Dapeng Wu


2020

pdf
A Batch Normalized Inference Network Keeps the KL Vanishing Away
Qile Zhu | Wei Bi | Xiaojiang Liu | Xiyao Ma | Xiaolin Li | Dapeng Wu
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is widely used as a generative model to approximate a model’s posterior on latent variables by combining the amortized variational inference and deep neural networks. However, when paired with strong autoregressive decoders, VAE often converges to a degenerated local optimum known as “posterior collapse”. Previous approaches consider the Kullback–Leibler divergence (KL) individual for each datapoint. We propose to let the KL follow a distribution across the whole dataset, and analyze that it is sufficient to prevent posterior collapse by keeping the expectation of the KL’s distribution positive. Then we propose Batch Normalized-VAE (BN-VAE), a simple but effective approach to set a lower bound of the expectation by regularizing the distribution of the approximate posterior’s parameters. Without introducing any new model component or modifying the objective, our approach can avoid the posterior collapse effectively and efficiently. We further show that the proposed BN-VAE can be extended to conditional VAE (CVAE). Empirically, our approach surpasses strong autoregressive baselines on language modeling, text classification and dialogue generation, and rivals more complex approaches while keeping almost the same training time as VAE.

2018

pdf
Tensor Product Generation Networks for Deep NLP Modeling
Qiuyuan Huang | Paul Smolensky | Xiaodong He | Li Deng | Dapeng Wu
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

We present a new approach to the design of deep networks for natural language processing (NLP), based on the general technique of Tensor Product Representations (TPRs) for encoding and processing symbol structures in distributed neural networks. A network architecture — the Tensor Product Generation Network (TPGN) — is proposed which is capable in principle of carrying out TPR computation, but which uses unconstrained deep learning to design its internal representations. Instantiated in a model for image-caption generation, TPGN outperforms LSTM baselines when evaluated on the COCO dataset. The TPR-capable structure enables interpretation of internal representations and operations, which prove to contain considerable grammatical content. Our caption-generation model can be interpreted as generating sequences of grammatical categories and retrieving words by their categories from a plan encoded as a distributed representation.

2016

pdf
PolyU at CL-SciSumm 2016
Ziqiang Cao | Wenjie Li | Dapeng Wu
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing for Digital Libraries (BIRNDL)