This paper focuses on semantic task planning, i.e., predicting a sequence of actions toward accomplishing a specific task under a certain scene, which is a new problem in computer vision research. The primary challenges are how to model task-specific knowledge and how to integrate this knowledge into the learning procedure. In this work, we propose training a recurrent long short-term memory (LSTM) network to address this problem, i.e., taking a scene image (including pre-located objects) and the specified task as input and recurrently predicting action sequences. However, training such a network generally requires large numbers of annotated samples to cover the semantic space (e.g., diverse action decomposition and ordering). To overcome this issue, we introduce a knowledge and-or graph (AOG) for task description, which hierarchically represents a task as atomic actions. With this AOG representation, we can produce many valid samples (i.e., action sequences according to common sense) by training another auxiliary LSTM network with a small set of annotated samples. Furthermore, these generated samples (i.e., task-oriented action sequences) effectively facilitate training of the model for semantic task planning. In our experiments, we create a new dataset that contains diverse daily tasks and extensively evaluate the effectiveness of our approach.
Recently, deep learning approach, especially deep Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets), have achieved overwhelming accuracy with fast processing speed for image classification. Incorporating temporal structure with deep ConvNets for video representation becomes a fundamental problem for video content analysis. In this paper, we propose a new approach, namely Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Encoder (HRNE), to exploit temporal information of videos. Compared to recent video representation inference approaches, this paper makes the following three contributions. First, our HRNE is able to efficiently exploit video temporal structure in a longer range by reducing the length of input information flow, and compositing multiple consecutive inputs at a higher level. Second, computation operations are significantly lessened while attaining more non-linearity. Third, HRNE is able to uncover temporal transitions between frame chunks with different granularities, i.e., it can model the temporal transitions between frames as well as the transitions between segments. We apply the new method to video captioning where temporal information plays a crucial role. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on video captioning benchmarks. Notably, even using a single network with only RGB stream as input, HRNE beats all the recent systems which combine multiple inputs, such as RGB ConvNet plus 3D ConvNet. Neural machine translation is a relatively new approach to statistical machine translation based purely on neural networks. The neural machine translation models often consist of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder extracts a fixed-length representation from a variable-length input sentence, and the decoder generates a correct translation from this representation. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the properties of the neural machine translation using two models; RNN Encoder--Decoder and a newly proposed gated recursive convolutional neural network. We show that the neural machine translation performs relatively well on short sentences without unknown words, but its performance degrades rapidly as the length of the sentence and the number of unknown words increase. Furthermore, we find that the proposed gated recursive convolutional network learns a grammatical structure of a sentence automatically. Recent progress in using long short-term memory (LSTM) for image captioning has motivated the exploration of their applications for video captioning. By taking a video as a sequence of features, an LSTM model is trained on video-sentence pairs and learns to associate a video to a sentence. However, most existing methods compress an entire video shot or frame into a static representation, without considering attention mechanism which allows for selecting salient features. Furthermore, existing approaches usually model the translating error, but ignore the correlations between sentence semantics and visual content. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel end-to-end framework named aLSTMs, an attention-based LSTM model with semantic consistency, to transfer videos to natural sentences. This framework integrates attention mechanism with LSTM to capture salient structures of video, and explores the correlation between multimodal representations (i.e., words and visual content) for generating sentences with rich semantic content. Specifically, we first propose an attention mechanism that uses the dynamic weighted sum of local two-dimensional convolutional neural network representations. Then, an LSTM decoder takes these visual features at time @math and the word-embedding feature at time @math @math 1 to generate important words. Finally, we use multimodal embedding to map the visual and sentence features into a joint space to guarantee the semantic consistence of the sentence description and the video visual content. Experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method using single feature can achieve competitive or even better results than the state-of-the-art baselines for video captioning in both BLEU and METEOR.  Automatically generating a natural language description of an image has attracted interests recently both because of its importance in practical applications and because it connects two major artificial intelligence fields: computer vision and natural language processing. Existing approaches are either top-down, which start from a gist of an image and convert it into words, or bottom-up, which come up with words describing various aspects of an image and then combine them. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that combines both approaches through a model of semantic attention. Our algorithm learns to selectively attend to semantic concept proposals and fuse them into hidden states and outputs of recurrent neural networks. The selection and fusion form a feedback connecting the top-down and bottom-up computation. We evaluate our algorithm on two public benchmarks: Microsoft COCO and Flickr30K. Experimental results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches consistently across different evaluation metrics.  Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, with the potential to overcome many of the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Unfortunately, NMT systems are known to be computationally expensive both in training and in translation inference. Also, most NMT systems have difficulty with rare words. These issues have hindered NMT's use in practical deployments and services, where both accuracy and speed are essential. In this work, we present GNMT, Google's Neural Machine Translation system, which attempts to address many of these issues. Our model consists of a deep LSTM network with 8 encoder and 8 decoder layers using attention and residual connections. To improve parallelism and therefore decrease training time, our attention mechanism connects the bottom layer of the decoder to the top layer of the encoder. To accelerate the final translation speed, we employ low-precision arithmetic during inference computations. To improve handling of rare words, we divide words into a limited set of common sub-word units ("wordpieces") for both input and output. This method provides a good balance between the flexibility of "character"-delimited models and the efficiency of "word"-delimited models, naturally handles translation of rare words, and ultimately improves the overall accuracy of the system. Our beam search technique employs a length-normalization procedure and uses a coverage penalty, which encourages generation of an output sentence that is most likely to cover all the words in the source sentence. On the WMT'14 English-to-French and English-to-German benchmarks, GNMT achieves competitive results to state-of-the-art. Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60 compared to Google's phrase-based production system.  Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component of spoken dialogue and it has a significant impact both on usability and perceived quality. Most NLG systems in common use employ rules and heuristics and tend to generate rigid and stylised responses without the natural variation of human language. They are also not easily scaled to systems covering multiple domains and languages. This paper presents a statistical language generator based on a semantically controlled Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) structure. The LSTM generator can learn from unaligned data by jointly optimising sentence planning and surface realisation using a simple cross entropy training criterion, and language variation can be easily achieved by sampling from output candidates. With fewer heuristics, an objective evaluation in two differing test domains showed the proposed method improved performance compared to previous methods. Human judges scored the LSTM system higher on informativeness and naturalness and overall preferred it to the other systems. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network model called RNN Encoder-Decoder that consists of two recurrent neural networks (RNN). One RNN encodes a sequence of symbols into a fixed-length vector representation, and the other decodes the representation into another sequence of symbols. The encoder and decoder of the proposed model are jointly trained to maximize the conditional probability of a target sequence given a source sequence. The performance of a statistical machine translation system is empirically found to improve by using the conditional probabilities of phrase pairs computed by the RNN Encoder-Decoder as an additional feature in the existing log-linear model. Qualitatively, we show that the proposed model learns a semantically and syntactically meaningful representation of linguistic phrases.  This paper studied generating natural languages at particular contexts or situations. We proposed two novel approaches which encode the contexts into a continuous semantic representation and then decode the semantic representation into text sequences with recurrent neural networks. During decoding, the context information are attended through a gating mechanism, addressing the problem of long-range dependency caused by lengthy sequences. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches on user review data, in which rich contexts are available and two informative contexts, sentiments and products, are selected for evaluation. Experiments show that the fake reviews generated by our approaches are very natural. Results of fake review detection with human judges show that more than 50 of the fake reviews are misclassified as the real reviews, and more than 90 are misclassified by existing state-of-the-art fake review detection algorithm.  Automatically describing the content of an image is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence that connects computer vision and natural language processing. In this paper, we present a generative model based on a deep recurrent architecture that combines recent advances in computer vision and machine translation and that can be used to generate natural sentences describing an image. The model is trained to maximize the likelihood of the target description sentence given the training image. Experiments on several datasets show the accuracy of the model and the fluency of the language it learns solely from image descriptions. Our model is often quite accurate, which we verify both qualitatively and quantitatively. For instance, while the current state-of-the-art BLEU-1 score (the higher the better) on the Pascal dataset is 25, our approach yields 59, to be compared to human performance around 69. We also show BLEU-1 score improvements on Flickr30k, from 56 to 66, and on SBU, from 19 to 28. Lastly, on the newly released COCO dataset, we achieve a BLEU-4 of 27.7, which is the current state-of-the-art.