We introduce the syntactic scaffold, an approach to incorporating syntactic information into semantic tasks. Syntactic scaffolds avoid expensive syntactic processing at runtime, only making use of a treebank during training, through a multitask objective. We improve over strong baselines on PropBank semantics, frame semantics, and coreference resolution, achieving competitive performance on all three tasks.
Neural architectures have often yielded performance gains when trained for multiple tasks together @cite_44 @cite_26 @cite_38 @cite_41 . In particular, performance of semantic role labeling tasks improves when done jointly with other semantic tasks @cite_29 @cite_32 @cite_9 . Contemporaneously with this work, proposed a multitask learning setting for universal syntactic dependencies and UCCA semantics @cite_15 . Syntactic scaffolds focus on a primary semantic task, treating syntax as an auxillary, eventually forgettable prediction task.
@cite_38 @cite_26 @cite_41 @cite_29 @cite_9 @cite_32 @cite_44 @cite_15
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We describe a single convolutional neural network architecture that, given a sentence, outputs a host of language processing predictions: part-of-speech tags, chunks, named entity tags, semantic roles, semantically similar words and the likelihood that the sentence makes sense (grammatically and semantically) using a language model. The entire network is trained jointly on all these tasks using weight-sharing, an instance of multitask learning. All the tasks use labeled data except the language model which is learnt from unlabeled text and represents a novel form of semi-supervised learning for the shared tasks. We show how both multitask learning and semi-supervised learning improve the generalization of the shared tasks, resulting in state-of-the-art-performance. The current state-of-the-art end-to-end semantic role labeling (SRL) model is a deep neural network architecture with no explicit linguistic features. However, prior work has shown that gold syntax trees can dramatically improve SRL, suggesting that neural network models could see great improvements from explicit modeling of syntax. In this work, we present linguistically-informed self-attention (LISA): a new neural network model that combines multi-head self-attention with multi-task learning across dependency parsing, part-of-speech, predicate detection and SRL. For example, syntax is incorporated by training one of the attention heads to attend to syntactic parents for each token. Our model can predict all of the above tasks, but it is also trained such that if a high-quality syntactic parse is already available, it can be beneficially injected at test time without re-training our SRL model. In experiments on the CoNLL-2005 SRL dataset LISA achieves an increase of 2.5 F1 absolute over the previous state-of-the-art on newswire with predicted predicates and more than 2.0 F1 on out-of-domain data. On ConLL-2012 English SRL we also show an improvement of more than 3.0 F1, a 13 reduction in error. Recent approaches for instance-aware semantic labeling have augmented convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with complex multi-task architectures or computationally expensive graphical models. We present a method that leverages a fully convolutional network (FCN) to predict semantic labels, depth and an instance-based encoding using each pixel’s direction towards its corresponding instance center. Subsequently, we apply low-level computer vision techniques to generate state-of-the-art instance segmentation on the street scene datasets KITTI and Cityscapes. Our approach outperforms existing works by a large margin and can additionally predict absolute distances of individual instances from a monocular image as well as a pixel-level semantic labeling. Most approaches for instance-aware semantic labeling traditionally focus on accuracy. Other aspects like runtime and memory footprint are arguably as important for real-time applications such as autonomous driving. Motivated by this observation and inspired by recent works that tackle multiple tasks with a single integrated architecture, in this paper we present a real-time efficient implementation based on ENet that solves three autonomous driving related tasks at once: semantic scene segmentation, instance segmentation and monocular depth estimation. Our approach builds upon a branched ENet architecture with a shared encoder but different decoder branches for each of the three tasks. The presented method can run at 21 fps at a resolution of 1024x512 on the Cityscapes dataset without sacrificing accuracy compared to running each task separately. In many complex machine learning applications there is a need to learn multiple interdependent output variables, where knowledge of these interdependencies can be exploited to improve the global performance. Typically, these structured output scenarios are also characterized by a high cost associated with obtaining supervised training data, motivating the study of active learning for these situations. Starting with active learning approaches for multiclass classification, we first design querying functions for selecting entire structured instances, exploring the tradeoff between selecting instances based on a global margin or a combination of the margin of local classifiers. We then look at the setting where subcomponents of the structured instance can be queried independently and examine the benefit of incorporating structural information in such scenarios. Empirical results on both synthetic data and the semantic role labeling task demonstrate a significant reduction in the need for supervised training data when using the proposed methods. Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similarly striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification. The code and models of our paper will be published on: this https URL . We address the task of learning a semantic segmentation from weakly supervised data. Our aim is to devise a system that predicts an object label for each pixel by making use of only image level labels during training – the information whether a certain object is present or not in the image. Such coarse tagging of images is faster and easier to obtain as opposed to the tedious task of pixelwise labeling required in state of the art systems. We cast this task naturally as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem. We use Semantic Texton Forest (STF) as the basic framework and extend it for the MIL setting. We make use of multitask learning (MTL) to regularize our solution. Here, an external task of geometric context estimation is used to improve on the task of semantic segmentation. We report experimental results on the MSRC21 and the very challenging VOC2007 datasets. On MSRC21 dataset we are able, by using 276 weakly labeled images, to achieve the performance of a supervised STF trained on pixelwise labeled training set of 56 images, which is a significant reduction in supervision needed. Over the last years, deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have transformed the field of computer vision thanks to their unparalleled capacity to learn high level semantic image features. However, in order to successfully learn those features, they usually require massive amounts of manually labeled data, which is both expensive and impractical to scale. Therefore, unsupervised semantic feature learning, i.e., learning without requiring manual annotation effort, is of crucial importance in order to successfully harvest the vast amount of visual data that are available today. In our work we propose to learn image features by training ConvNets to recognize the 2d rotation that is applied to the image that it gets as input. We demonstrate both qualitatively and quantitatively that this apparently simple task actually provides a very powerful supervisory signal for semantic feature learning. We exhaustively evaluate our method in various unsupervised feature learning benchmarks and we exhibit in all of them state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our results on those benchmarks demonstrate dramatic improvements w.r.t. prior state-of-the-art approaches in unsupervised representation learning and thus significantly close the gap with supervised feature learning. For instance, in PASCAL VOC 2007 detection task our unsupervised pre-trained AlexNet model achieves the state-of-the-art (among unsupervised methods) mAP of 54.4 that is only 2.4 points lower from the supervised case. We get similar striking results when we transfer our unsupervised learned features on various other tasks, such as ImageNet classification, PASCAL classification, PASCAL segmentation, and CIFAR-10 classification.