability for Scientific Discovery
Organizers: Subhashini Venugopalan, Michael Brenner, Scott Linderman, Been Kim
Program Committee: Akinori Mitani, Arunachalam Narayanaswamy, Avinash Varadarajan, Awa Dieng, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Bo Dai, Stephan Hoyer, Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Suhani Vora
Steering Committee: John Platt, Mukund Sundararajan, Jon Kleinberg

Negative Dependence and Submodularity for Machine Learning
Organizers: Zelda Mariet, Mike Gartrell, Michal Derezinski

7th ICML Workshop on Automated Machine Learning (AutoML)
Organizers: Charles Weill, Katharina Eggensperger, Matthias Feurer, Frank Hutter, Marius Lindauer, Joaquin Vanschoren

Federated Learning for User Privacy and Data Confidentiality
Keynote: Brendan McMahan
Program Committee: Peter Kairouz, Jakub Konecný

MLRetrospectives: A Venue for Self-Reflection in ML Research
Speaker: Margaret Mitchell

Machine Learning for Media Discovery
Speaker: Ed Chi

INNF+: Invertible Neural Networks, Normalizing Flows, and Explicit Likelihood Models
Organizers: Chin-Wei Huang, David Krueger, Rianne van den Berg, George Papamakarios, Chris Cremer, Ricky Chen, Danilo Rezende

4th Lifelong Learning Workshop
Program Committee: George Tucker, Marlos C. Machado

2nd ICML Workshop on Human in the Loop Learning (HILL)
Organizers: Shanghang Zhang, Xin Wang, Fisher Yu, Jiajun Wu, Trevor Darrell

Machine Learning for Global Health
Organizers: Danielle Belgrave, Danielle Belgrave, Stephanie Hyland, Charles Onu, Nicholas Furnham, Ernest Mwebaze, Neil Lawrence

Committee
Social Chair: Adam White

^†Work performed while at Google

Read More

Posted by Yang Li, Research Scientist, Google Research

Mobile devices offer a myriad of functionalities that can assist in everyday activities. However, many of these functionalities are not easily discoverable or accessible to users, forcing users to look up how to perform a specific task — how to turn on the traffic mode in Maps or change notification settings in YouTube, for example. While searching the web for detailed instructions for these questions is an option, it is still up to the user to follow these instructions step-by-step and navigate UI details through a small touchscreen, which can be tedious and time consuming, and results in reduced accessibility. What if one could design a computational agent to turn these language instructions into actions and automatically execute them on the user’s behalf?

In “Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences”, published at ACL 2020, we present the first step towards addressing the problem of automatic action sequence mapping, creating three new datasets used to train deep learning models that ground natural language instructions to executable mobile UI actions. This work lays the technical foundation for task automation on mobile devices that would alleviate the need to maneuver through UI details, which may be especially valuable for users who are visually or situationally impaired. We have also open-sourced our model code and data pipelines through our GitHub repository, in order to spur further developments among the research community.

Constructing Language Grounding Models
People often provide one another with instructions in order to coordinate joint efforts and accomplish tasks involving complex sequences of actions, for example, following a recipe to bake a cake, or having a friend walk you through setting up a home network. Building computational agents able to help with similar interactions is an important goal that requires true language grounding in the environments in which the actions take place.

The learning task addressed here is to predict a sequence of actions for a mobile platform given a set of instructions, a sequence of screens produced as the system transitions from one screen to another, as well as the set of interactive elements on those screens. Training such a model end-to-end would require paired language-action data, which is difficult to acquire at a large scale.

Instead, we deconstruct the problem into two sequential steps: an action phrase-extraction step and a grounding step.

The workflow of grounding language instructions to executable actions.

The action phrase-extraction step identifies the operation, object and argument descriptions from multi-step instructions using a Transformer model with area attention for representing each description phrase. Area attention allows the model to attend to a group of adjacent words in the instruction (a span) as a whole for decoding a description.

The action phrase extraction model takes a word sequence of a natural language instruction and outputs a sequence of spans (denoted in red boxes) that indicate the phrases describing the operation, the object and the argument of each action in the task.

Next, the grounding step matches the extracted operation and object descriptions with a UI object on the screen. Again, we use a Transformer model, but in this case, it contextually represents UI objects and grounds object descriptions to them.

The grounding model takes the extracted spans as input and grounds them to executable actions, including the object an action is applied to, given the UI screen at each step during execution.

Results
To investigate the feasibility of this task and the effectiveness of our approach, we construct three new datasets to train and evaluate our model. The first dataset includes 187 multi-step English instructions for operating Pixel phones along their corresponding action-screen sequences and enables assessment of full task performance on naturally occurring instructions, which is used for testing end-to-end grounding quality. For action phrase extraction training and evaluation, we obtain English “how-to” instructions that can be found abundantly from the web and annotate phrases that describe each action. To train the grounding model, we synthetically generate 295K single-step commands to UI actions, covering 178K different UI objects across 25K mobile UI screens from a public android UI corpus.

A Transformer with area attention obtains 85.56% accuracy for predicting span sequences that completely match the ground truth. The phrase extractor and grounding model together obtain 89.21% partial and 70.59% complete accuracy for matching ground-truth action sequences on the more challenging task of mapping language instructions to executable actions end-to-end. We also evaluated alternative methods and representations of UI objects, such as using a graph convolutional network (GCN) or a feedforward network, and found those that can represent an object contextually in the screen lead to better grounding accuracy. The new datasets, models and results provide an important first step on the challenging problem of grounding natural language instructions to mobile UI actions.

Conclusion
This research, and language grounding in general, is an important step for translating multi-stage instructions into actions on a graphical user interface. Successful application of task automation to the UI domain has the potential to significantly improve accessibility, where language interfaces might help individuals who are visually impaired perform tasks with interfaces that are predicated on sight. This also matters for situational impairment when one cannot access a device easily while encumbered by tasks at hand.

By deconstructing the problem into action phrase extraction and language grounding, progress on either can improve full task performance and it alleviates the need to have language-action paired datasets, which are difficult to collect at scale. For example, action span extraction is related to both semantic role labeling and extraction of multiple facts from text and could benefit from innovations in span identification and multitask learning. Reinforcement learning that has been applied in previous grounding work may help improve out-of-sample prediction for grounding in UIs and improve direct grounding from hidden state representations. Although our datasets were based on Android UIs, our approach can be applied generally to instruction grounding on other user interface platforms. Lastly, our work provides a technical foundation for investigating user experiences in language-based human computer interaction.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my collaborators on this work at Google Research. Xin Zhou and Jiacong He contributed substantially to the data pipelines and the creation of the datasets. Yuan Zhang and Jason Baldridge provided much valuable advice for the project and contributed to the presentation of the work. Gang Li provided generous help for creating open-source datasets. Many thanks to Ashwin Kakarla, Muqthar Mohammad and Mohd Majeed for their help with the annotations.

Read More

Read More

Posted by Esteban Real, Staff Software Engineer, and Chen Liang, Software Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team

Machine learning (ML) has seen tremendous successes recently, which were made possible by ML algorithms like deep neural networks that were discovered through years of expert research. The difficulty involved in this research fueled AutoML, a field that aims to automate the design of ML algorithms. So far, AutoML has focused on constructing solutions by combining sophisticated hand-designed components. A typical example is that of neural architecture search, a subfield in which one builds neural networks automatically out of complex layers (e.g., convolutions, batch-norm, and dropout), and the topic of much research.

An alternative approach to using these hand-designed components in AutoML is to search for entire algorithms from scratch. This is challenging because it requires the exploration of vast and sparse search spaces, yet it has great potential benefits — it is not biased toward what we already know and potentially allows for the discovery of new and better ML architectures. By analogy, if one were building a house from scratch, there is more potential for flexibility or improvement than if one was constructing a house using only prefabricated rooms. However, the discovery of such housing designs may be more difficult because there are many more possible ways to combine the bricks and mortar than there are of combining pre-made designs of entire rooms. As such, early research into algorithm learning from scratch focused on one aspect of the algorithm, to reduce the search space and compute required, such as the learning rule, and has not been revisited much since the early 90s. Until now.

Extending our research into evolutionary AutoML, our recent paper, to be published at ICML 2020, demonstrates that it is possible to successfully evolve ML algorithms from scratch. The approach we propose, called AutoML-Zero, starts from empty programs and, using only basic mathematical operations as building blocks, applies evolutionary methods to automatically find the code for complete ML algorithms. Given small image classification problems, our method rediscovered fundamental ML techniques, such as 2-layer neural networks with backpropagation, linear regression and the like, which have been invented by researchers throughout the years. This result demonstrates the plausibility of automatically discovering more novel ML algorithms to address harder problems in the future.

Evolving Learning Algorithms from Scratch
We use a variant of classic evolutionary methods to search the space of algorithms. These methods have proved useful in discovering computer programs since the 80s. Their simplicity and scalability makes them especially suitable for the discovery of learning algorithms.

In our case, a population is initialized with empty programs. It then evolves in repeating cycles to produce better and better learning algorithms. At each cycle, two (or more) random models compete and the most accurate model gets to be a parent. The parent clones itself to produce a child, which gets mutated. That is, the child’s code is modified in a random way, which could mean, for example, arbitrarily inserting, removing or modifying a line in the code. The mutated algorithm is then evaluated on image classification tasks.

A population is initialized with empty programs. Many generations later, we see a more evolved population and two of its algorithms compete. The most accurate wins to produce a child. After many such events, the final population contains highly accurate classifiers.

Exploring a Difficult Search Space
Our AutoML-Zero setup, in contrast to much previous AutoML work, makes the search space very sparse — an accurate algorithm might be as rare as 1 in 10¹² candidates. This is due to the granularity of the building blocks provided to the algorithm, which include only basic operations such as variable assignment, addition, and matrix multiplication. In such an environment, a random search will not find a solution in a reasonable amount of time, yet evolution can be tens of thousands of times faster, according to our measurements. We distributed the search on multiple machines that occasionally exchange algorithms (analogous to migration in real life). We also constructed small proxy classification tasks on which to evaluate each child algorithm, and executed this evaluation with highly optimized code.

Despite the sparsity, the evolutionary search discovers more complex and effective techniques as time passes. Initially, the simplest algorithms appear, which represent linear models with hard-coded weights. In time, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is invented to learn the weights, in spite of the gradient itself not having been provided as a building block. Though flawed at first, SGD gets fixed relatively quickly, starting a series of improvements to the prediction and learning algorithm. Within our toy scenario, the process discovers several concepts known to have been useful to the research community. In the end, our approach manages to construct a model that outperforms hand-designs of comparable complexity.

Progress of an evolution experiment. As time passes, from left to right, we see the algorithms becoming more complex and more accurate.

The Evolved Algorithm
The figure above includes the best evolved algorithm produced by our method. This final algorithm includes techniques such as noise injection as data augmentation, bilinear model, gradient normalization, and weight averaging, and the improvement over the baseline also transfers to datasets that are not used during search. Our paper describes how the different lines in the evolved code implement each of these techniques, and verifies their value through ablation studies.

Through more experiments, we show that it is possible to guide the evolutionary search by controlling “the habitat” — i.e., the tasks on which the evolutionary process evaluates the fitness of the algorithms. For example, when we reduce the amount of data, the noisy ReLU emerges, which helps with regularization. Or when we reduce the number of training steps, we witness the emergence of learning rate decay, which enables faster convergence. Targeted discoveries such as these are important — while it may be interesting if an automatic tool-inventing machine comes up with a hammer or a needle, it is much more interesting if it comes up with a hammer when you show it some nails and a needle when you show it some thread. By analogy, in our work the noisy ReLU (“hammer”) is discovered when in the presence of little data (“nails”) and the learning rate decay when in the presence of few training steps.

Conclusion
We consider this to be preliminary work. We have yet to evolve fundamentally new algorithms, but it is encouraging that the evolved algorithm can surpass simple neural networks that exist within the search space. Right now, the search process requires significant compute.^* As the coming years scale up available hardware and as the search methods become more efficient, it is likely that the search space will become more inclusive and the results will improve. We are excited at the prospects of discovering novel machine learning algorithms as we further our understanding of AutoML-Zero.

Acknowledgements
We want to thank our co-authors, David R. So and Quoc V. Le, and the many who helped us through discussions during the project and paper writing, including Samy Bengio, Vincent Vanhoucke, Doug Eck, Charles Sutton, Yanping Huang, Jacques Pienaar, Jeff Dean, and particularly Gabriel Bender, Hanxiao Liu, Rishabh Singh, Chiyuan Zhang, and Hieu Pham. We also want to especially thank Tom Small for contributing the animations in this post.

* The electricity consumption for the experiments (run in 2019) was matched with the purchase of renewable energy. ↩

Read More

Why is this field of work so important?

Machine learning is such a powerful tool, and because of that, you want to make sure you’re using it responsibly. Let’s take an electric machine saw as an example. It’s a super powerful tool, but you need to learn how to use it in order not to cut your fingers. Once you learn, it’s so useful and efficient that you’ll never want to go back to using a hand saw. And the same goes for machine learning. We want to help you understand and use machine learning correctly, fairly and safely. 

Since machine learning is used in our everyday lives, it’s also important for everyone to understand how it impacts us. No matter whether you’re a coffee shop owner using machine learning to optimize the purchase of your beans based on seasonal trends, or your doctor diagnoses you with a disease with the help of this technology, it’s often crucial to understand why a machine learning model has produced the outcome it has. It’s also important for developers and decision-makers to be able to explain or present a machine learning model to people in order to do so. This is what we call “interpretability.” 

How do you make machine learning models easier to understand and interpret? 

There are many different ways to make an ML model easier to understand. One way is to make the model reflect how humans think from the start, and have the model “trained” to provide explanations along with predictions, meaning when it gives you an outcome, it also has to explain how it got there. 

Another way is to try and explain a model after the training on data is done. This is something you can do when the model has been built to use input to provide an output from its own perspective, optimizing for prediction, without a clear “how” included. This means you’re able to plug things into it and see what comes out, and that can give you some insight into how the model generally makes decisions, but you don’t necessarily know exactly how specific inputs are interpreted by the model in specific cases. 

One way to try and explain models after they’ve been trained is using low level features or high level concepts. Let me give you an example of what this means. Imagine a system that classifies pictures: you give it a picture and it says, “This is a cat.” A low level feature is when I then ask the machine which pixels mattered for that prediction, it can tell us if it was one pixel or the other, and we might be able to see that the pixels in question show the cat’s whiskers. But we might also see that it is a scattering of pixels that don’t appear meaningful to the human eye, or that it’s made the wrong interpretation. High level concepts are more similar to the way humans communicate with one another. Instead of asking about pixels, I’d ask, “Did the whiskers matter for the prediction? or the paws?” and again, the machine can show me what imagery led it to reach this conclusion. Based on the outcome, I can understand the model better. (Together with researchers from Stanford, we’ve published papers that go into further detail on this for those who are interested.)

Can machines understand some things that we humans can’t? 

Yes! This is an area that I am very interested in myself. I am currently working on a way to showcase how technology can help humans learn new things. Machine learning technology is better at some things than we are; for example it can analyze and interpret data at a much larger scale than humans can. Leveraging this technology, I believe we can enlighten human scientists with knowledge they haven’t previously been aware of. 

What do you need to be careful of when you’re making conclusions based on machine learning models?

First of all, we have to be careful that human bias doesn’t come into play. Humans carry biases that we simply cannot help and are often unaware of, so if an explanation is up to a human’s interpretation, and often it is, then we have a problem. Humans read what they want to read. Now, this doesn’t mean that you should remove humans from the loop. Humans communicate with machines, and vice versa. Machines need to communicate their outcomes in the form of a clear statement using quantitative data, not one that is vague and completely open for interpretation. If the latter happens, then the machine hasn’t done a very good job and the human isn’t able to provide good feedback to the machine. It could also be that the outcome simply lacks additional context only the human can provide, or that it could benefit from having caveats, in order for them to make an informed judgement about the results of the model. 

What are some of the main challenges of this work? 

Well, one of the challenges for computer scientists in this field is dealing with non mathematical objectives, which are things you might want to optimize for, but don’t have an equation for. You can’t always define what is good for humans using math. That requires us to test and evaluate methods with rigor, and have a table full of different people to discuss the outcome. Another thing has to do with complexity. Humans are so complex that we have a whole field of work – psychology – to study this. So in my work, we don’t just have computational challenges, but also complex humans that we have to consider. Value-based questions such as “what defines fairness?” are even harder. They require interdisciplinary collaboration, and a diverse group of people in the room to discuss each individual matter.

What’s the most exciting part? 

I think interpretability research and methods are making a huge impact. Machine learning technology is a powerful tool that will transform society as we know it, and helping others to use it safely is very rewarding. 

On a more personal note, I come from South Korea and grew up in circumstances where I feel I didn’t have too many opportunities. I was incredibly lucky to get a scholarship to MIT and come to the U.S. When I think about the people who haven’t had these opportunities to be educated in science or machine learning, and knowing that this machine learning technology can really help and be useful to them in their everyday lives if they use it safely, I feel really motivated to be working on democratizing this technology. There’s many ways to do it, and interpretability is one of the things that I can contribute with.  

Read More

Posted by Ofir Nachum and Bo Dai, Research Scientists, Google Research

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an approach commonly used to train agents to make sequences of decisions that will be successful in complex environments, including for example, settings such as robotic navigation, where an agent controls the joint motors of a robot to seek a path to a target location, or game-playing, where the goal might be to solve a game level in minimal time. Many modern successful RL algorithms, such as Q-learning and actor-critic, propose to reduce the RL problem to a constraint-satisfaction problem, where a constraint exists for every possible “state” of the environment. For example, in vision-based robotic navigation, the “states” of the environment correspond to every possible camera input.

Despite how ubiquitous the constraint-satisfaction approach is in practice, this strategy is often difficult to reconcile with the complexity of real-world settings. In practical scenarios (like the robotic navigation example) the space of states is large, sometimes even uncountable, so how can one learn to satisfy the tremendous number of constraints associated with arbitrary input? Implementations of Q-learning and actor-critic often ignore these mathematical issues or obscure them through a series of rough approximations, which results in a stark divide between the practical implementations of these algorithms and their mathematical foundations.

In “Reinforcement Learning via Fenchel-Rockafellar Duality” we have developed a new approach to RL that enables algorithms that are both useful in practice and mathematically principled — that is to say, the proposed algorithms avoid the use of exceedingly rough approximations to translate their mathematical foundations to practical implementation. This approach is based on convex duality, which is a well-studied mathematical tool used to transform problems expressed in one form into equivalent problems in distinct forms that may be more computationally friendly. In our case, we develop specific ways to apply duality in RL to transform the traditional constraint-satisfaction mathematical form to an unconstrained, and thus more practical, mathematical problem.

A Duality-Based Solution
The duality-based approach begins by formulating the reinforcement learning problem as a mathematical objective along with a number of constraints, potentially infinite in number. Applying duality to this mathematical problem yields a different formulation of the same problem. Still, this dual formulation has the same format as the original problem — a single objective with a large number of constraints — although the specific objective and constraints are changed.

The next step is key to the duality-based solution. We augment the dual objective with a convex regularizer, a method often used in optimization as a way to smooth a problem and make it easier to solve. The choice of the regularizer is crucial to the final step, in which we apply duality once again to yield another formulation of an equivalent problem. In our case, we use the f-divergence regularizer, which results in a final formulation that is now unconstrained. Although there exist other choices of convex regularizers, regularization via the f-divergence is uniquely desirable for yielding an unconstrained problem that is especially amenable to optimization in practical and real-world settings which require off-policy or offline learning.

Notably in many cases, the applications of duality and regularization prescribed by the duality-based approach do not change the optimality of the original solution. In other words, although the form of the problem has changed, the solution has not. This way, the result obtained with the new formulation is the same result as for the original problem, albeit achieved in a much easier way.

Experimental Evaluation
As a test of our new approach, we implemented duality-based training on a navigational agent. The agent starts at one corner of a multi-room map and must navigate to the opposite corner. We compare our algorithm to an actor-critic approach. Although both of these algorithms are based on the same underlying mathematical problem, actor-critic uses a number of approximations due to the infeasibility of satisfying the large number of constraints. In contrast, our algorithm is more amenable to practical implementation as can be seen by comparing the performance of the two algorithms. In the figure below, we plot the average reward achieved by the learned agent against the number of iterations of training for each algorithm. The duality-based implementation achieves significantly higher reward compared to actor-critic.

A plot of the average reward achieved by an agent using the duality-based approach (blue) compared to an agent using standard actor-critic (orange). In addition to being more mathematically principled, our approach also yields better practical results.

Conclusion
In summary, we’ve shown that if one formulates the RL problem as a mathematical objective with constraints, then repeated applications of convex duality in conjunction with a cleverly chosen convex regularizer yield an equivalent problem without constraints. The resulting unconstrained problem is easy to implement in practice and applicable in a wide range of settings. We’ve already applied our general framework to agent behavior policy optimization as well as policy evaluation, and imitation learning. We’ve found that our algorithms are not only more mathematically principled than existing RL methods, but they also often yield better practical performance, showing the value of unifying mathematical principles with practical implementation.

Read More

Posted by Cat Armato and Emily Knapp, Program Managers

This week, the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2020), a premier conference covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language, takes place online.

As a leader in natural language processing and understanding, and a Diamond Level sponsor of ACL 2020, Google will showcase the latest research in the field with over 30 publications, and the organization of and participation in a variety of workshops and tutorials.

If you’re registered for ACL 2020, we hope that you’ll visit the Google virtual booth to learn more about the projects and opportunities at Google that go into solving interesting problems for billions of people. You can also learn more about the Google research being presented at ACL 2020 below (Google affiliations bolded).

Committees
Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) Chair: Vinodkumar Prabhakaran
Accessibility Chair: Sushant Kafle
Local Sponsorship Chair: Kristina Toutanova
Virtual Infrastructure Committee: Yi Luan
Area Chairs: Anders Søgaard, Ankur Parikh, Annie Louis, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, Christo Kirov, Daniel Cer, Dipanjan Das, Diyi Yang, Emily Pitler, Eunsol Choi, George Foster, Idan Szpektor, Jacob Eisenstein, Jason Baldridge, Jun Suzuki, Kenton Lee, Luheng He, Marius Pasca, Ming-Wei Chang, Sebastian Gehrmann, Shashi Narayan, Slav Petrov, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Waleed Ammar, William Cohen

Long Papers
Cross-modal Language Generation using Pivot Stabilization for Web-scale Language Coverage
Ashish V. Thapliyal, Radu Soricut

Automatic Detection of Generated Text is Easiest when Humans are Fooled
Daphne Ippolito, Daniel Duckworth, Chris Callison-Burch, Douglas Eck

On Faithfulness and Factuality in Abstractive Summarization
Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, Bernd Bohnet, Ryan McDonald

MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices
Zhiqing Sun, Hongkun Yu, Xiaodan Song, Renjie Liu, Yiming Yang, Denny Zhou

BabyWalk: Going Farther in Vision-and-Language Navigation by Taking Baby Steps
Wang Zhu, Hexiang Hu, Jiacheng Chen, Zhiwei Deng, Vihan Jain, Eugene Ie, Fei Sha

Dynamic Programming Encoding for Subword Segmentation in Neural Machine Translation
Xuanli He, Gholamreza Haffari, Mohammad Norouzi

GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions
Dorottya Demszky, Dana Movshovitz-Attias, Jeongwoo Ko, Alan Cowen, Gaurav Nemade, Sujith Ravi

TaPas: Weakly Supervised Table Parsing via Pre-training (see blog post)
Jonathan Herzig, Pawel Krzysztof Nowak, Thomas Müller, Francesco Piccinno, Julian Eisenschlos

Toxicity Detection: Does Context Really Matter?
John Pavlopoulos, Jeffrey Sorensen, Lucas Dixon, Nithum Thain, Ion Androutsopoulos

(Re)construing Meaning in NLP
Sean Trott, Tiago Timponi Torrent, Nancy Chang, Nathan Schneider

Pretraining with Contrastive Sentence Objectives Improves Discourse Performance of Language Models
Dan Iter, Kelvin Guu, Larry Lansing, Dan Jurafsky

Probabilistic Assumptions Matter: Improved Models for Distantly-Supervised Document-Level Question Answering
Hao Cheng, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova

AdvAug: Robust Adversarial Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation
Yong Cheng, Lu Jiang, Wolfgang Macherey, Jacob Eisenstein

Named Entity Recognition as Dependency Parsing
Juntao Yu, Bernd Bohnet, Massimo Poesio

Cross-modal Coherence Modeling for Caption Generation
Malihe Alikhani, Piyush Sharma, Shengjie Li, Radu Soricut, Matthew Stone

Representation Learning for Information Extraction from Form-like Documents (see blog post)
Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Navneet Potti, Sandeep Tata, James Bradley Wendt, Qi Zhao, Marc Najork

Low-Dimensional Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Ines Chami, Adva Wolf, Da-Cheng Juan, Frederic Sala, Sujith Ravi, Christopher Ré

What Question Answering can Learn from Trivia Nerds
Jordan Boyd-Graber, Benjamin Börschinger

Learning a Multi-Domain Curriculum for Neural Machine Translation (see blog post)
Wei Wang, Ye Tian, Jiquan Ngiam, Yinfei Yang, Isaac Caswell, Zarana Parekh

Translationese as a Language in “Multilingual” NMT
Parker Riley, Isaac Caswell, Markus Freitag, David Grangier

Mapping Natural Language Instructions to Mobile UI Action Sequences
Yang Li, Jiacong He, Xin Zhou, Yuan Zhang, Jason Baldridge

BLEURT: Learning Robust Metrics for Text Generation (see blog post)
Thibault Sellam, Dipanjan Das, Ankur Parikh

Exploring Unexplored Generalization Challenges for Cross-Database Semantic Parsing
Alane Suhr, Ming-Wei Chang, Peter Shaw, Kenton Lee

Frugal Paradigm Completion
Alexander Erdmann, Tom Kenter, Markus Becker, Christian Schallhart

Short Papers
Reverse Engineering Configurations of Neural Text Generation Models
Yi Tay, Dara Bahri, Che Zheng, Clifford Brunk, Donald Metzler, Andrew Tomkins

Syntactic Data Augmentation Increases Robustness to Inference Heuristics
Junghyun Min, R. Thomas McCoy, Dipanjan Das, Emily Pitler, Tal Linzen

Leveraging Monolingual Data with Self-Supervision for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Aditya Siddhant, Ankur Bapna, Yuan Cao, Orhan Firat, Mia Chen, Sneha Kudugunta, Naveen Arivazhagan, Yonghui Wu

Social Biases in NLP Models as Barriers for Persons with Disabilities
Ben Hutchinson, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Emily Denton, Kellie Webster, Yu Zhong, Stephen Denuyl

Toward Better Storylines with Sentence-Level Language Models
Daphne Ippolito, David Grangier, Douglas Eck, Chris Callison-Burch

TACL Papers
TYDI QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages (see blog post)
Jonathan H. Clark, Eunsol Choi, Michael Collins, Dan Garrette, Tom Kwiatkowski, Vitaly Nikolaev, Jennimaria Palomaki

Phonotactic Complexity and Its Trade-offs
Tiago Pimentel, Brian Roark, Ryan Cotterell

Demos
Multilingual Universal Sentence Encoder for Semantic Retrieval (see blog post)
Yinfei Yang, Daniel Cer, Amin Ahmad, Mandy Guo, Jax Law, Noah Constant, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Steve Yuan, Chris Tar, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Brian Strope, Ray Kurzweil

Workshops
IWPT – The 16th International Conference on Parsing Technologies
Yuji Matsumoto, Stephan Oepen, Kenji Sagae, Anders Søgaard, Weiwei Sun and Reut Tsarfaty

ALVR – Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research
Xin Wang, Jesse Thomason, Ronghang Hu, Xinlei Chen, Peter Anderson, Qi Wu, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Baldridge and William Yang Wang

WNGT – The 4th Workshop on Neural Generation and Translation
Alexandra Birch, Graham Neubig, Andrew Finch, Hiroaki Hayashi, Kenneth Heafield, Ioannis Konstas, Yusuke Oda and Xian Li

NLPMC – NLP for Medical Conversations
Parminder Bhatia, Chaitanya Shivade, Mona Diab, Byron Wallace, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, Nan Du, Izhak Shafran and Steven Lin

AutoSimTrans – The 1st Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation
Hua Wu, Colin Cherry, James Cross, Liang Huang, Zhongjun He, Mark Liberman and Yang Liu

Tutorials
Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP (cutting-edge)
Yonatan Belinkov, Sebastian Gehrmann, Ellie Pavlick

Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Processing (Introductory)
Maarten Sap, Vered Shwartz, Antoine Bosselut, Yejin Choi, Dan Roth

Posted by Rami Al-Rfou, Research Scientist, Google Research

It has been more than 4 years since SmartReply was launched, and since then, it has expanded to more users with the Gmail launch and Android Messages and to more devices with Android Wear. Developers now use SmartReply to respond to reviews within the Play Developer Console and can set up their own versions using APIs offered within MLKit and TFLite. With each launch there has been a unique challenge in modeling and serving that required customizing SmartReply for the task requirements.

We are now excited to share an updated SmartReply built for YouTube and implemented in YouTube Studio that helps creators engage more easily with their viewers. This model learns comment and reply representation through a computationally efficient dilated self-attention network, and represents the first cross-lingual and character byte-based SmartReply model. SmartReply for YouTube is currently available for English and Spanish creators, and this approach simplifies the process of extending the SmartReply feature to many more languages in the future.

YouTube creators receive a large volume of responses to their videos. Moreover, the community of creators and viewers on YouTube is diverse, as reflected by the creativity of their comments, discussions and videos. In comparison to emails, which tend to be long and dominated by formal language, YouTube comments reveal complex patterns of language switching, abbreviated words, slang, inconsistent usage of punctuation, and heavy utilization of emoji. Following is a sample of comments that illustrate this challenge:

Deep Retrieval
The initial release of SmartReply for Inbox encoded input emails word-by-word with a recurrent neural network, and then decoded potential replies with yet another word-level recurrent neural network. Despite the expressivity of this approach, it was computationally expensive. Instead, we found that one can achieve the same ends by designing a system that searches through a predefined list of suggestions for the most appropriate response.

This retrieval system encoded the message and its suggestion independently. First, the text was preprocessed to extract words and short phrases. This preprocessing included, but was not limited to, language identification, tokenization, and normalization. Two neural networks then simultaneously and independently encoded the message and the suggestion. This factorization allowed one to pre-compute the suggestion encodings and then search through the set of suggestions using an efficient maximum inner product search data structure. This deep retrieval approach enabled us to expand SmartReply to Gmail and since then, it has been the foundation for several SmartReply systems including the current YouTube system.

Beyond Words
The previous SmartReply systems described above relied on word level preprocessing that is well tuned for a limited number of languages and narrow genres of writing. Such systems face significant challenges in the YouTube case, where a typical comment might include heterogeneous content, like emoji, ASCII art, language switching, etc. In light of this, and taking inspiration from our recent work on byte and character language modeling, we decided to encode the text without any preprocessing. This approach is supported by research demonstrating that a deep Transformer network is able to model words and phrases from the ground up just by feeding it text as a sequence of characters or bytes, with comparable quality to word-based models.

Although initial results were promising, especially for processing comments with emoji or typos, the inference speed was too slow for production due to the fact that character sequences are longer than word equivalents and the computational complexity of self-attention layers grows quadratically as a function of sequence length. We found that shrinking the sequence length by applying temporal reduction layers at each layer of the network, similar to the dilation technique applied in WaveNet, provides a good trade-off between computation and quality.

The figure below presents a dual encoder network that encodes both the comment and the reply to maximize the mutual information between their latent representations by training the network with a contrastive objective. The encoding starts with feeding the transformer a sequence of bytes after they have been embedded. The input for each subsequent layer will be reduced by dropping a percentage of characters at equal offsets. After applying several transformer layers the sequence length is greatly truncated, significantly reducing the computational complexity. This sequence compression scheme could be substituted by other operators such as average pooling, though we did not notice any gains from more sophisticated methods, and therefore, opted to use dilation for simplicity.

A dual encoder network that maximizes the mutual information between the comments and their replies through a contrastive objective. Each encoder is fed a sequence of bytes and is implemented as a computationally efficient dilated transformer network.

A Model to Learn Them All
Instead of training a separate model for each language, we opted to train a single cross-lingual model for all supported languages. This allows the support of mixed-language usage in the comments, and enables the model to utilize the learning of common elements in one language for understanding another, such as emoji and numbers. Moreover, having a single model simplifies the logistics of maintenance and updates. While the model has been rolled out to English and Spanish, the flexibility inherent in this approach will enable it to be expanded to other languages in the future.

Inspecting the encodings of a multilingual set of suggestions produced by the model reveals that the model clusters appropriate replies, regardless of the language to which they belong. This cross-lingual capability emerged without exposing the model during training to any parallel corpus. We demonstrate in the figure below for three languages how the replies are clustered by their meaning when the model is probed with an input comment. For example, the English comment “This is a great video,” is surrounded by appropriate replies, such as “Thanks!” Moreover, inspection of the nearest replies in other languages reveal them also to be appropriate and similar in meaning to the English reply. The 2D projection also shows several other cross-lingual clusters that consist of replies of similar meaning. This clustering demonstrates how the model can support a rich cross-lingual user experience in the supported languages.

A 2D projection of the model encodings when presented with a hypothetical comment and a small list of potential replies. The neighborhood surrounding English comments (black color) consists of appropriate replies in English and their counterparts in Spanish and Arabic. Note that the network learned to align English replies with their translations without access to any parallel corpus.

When to Suggest?
Our goal is to help creators, so we have to make sure that SmartReply only makes suggestions when it is very likely to be useful. Ideally, suggestions would only be displayed when it is likely that the creator would reply to the comment and when the model has a high chance of providing a sensible and specific response. To accomplish this, we trained auxiliary models to identify which comments should trigger the SmartReply feature.

Conclusion
We’ve launched YouTube SmartReply, starting with English and Spanish comments, the first cross-lingual and character byte-based SmartReply. YouTube is a global product with a diverse user base that generates heterogeneous content. Consequently, it is important that we continuously improve comments for this global audience, and SmartReply represents a strong step in this direction.

Acknowledgements
SmartReply for YouTube creators was developed by Golnaz Farhadi, Ezequiel Baril, Cheng Lee, Claire Yuan, Coty Morrison‎, Joe Simunic‎, Rachel Bransom‎, Rajvi Mehta, Jorge Gonzalez‎, Mark Williams, Uma Roy and many more. We are grateful for the leadership support from Nikhil Dandekar, Eileen Long, Siobhan Quinn, Yun-hsuan Sung, Rachel Bernstein, and Ray Kurzweil.