Soravit Changpinyo


2021

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CrossVQA: Scalably Generating Benchmarks for Systematically Testing VQA Generalization
Arjun Akula | Soravit Changpinyo | Boqing Gong | Piyush Sharma | Song-Chun Zhu | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

One challenge in evaluating visual question answering (VQA) models in the cross-dataset adaptation setting is that the distribution shifts are multi-modal, making it difficult to identify if it is the shifts in visual or language features that play a key role. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic framework for generating disentangled shifts by introducing a controllable visual question-answer generation (VQAG) module that is capable of generating highly-relevant and diverse question-answer pairs with the desired dataset style. We use it to create CrossVQA, a collection of test splits for assessing VQA generalization based on the VQA2, VizWiz, and Open Images datasets. We provide an analysis of our generated datasets and demonstrate its utility by using them to evaluate several state-of-the-art VQA systems. One important finding is that the visual shifts in cross-dataset VQA matter more than the language shifts. More broadly, we present a scalable framework for systematically evaluating the machine with little human intervention.

2019

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Decoupled Box Proposal and Featurization with Ultrafine-Grained Semantic Labels Improve Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering
Soravit Changpinyo | Bo Pang | Piyush Sharma | Radu Soricut
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Object detection plays an important role in current solutions to vision and language tasks like image captioning and visual question answering. However, popular models like Faster R-CNN rely on a costly process of annotating ground-truths for both the bounding boxes and their corresponding semantic labels, making it less amenable as a primitive task for transfer learning. In this paper, we examine the effect of decoupling box proposal and featurization for down-stream tasks. The key insight is that this allows us to leverage a large amount of labeled annotations that were previously unavailable for standard object detection benchmarks. Empirically, we demonstrate that this leads to effective transfer learning and improved image captioning and visual question answering models, as measured on publicly-available benchmarks.

2018

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Multi-Task Learning for Sequence Tagging: An Empirical Study
Soravit Changpinyo | Hexiang Hu | Fei Sha
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

We study three general multi-task learning (MTL) approaches on 11 sequence tagging tasks. Our extensive empirical results show that in about 50% of the cases, jointly learning all 11 tasks improves upon either independent or pairwise learning of the tasks. We also show that pairwise MTL can inform us what tasks can benefit others or what tasks can be benefited if they are learned jointly. In particular, we identify tasks that can always benefit others as well as tasks that can always be harmed by others. Interestingly, one of our MTL approaches yields embeddings of the tasks that reveal the natural clustering of semantic and syntactic tasks. Our inquiries have opened the doors to further utilization of MTL in NLP.