Conventional neural autoregressive decoding commonly assumes a fixed left-to-right generation order, which may be sub-optimal. In this work, we propose a novel decoding algorithm -- InDIGO -- which supports flexible sequence generation in arbitrary orders through insertion operations. We extend Transformer, a state-of-the-art sequence generation model, to efficiently implement the proposed approach, enabling it to be trained with either a pre-defined generation order or adaptive orders obtained from beam-search. Experiments on four real-world tasks, including word order recovery, machine translation, image caption and code generation, demonstrate that our algorithm can generate sequences following arbitrary orders, while achieving competitive or even better performance compared to the conventional left-to-right generation. The generated sequences show that InDIGO adopts adaptive generation orders based on input information.
Code generation maps a program description to executable source code in a programming language. Existing approaches mainly rely on a recurrent neural network (RNN) as the decoder. However, we find that a program contains significantly more tokens than a natural language sentence, and thus it may be inappropriate for RNN to capture such a long sequence. In this paper, we propose a grammar-based structural convolutional neural network (CNN) for code generation. Our model generates a program by predicting the grammar rules of the programming language; we design several CNN modules, including the tree-based convolution and pre-order convolution, whose information is further aggregated by dedicated attentive pooling layers. Experimental results on the HearthStone benchmark dataset show that our CNN code generator significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art method by 5 percentage points; additional experiments on several semantic parsing tasks demonstrate the robustness of our model. We also conduct in-depth ablation test to better understand each component of our model.
Recent progress on deep learning has made it possible to automatically transform the screenshot of Graphic User Interface (GUI) into code by using the encoder-decoder framework. While the commonly adopted image encoder (e.g., CNN network), might be capable of extracting image features to the desired level, interpreting these abstract image features into hundreds of tokens of code puts a particular challenge on the decoding power of the RNN-based code generator. Considering the code used for describing GUI is usually hierarchically structured, we propose a new attention-based hierarchical code generation model, which can describe GUI images in a finer level of details, while also being able to generate hierarchically structured code in consistency with the hierarchical layout of the graphic elements in the GUI. Our model follows the encoder-decoder framework, all the components of which can be trained jointly in an end-to-end manner. The experimental results show that our method outperforms other current state-of-the-art methods on both a publicly available GUI-code dataset as well as a dataset established by our own.
We present TRANX, a transition-based neural semantic parser that maps natural language (NL) utterances into formal meaning representations (MRs). TRANX uses a transition system based on the abstract syntax description language for the target MR, which gives it two major advantages: (1) it is highly accurate, using information from the syntax of the target MR to constrain the output space and model the information flow, and (2) it is highly generalizable, and can easily be applied to new types of MR by just writing a new abstract syntax description corresponding to the allowable structures in the MR. Experiments on four different semantic parsing and code generation tasks show that our system is generalizable, extensible, and effective, registering strong results compared to existing neural semantic parsers.
In models to generate program source code from natural language, representing this code in a tree structure has been a common approach. However, existing methods often fail to generate complex code correctly due to a lack of ability to memorize large and complex structures. We introduce ReCode, a method based on subtree retrieval that makes it possible to explicitly reference existing code examples within a neural code generation model. First, we retrieve sentences that are similar to input sentences using a dynamic-programming-based sentence similarity scoring method. Next, we extract n-grams of action sequences that build the associated abstract syntax tree. Finally, we increase the probability of actions that cause the retrieved n-gram action subtree to be in the predicted code. We show that our approach improves the performance on two code generation tasks by up to +2.6 BLEU.
Specialized Deep Learning (DL) acceleration stacks, designed for a specific set of frameworks, model architectures, operators, and data types, offer the allure of high performance while sacrificing flexibility. Changes in algorithms, models, operators, or numerical systems threaten the viability of specialized hardware accelerators. We propose VTA, a programmable deep learning architecture template designed to be extensible in the face of evolving workloads. VTA achieves this flexibility via a parametrizable architecture, two-level ISA, and a JIT compiler. The two-level ISA is based on (1) a task-ISA that explicitly orchestrates concurrent compute and memory tasks and (2) a microcode-ISA which implements a wide variety of operators with single-cycle tensor-tensor operations. Next, we propose a runtime system equipped with a JIT compiler for flexible code-generation and heterogeneous execution that enables effective use of the VTA architecture. VTA is integrated and open-sourced into Apache TVM, a state-of-the-art deep learning compilation stack that provides flexibility for diverse models and divergent hardware backends. We propose a flow that performs design space exploration to generate a customized hardware architecture and software operator library that can be leveraged by mainstream learning frameworks. We demonstrate our approach by deploying optimized deep learning models used for object classification and style transfer on edge-class FPGAs.
Research on question answering with knowledge base has recently seen an increasing use of deep architectures. In this extended abstract, we study the application of the neural machine translation paradigm for question parsing. We employ a sequence-to-sequence model to learn graph patterns in the SPARQL graph query language and their compositions. Instead of inducing the programs through question-answer pairs, we expect a semi-supervised approach, where alignments between questions and queries are built through templates. We argue that the coverage of language utterances can be expanded using late notable works in natural language generation.
Semantic parsing is the task of transducing natural language (NL) utterances into formal meaning representations (MRs), commonly represented as tree structures. Annotating NL utterances with their corresponding MRs is expensive and time-consuming, and thus the limited availability of labeled data often becomes the bottleneck of data-driven, supervised models. We introduce StructVAE, a variational auto-encoding model for semisupervised semantic parsing, which learns both from limited amounts of parallel data, and readily-available unlabeled NL utterances. StructVAE models latent MRs not observed in the unlabeled data as tree-structured latent variables. Experiments on semantic parsing on the ATIS domain and Python code generation show that with extra unlabeled data, StructVAE outperforms strong supervised models.
As datasets continue to grow, neural network (NN) applications are becoming increasingly limited by both the amount of available computational power and the ease of developing high-performance applications. Researchers often must have expert systems knowledge to make their algorithms run efficiently. Although available computing power increases rapidly each year, algorithm efficiency is not able to keep pace due to the use of general purpose compilers, which are not able to fully optimize specialized application domains. Within the domain of NNs, we have the added knowledge that network architecture remains constant during training, meaning the architecture's data structure can be statically optimized by a compiler. In this paper, we present SONNC, a compiler for NNs that utilizes static analysis to generate optimized parallel code. We show that SONNC's use of static optimizations make it able to outperform hand-optimized C++ code by up to 7.8X, and MATLAB code by up to 24X. Additionally, we show that use of SONNC significantly reduces code complexity when using structurally sparse networks.
Multiresolution Analysis (MRA) is a mathematical method that is based on working on a problem at different scales. One of its applications is medical imaging where processing at multiple scales, based on the concept of Gaussian and Laplacian image pyramids, is a well-known technique. It is often applied to reduce noise while preserving image detail on different levels of granularity without modifying the filter kernel. In scientific computing, multigrid methods are a popular choice, as they are asymptotically optimal solvers for elliptic Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). As such algorithms have a very high computational complexity that would overwhelm CPUs in the presence of real-time constraints, application-specific processors come into consideration for implementation. Despite of huge advancements in leveraging productivity in the respective fields, designers are still required to have detailed knowledge about coding techniques and the targeted architecture to achieve efficient solutions. Recently, the HIPAcc framework was proposed as a means for automatic code generation of image processing algorithms, based on a Domain-Specific Language (DSL). From the same code base, it is possible to generate code for efficient implementations on several accelerator technologies including different types of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) as well as reconfigurable logic (FPGAs). In this work, we demonstrate the ability of HIPAcc to generate code for the implementation of multiresolution applications on FPGAs and embedded GPUs.
Simulation of spiking neural networks has been traditionally done on high-performance supercomputers or large-scale clusters. Utilizing the parallel nature of neural network computation algorithms, GeNN (GPU Enhanced Neural Network) provides a simulation environment that performs on General Purpose NVIDIA GPUs with a code generation based approach. GeNN allows the users to design and simulate neural networks by specifying the populations of neurons at different stages, their synapse connection densities and the model of individual neurons. In this report we describe work on how to scale synaptic weights based on the configuration of the user-defined network to ensure sufficient spiking and subsequent effective learning. We also discuss optimization strategies particular to GPU computing: sparse representation of synapse connections and occupancy based block-size determination.
Face detection and alignment in unconstrained environment are challenging due to various poses, illuminations and occlusions. Recent studies show that deep learning approaches can achieve impressive performance on these two tasks. In this paper, we propose a deep cascaded multi-task framework which exploits the inherent correlation between them to boost up their performance. In particular, our framework adopts a cascaded structure with three stages of carefully designed deep convolutional networks that predict face and landmark location in a coarse-to-fine manner. In addition, in the learning process, we propose a new online hard sample mining strategy that can improve the performance automatically without manual sample selection. Our method achieves superior accuracy over the state-of-the-art techniques on the challenging FDDB and WIDER FACE benchmark for face detection, and AFLW benchmark for face alignment, while keeps real time performance.
Many language generation tasks require the production of text conditioned on both structured and unstructured inputs. We present a novel neural network architecture which generates an output sequence conditioned on an arbitrary number of input functions. Crucially, our approach allows both the choice of conditioning context and the granularity of generation, for example characters or tokens, to be marginalised, thus permitting scalable and effective training. Using this framework, we address the problem of generating programming code from a mixed natural language and structured specification. We create two new data sets for this paradigm derived from the collectible trading card games Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone. On these, and a third preexisting corpus, we demonstrate that marginalising multiple predictors allows our model to outperform strong benchmarks.
The popularity of neural networks (NNs) spans academia, industry, and popular culture. In particular, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been applied to many image based machine learning tasks and have yielded strong results. The availability of hardware/software systems for efficient training and deployment of large and/or deep CNN models has been, and continues to be, an important consideration for the field. Early systems for NN computation focused on leveraging existing dense linear algebra techniques and libraries. Current approaches use low-level machine specific programming and/or closed-source, purpose-built vendor libraries. In this work, we present an open source system that, compared to existing approaches, achieves competitive computational speed while achieving higher portability. We achieve this by targeting the vendor-neutral OpenCL platform using a code-generation approach. We argue that our approach allows for both: (1) the rapid development of new computational kernels for existing hardware targets, and (2) the rapid tuning of existing computational kernels for new hardware targets. Results are presented for a case study of targeting the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 mobile computing platform for CNN deployment.
Instance Search (INS) is a fundamental problem for many applications, while it is more challenging comparing to traditional image search since the relevancy is defined at the instance level. Existing works have demonstrated the success of many complex ensemble systems that are typically conducted by firstly generating object proposals, and then extracting handcrafted and/or CNN features of each proposal for matching. However, object bounding box proposals and feature extraction are often conducted in two separated steps, thus the effectiveness of these methods collapses. Also, due to the large amount of generated proposals, matching speed becomes the bottleneck that limits its application to large-scale datasets. To tackle these issues, in this paper we propose an effective and efficient Deep Region Hashing (DRH) approach for large-scale INS using an image patch as the query. Specifically, DRH is an end-to-end deep neural network which consists of object proposal, feature extraction, and hash code generation. DRH shares full-image convolutional feature map with the region proposal network, thus enabling nearly cost-free region proposals. Also, each high-dimensional, real-valued region features are mapped onto a low-dimensional, compact binary codes for the efficient object region level matching on large-scale dataset. Experimental results on four datasets show that our DRH can achieve even better performance than the state-of-the-arts in terms of MAP, while the efficiency is improved by nearly 100 times.
We consider the problem of parsing natural language descriptions into source code written in a general-purpose programming language like Python. Existing data-driven methods treat this problem as a language generation task without considering the underlying syntax of the target programming language. Informed by previous work in semantic parsing, in this paper we propose a novel neural architecture powered by a grammar model to explicitly capture the target syntax as prior knowledge. Experiments find this an effective way to scale up to generation of complex programs from natural language descriptions, achieving state-of-the-art results that well outperform previous code generation and semantic parsing approaches.
Tasks like code generation and semantic parsing require mapping unstructured (or partially structured) inputs to well-formed, executable outputs. We introduce abstract syntax networks, a modeling framework for these problems. The outputs are represented as abstract syntax trees (ASTs) and constructed by a decoder with a dynamically-determined modular structure paralleling the structure of the output tree. On the benchmark Hearthstone dataset for code generation, our model obtains 79.2 BLEU and 22.7% exact match accuracy, compared to previous state-of-the-art values of 67.1 and 6.1%. Furthermore, we perform competitively on the Atis, Jobs, and Geo semantic parsing datasets with no task-specific engineering.
Automated documentation of programming source code and automated code generation from natural language are challenging tasks of both practical and scientific interest. Progress in these areas has been limited by the low availability of parallel corpora of code and natural language descriptions, which tend to be small and constrained to specific domains. In this work we introduce a large and diverse parallel corpus of a hundred thousands Python functions with their documentation strings ("docstrings") generated by scraping open source repositories on GitHub. We describe baseline results for the code documentation and code generation tasks obtained by neural machine translation. We also experiment with data augmentation techniques to further increase the amount of training data. We release our datasets and processing scripts in order to stimulate research in these areas.
Probabilistic inference procedures are usually coded painstakingly from scratch, for each target model and each inference algorithm. We reduce this effort by generating inference procedures from models automatically. We make this code generation modular by decomposing inference algorithms into reusable program-to-program transformations. These transformations perform exact inference as well as generate probabilistic programs that compute expectations, densities, and MCMC samples. The resulting inference procedures are about as accurate and fast as other probabilistic programming systems on real-world problems.
Transforming a graphical user interface screenshot created by a designer into computer code is a typical task conducted by a developer in order to build customized software, websites, and mobile applications. In this paper, we show that deep learning methods can be leveraged to train a model end-to-end to automatically generate code from a single input image with over 77% of accuracy for three different platforms (i.e. iOS, Android and web-based technologies).