Books are a rich source of both fine-grained information, how a character, an object or a scene looks like, as well as high-level semantics, what someone is thinking, feeling and how these states evolve through a story. This paper aims to align books to their movie releases in order to provide rich descriptive explanations for visual content that go semantically far beyond the captions available in current datasets.To align movies and books we exploit a neural sentence embedding that is trained in an unsupervised way from a large corpus of books, as well as a video-text neural embedding for computing similarities between movie clips and sentences in the book. We propose a context-aware CNN to combine information from multiple sources. We demonstrate good quantitative performance for movie/book alignment and show several qualitative examples that showcase the diversity of tasks our model can be used for.

Bayesian optimization is an effective methodology for the global optimization of functions with expensive evaluations. It relies on querying a distribution over functions defined by a relatively cheap surrogate model. An accurate model for this distribution over functions is critical to the effectiveness of the approach, and is typically fit using Gaussian processes (GPs). However, since GPs scale cubically with the number of observations, it has been challenging to handle objectives whose optimization requires many evaluations, and as such, massively parallelizing the optimization.In this work, we explore the use of neural networks as an alternative to GPs to model distributions over functions. We show that performing adaptive basis function regression with a neural network as the parametric form performs competitively with state-of-the-art GP-based approaches, but scales linearly with the number of data rather than cubically. This allows us to achieve a previously intractable degree of parallelism, which we apply to large scale hyperparameter optimization, rapidly finding competitive models on benchmark object recognition tasks using convolutional networks, and image caption generation using neural language models.

Inspired by recent work in machine translation and object detection, we introduce an attention based model that automatically learns to describe the content of images. We describe how we can train this model in a deterministic manner using standard backpropagation techniques and stochastically by maximizing a variational lower bound. We also show through visualization how the model is able to automatically learn to fix its gaze on salient objects while generating the corresponding words in the output sequence. We validate the use of attention with state-of-theart performance on three benchmark datasets: Flickr8k, Flickr30k and MS COCO.

We consider the problem of estimating a multivariate function $f_0$ of bounded variation (BV), from noisy observations $y_i = f_0(x_i) + z_i$ made at random design points $x_i \in \mathbb{R}^d$, $i=1,\ldots,n$. We study an estimator that forms the Voronoi diagram of the design points, and then solves an optimization problem that regularizes according to a certain discrete notion of total variation (TV): the sum of weighted absolute differences of parameters $\theta_i,\theta_j$ (which estimate the function values $f_0(x_i),f_0(x_j)$) at all neighboring cells $i,j$ in the Voronoi diagram. This is seen to be equivalent to a variational optimization problem that regularizes according to the usual continuum (measure-theoretic) notion of TV, once we restrict the domain to functions that are piecewise constant over the Voronoi diagram. The regression estimator under consideration hence performs (shrunken) local averaging over adaptively formed unions of Voronoi cells, and we refer to it as the Voronoigram, following the ideas in Koenker (2005), and drawing inspiration from Tukey's regressogram (Tukey, 1961). Our contributions in this paper span both the conceptual and theoretical frontiers: we discuss some of the unique properties of the Voronoigram in comparison to TV-regularized estimators that use other graph-based discretizations; we derive the asymptotic limit of the Voronoi TV functional; and we prove that the Voronoigram is minimax rate optimal (up to log factors) for estimating BV functions that are essentially bounded.

In this work, we introduce a hypergraph representation learning framework called Hypergraph Neural Networks (HNN) that jointly learns hyperedge embeddings along with a set of hyperedge-dependent embeddings for each node in the hypergraph. HNN derives multiple embeddings per node in the hypergraph where each embedding for a node is dependent on a specific hyperedge of that node. Notably, HNN is accurate, data-efficient, flexible with many interchangeable components, and useful for a wide range of hypergraph learning tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of the HNN framework for hyperedge prediction and hypergraph node classification. We find that HNN achieves an overall mean gain of 7.72% and 11.37% across all baseline models and graphs for hyperedge prediction and hypergraph node classification, respectively.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become increasingly important in recent years due to their state-of-the-art performance on many important downstream applications. Existing GNNs have mostly focused on learning a single node representation, despite that a node often exhibits polysemous behavior in different contexts. In this work, we develop a persona-based graph neural network framework called PersonaSAGE that learns multiple persona-based embeddings for each node in the graph. Such disentangled representations are more interpretable and useful than a single embedding. Furthermore, PersonaSAGE learns the appropriate set of persona embeddings for each node in the graph, and every node can have a different number of assigned persona embeddings. The framework is flexible enough and the general design helps in the wide applicability of the learned embeddings to suit the domain. We utilize publicly available benchmark datasets to evaluate our approach and against a variety of baselines. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PersonaSAGE for a variety of important tasks including link prediction where we achieve an average gain of 15% while remaining competitive for node classification. Finally, we also demonstrate the utility of PersonaSAGE with a case study for personalized recommendation of different entity types in a data management platform.

Traditionally, data analysis and theory have been viewed as separate disciplines, each feeding into fundamentally different types of models. Modern deep learning technology is beginning to unify these two disciplines and will produce a new class of predictively powerful space weather models that combine the physical insights gained by data and theory. We call on NASA to invest in the research and infrastructure necessary for the heliophysics' community to take advantage of these advances.

Learning fair graph representations for downstream applications is becoming increasingly important, but existing work has mostly focused on improving fairness at the global level by either modifying the graph structure or objective function without taking into account the local neighborhood of a node. In this work, we formally introduce the notion of neighborhood fairness and develop a computational framework for learning such locally fair embeddings. We argue that the notion of neighborhood fairness is more appropriate since GNN-based models operate at the local neighborhood level of a node. Our neighborhood fairness framework has two main components that are flexible for learning fair graph representations from arbitrary data: the first aims to construct fair neighborhoods for any arbitrary node in a graph and the second enables adaption of these fair neighborhoods to better capture certain application or data-dependent constraints, such as allowing neighborhoods to be more biased towards certain attributes or neighbors in the graph.Furthermore, while link prediction has been extensively studied, we are the first to investigate the graph representation learning task of fair link classification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed neighborhood fairness framework for a variety of graph machine learning tasks including fair link prediction, link classification, and learning fair graph embeddings. Notably, our approach achieves not only better fairness but also increases the accuracy in the majority of cases across a wide variety of graphs, problem settings, and metrics.

We introduce a language generation task grounded in a popular video game environment. KNUDGE (KNowledge Constrained User-NPC Dialogue GEneration) involves generating dialogue trees conditioned on an ontology captured in natural language passages providing quest and entity specifications. KNUDGE is constructed from side quest dialogues drawn directly from game data of Obsidian Entertainment's The Outer Worlds, leading to real-world complexities in generation: (1) dialogues are branching trees as opposed to linear chains of utterances; (2) utterances must remain faithful to the game lore--character personas, backstories, and entity relationships; and (3) a dialogue must accurately reveal new quest-related details to the human player. We report results for supervised and in-context learning techniques, finding there is significant room for future work on creating realistic game-quality dialogues.

Language modeling, a central task in natural language processing, involves estimating a probability distribution over strings. In most cases, the estimated distribution sums to 1 over all finite strings. However, in some pathological cases, probability mass can ``leak'' onto the set of infinite sequences. In order to characterize the notion of leakage more precisely, this paper offers a measure-theoretic treatment of language modeling. We prove that many popular language model families are in fact tight, meaning that they will not leak in this sense. We also generalize characterizations of tightness proposed in previous works.