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Margaret Mitchell

Bio: Margaret Mitchell is an academic researcher from Google. The author has contributed to research in topics: Computer science & Context (language use). The author has an hindex of 42, co-authored 94 publications receiving 13094 citations. Previous affiliations of Margaret Mitchell include University of Aberdeen & Johns Hopkins University.


Papers
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Proceedings ArticleDOI
07 Dec 2015
TL;DR: The task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA) is proposed, given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer.
Abstract: We propose the task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios, such as helping the visually impaired, both the questions and answers are open-ended. Visual questions selectively target different areas of an image, including background details and underlying context. As a result, a system that succeeds at VQA typically needs a more detailed understanding of the image and complex reasoning than a system producing generic image captions. Moreover, VQA is amenable to automatic evaluation, since many open-ended answers contain only a few words or a closed set of answers that can be provided in a multiple-choice format. We provide a dataset containing ~0.25M images, ~0.76M questions, and ~10M answers (www.visualqa.org), and discuss the information it provides. Numerous baselines for VQA are provided and compared with human performance.

3,513 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: The task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA) is proposed, given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer.
Abstract: We propose the task of free-form and open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a natural language question about the image, the task is to provide an accurate natural language answer. Mirroring real-world scenarios, such as helping the visually impaired, both the questions and answers are open-ended. Visual questions selectively target different areas of an image, including background details and underlying context. As a result, a system that succeeds at VQA typically needs a more detailed understanding of the image and complex reasoning than a system producing generic image captions. Moreover, VQA is amenable to automatic evaluation, since many open-ended answers contain only a few words or a closed set of answers that can be provided in a multiple-choice format. We provide a dataset containing ~0.25M images, ~0.76M questions, and ~10M answers (this http URL), and discuss the information it provides. Numerous baselines and methods for VQA are provided and compared with human performance. Our VQA demo is available on CloudCV (this http URL).

2,365 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
07 Jun 2015
TL;DR: This paper used multiple instance learning to train visual detectors for words that commonly occur in captions, including many different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, which serve as conditional inputs to a maximum-entropy language model.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for automatically generating image descriptions: visual detectors, language models, and multimodal similarity models learnt directly from a dataset of image captions. We use multiple instance learning to train visual detectors for words that commonly occur in captions, including many different parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The word detector outputs serve as conditional inputs to a maximum-entropy language model. The language model learns from a set of over 400,000 image descriptions to capture the statistics of word usage. We capture global semantics by re-ranking caption candidates using sentence-level features and a deep multimodal similarity model. Our system is state-of-the-art on the official Microsoft COCO benchmark, producing a BLEU-4 score of 29.1%. When human judges compare the system captions to ones written by other people on our held-out test set, the system captions have equal or better quality 34% of the time.

1,357 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
27 Dec 2018
TL;DR: This work presents a framework for mitigating biases concerning demographic groups by including a variable for the group of interest and simultaneously learning a predictor and an adversary, which results in accurate predictions that exhibit less evidence of stereotyping Z.
Abstract: Machine learning is a tool for building models that accurately represent input training data. When undesired biases concerning demographic groups are in the training data, well-trained models will reflect those biases. We present a framework for mitigating such biases by including a variable for the group of interest and simultaneously learning a predictor and an adversary. The input to the network X, here text or census data, produces a prediction Y, such as an analogy completion or income bracket, while the adversary tries to model a protected variable Z, here gender or zip code. The objective is to maximize the predictor's ability to predict Y while minimizing the adversary's ability to predict Z. Applied to analogy completion, this method results in accurate predictions that exhibit less evidence of stereotyping Z. When applied to a classification task using the UCI Adult (Census) Dataset, it results in a predictive model that does not lose much accuracy while achieving very close to equality of odds (Hardt, et al., 2016). The method is flexible and applicable to multiple definitions of fairness as well as a wide range of gradient-based learning models, including both regression and classification tasks.

945 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
22 Jun 2015
TL;DR: A neural network architecture is used to address sparsity issues that arise when integrating contextual information into classic statistical models, allowing the system to take into account previous dialog utterances.
Abstract: We present a novel response generation system that can be trained end to end on large quantities of unstructured Twitter conversations. A neural network architecture is used to address sparsity issues that arise when integrating contextual information into classic statistical models, allowing the system to take into account previous dialog utterances. Our dynamic-context generative models show consistent gains over both context-sensitive and non-context-sensitive Machine Translation and Information Retrieval baselines.

941 citations


Cited by
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Book
18 Nov 2016
TL;DR: Deep learning as mentioned in this paper is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts, and it is used in many applications such as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames.
Abstract: Deep learning is a form of machine learning that enables computers to learn from experience and understand the world in terms of a hierarchy of concepts. Because the computer gathers knowledge from experience, there is no need for a human computer operator to formally specify all the knowledge that the computer needs. The hierarchy of concepts allows the computer to learn complicated concepts by building them out of simpler ones; a graph of these hierarchies would be many layers deep. This book introduces a broad range of topics in deep learning. The text offers mathematical and conceptual background, covering relevant concepts in linear algebra, probability theory and information theory, numerical computation, and machine learning. It describes deep learning techniques used by practitioners in industry, including deep feedforward networks, regularization, optimization algorithms, convolutional networks, sequence modeling, and practical methodology; and it surveys such applications as natural language processing, speech recognition, computer vision, online recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and videogames. Finally, the book offers research perspectives, covering such theoretical topics as linear factor models, autoencoders, representation learning, structured probabilistic models, Monte Carlo methods, the partition function, approximate inference, and deep generative models. Deep Learning can be used by undergraduate or graduate students planning careers in either industry or research, and by software engineers who want to begin using deep learning in their products or platforms. A website offers supplementary material for both readers and instructors.

38,208 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
01 Oct 2017
TL;DR: This work combines existing fine-grained visualizations to create a high-resolution class-discriminative visualization, Guided Grad-CAM, and applies it to image classification, image captioning, and visual question answering (VQA) models, including ResNet-based architectures.
Abstract: We propose a technique for producing ‘visual explanations’ for decisions from a large class of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based models, making them more transparent. Our approach – Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), uses the gradients of any target concept (say logits for ‘dog’ or even a caption), flowing into the final convolutional layer to produce a coarse localization map highlighting the important regions in the image for predicting the concept. Unlike previous approaches, Grad- CAM is applicable to a wide variety of CNN model-families: (1) CNNs with fully-connected layers (e.g. VGG), (2) CNNs used for structured outputs (e.g. captioning), (3) CNNs used in tasks with multi-modal inputs (e.g. visual question answering) or reinforcement learning, without architectural changes or re-training. We combine Grad-CAM with existing fine-grained visualizations to create a high-resolution class-discriminative visualization, Guided Grad-CAM, and apply it to image classification, image captioning, and visual question answering (VQA) models, including ResNet-based architectures. In the context of image classification models, our visualizations (a) lend insights into failure modes of these models (showing that seemingly unreasonable predictions have reasonable explanations), (b) outperform previous methods on the ILSVRC-15 weakly-supervised localization task, (c) are more faithful to the underlying model, and (d) help achieve model generalization by identifying dataset bias. For image captioning and VQA, our visualizations show even non-attention based models can localize inputs. Finally, we design and conduct human studies to measure if Grad-CAM explanations help users establish appropriate trust in predictions from deep networks and show that Grad-CAM helps untrained users successfully discern a ‘stronger’ deep network from a ‘weaker’ one even when both make identical predictions. Our code is available at https: //github.com/ramprs/grad-cam/ along with a demo on CloudCV [2] and video at youtu.be/COjUB9Izk6E.

7,556 citations

Proceedings Article
06 Jul 2015
TL;DR: An attention based model that automatically learns to describe the content of images is introduced that can be trained in a deterministic manner using standard backpropagation techniques and stochastically by maximizing a variational lower bound.
Abstract: 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-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets: Flickr9k, Flickr30k and MS COCO.

6,485 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: This work proposes a small DNN architecture called SqueezeNet, which achieves AlexNet-level accuracy on ImageNet with 50x fewer parameters and is able to compress to less than 0.5MB (510x smaller than AlexNet).
Abstract: Recent research on deep neural networks has focused primarily on improving accuracy. For a given accuracy level, it is typically possible to identify multiple DNN architectures that achieve that accuracy level. With equivalent accuracy, smaller DNN architectures offer at least three advantages: (1) Smaller DNNs require less communication across servers during distributed training. (2) Smaller DNNs require less bandwidth to export a new model from the cloud to an autonomous car. (3) Smaller DNNs are more feasible to deploy on FPGAs and other hardware with limited memory. To provide all of these advantages, we propose a small DNN architecture called SqueezeNet. SqueezeNet achieves AlexNet-level accuracy on ImageNet with 50x fewer parameters. Additionally, with model compression techniques we are able to compress SqueezeNet to less than 0.5MB (510x smaller than AlexNet). The SqueezeNet architecture is available for download here: this https URL

5,904 citations