DataBloom

Posted by Ankur Parikh and Xuezhi Wang, Research Scientists, Google Research

In the last few years, research in natural language generation, used for tasks like text summarization, has made tremendous progress. Yet, despite achieving high levels of fluency, neural systems can still be prone to hallucination (i.e.generating text that is understandable, but not faithful to the source), which can prohibit these systems from being used in many applications that require high degrees of accuracy. Consider an example from the Wikibio dataset, where the neural baseline model tasked with summarizing a Wikipedia infobox entry for Belgian football player Constant Vanden Stock summarizes incorrectly that he is an American figure skater.

While the process of assessing the faithfulness of generated text to the source content can be challenging, it is often easier when the source content is structured (e.g., in tabular format). Moreover, structured data can also test a model’s ability for reasoning and numerical inference. However, existing large scale structured datasets are often noisy (i.e., the reference sentence cannot be fully inferred from the tabular data), making them unreliable for the measurement of hallucination in model development.

In “ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset”, we present an open domain table-to-text generation dataset created using a novel annotation process (via sentence revision) along with a controlled text generation task that can be used to assess model hallucination. ToTTo (shorthand for “Table-To-Text”) consists of 121,000 training examples, along with 7,500 examples each for development and test. Due to the accuracy of annotations, this dataset is suitable as a challenging benchmark for research in high precision text generation. The dataset and code are open-sourced on our GitHub repo.

Table-to-Text Generation
ToTTo introduces a controlled generation task in which a given Wikipedia table with a set of selected cells is used as the source material for the task of producing a single sentence description that summarizes the cell contents in the context of the table. The example below demonstrates some of the many challenges posed by the task, such as numerical reasoning, a large open-domain vocabulary, and varied table structure.

Example in the ToTTo dataset, where given the source table and set of highlighted cells (left), the goal is to generate a one sentence description, such as the “target sentence” (right). Note that generating the target sentence would require numerical inference (eleven NFL seasons) and understanding of the NFL domain.

Annotation Process
Designing an annotation process to obtain natural but also clean target sentences from tabular data is a significant challenge. Many datasets like Wikibio and RotoWire pair naturally occurring text heuristically with tables, a noisy process that makes it difficult to disentangle whether hallucination is primarily caused by data noise or model shortcomings. On the other hand, one can elicit annotators to write sentence targets from scratch, which are faithful to the table, but the resulting targets often lack variety in terms of structure and style.

In contrast, ToTTo is constructed using a novel data annotation strategy in which annotators revise existing Wikipedia sentences in stages. This results in target sentences that are clean, as well as natural, containing interesting and varied linguistic properties. The data collection and annotation process begins by collecting tables from Wikipedia, where a given table is paired with a summary sentence collected from the supporting page context according to heuristics, such as word overlap between the page text and the table and hyperlinks referencing tabular data. This summary sentence may contain information not supported by the table and may contain pronouns with antecedents found in the table only, not the sentence itself.

The annotator then highlights the cells in the table that support the sentence and deletes phrases in the sentence that are not supported by the table. They also decontextualize the sentence so that it is standalone (e.g., with correct pronoun resolution) and correct grammar, where necessary.

We show that annotators obtain high agreement on the above task: 0.856 Fleiss Kappa for cell highlighting, and 67.0 BLEU for the final target sentence.

Dataset Analysis
We conducted a topic analysis on the ToTTo dataset over 44 categories and found that the Sports and Countries topics, each of which consists of a range of fine-grained topics, e.g., football/olympics for sports and population/buildings for countries, together comprise 56.4% of the dataset. The other 44% is composed of a much more broad set of topics, including Performing Arts, Transportation, and Entertainment.

Furthermore, we conducted a manual analysis of the different types of linguistic phenomena in the dataset over 100 randomly chosen examples. The table below summarizes the fraction of examples that require reference to the page and section titles, as well as some of the linguistic phenomena in the dataset that potentially pose new challenges to current systems.

Linguistic Phenomena	Percentage
Require reference to page title	82%
Require reference to section title	19%
Require reference to table description	3%
Reasoning (logical, numerical, temporal etc.)	21%
Comparison across rows/columns/cells	13%
Require background information	12%

Baseline Results
We present some baseline results of three state-of-the-art models from the literature (BERT-to-BERT, Pointer Generator, and the Puduppully 2019 model) on two evaluation metrics, BLEU and PARENT. In addition to reporting the score on the overall test set, we also evaluate each model on a more challenging subset consisting of out-of-domain examples. As the table below shows, the BERT-to-BERT model performs best in terms of both BLEU and PARENT. Moreover, all models achieve considerably lower performance on the challenge set indicating the challenge of out-of-domain generalization.

While automatic metrics can give some indication of performance, they are not currently sufficient for evaluating hallucination in text generation systems. To better understand hallucination, we manually evaluate the top performing baseline, to determine how faithful it is to the content in the source table, under the assumption that discrepancies indicate hallucination. To compute the “Expert” performance, for each example in our multi-reference test set, we held out one reference and asked annotators to compare it with the other references for faithfulness. As the results show, the top performing baseline appears to hallucinate information ~20% of the time.

Model Errors and Challenges
In the table below, we present a selection of the observed model errors to highlight some of the more challenging aspects of the ToTTo dataset. We find that state-of-the-art models struggle with hallucination, numerical reasoning, and rare topics, even when using cleaned references (errors in red). The last example shows that even when the model output is correct it is sometimes not as informative as the original reference which contains more reasoning about the table (shown in blue).

Conclusion
In this work, we presented ToTTo, a large, English table-to-text dataset that presents both a controlled generation task and a data annotation process based on iterative sentence revision. We also provided several state-of-the-art baselines, and demonstrated ToTTo could be a useful dataset for modeling research as well as for developing evaluation metrics that can better detect model improvements.

In addition to the proposed task, we hope our dataset can also be helpful for other tasks such as table understanding and sentence revision. ToTTo is available at our GitHub repo.

Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Ming-Wei Chang, Jonathan H. Clark, Kenton Lee, and Jennimaria Palomaki for their insightful discussions and support. Many thanks also to Ashwin Kakarla and his team for help with the annotations.

Posted by Jennifer J. Sun, Student Researcher and Ting Liu, Senior Software Engineer, Google Research

Everyday actions, such as jogging, reading a book, pouring water, or playing sports, can be viewed as a sequence of poses, consisting of the position and orientation of a person’s body. An understanding of poses from images and videos is a crucial step for enabling a range of applications, including augmented reality display, full-body gesture control, and physical exercise quantification. However, a 3-dimensional pose captured in two dimensions in images and videos appears different depending on the viewpoint of the camera. The ability to recognize similarity in 3D pose using only 2D information will help vision systems better understand the world.

In “View-Invariant Probabilistic Embedding for Human Pose” (Pr-VIPE), a spotlight paper at ECCV 2020, we present a new algorithm for human pose perception that recognizes similarity in human body poses across different camera views by mapping 2D body pose keypoints to a view-invariant embedding space. This ability enables tasks, such as pose retrieval, action recognition, action video synchronization, and more. Compared to existing models that directly map 2D pose keypoints to 3D pose keypoints, the Pr-VIPE embedding space is (1) view-invariant, (2) probabilistic in order to capture 2D input ambiguity, and (3) does not require camera parameters during training or inference. Trained with in-lab setting data, the model works on in-the-wild images out of the box, given a reasonably good 2D pose estimator (e.g., PersonLab, BlazePose, among others). The model is simple, results in compact embeddings, and can be trained (in ~1 day) using 15 CPUs. We have released the code on our GitHub repo.

Pr-VIPE can be directly applied to align videos from different views.

Pr-VIPE
The input to Pr-VIPE is a set of 2D keypoints, from any 2D pose estimator that produces a minimum of 13 body keypoints, and the output is the mean and variance of the pose embedding. The distances between embeddings of 2D poses correlate to their similarities in absolute 3D pose space. Our approach is based on two observations:

• The same 3D pose may appear very different in 2D as the viewpoint changes.
• The same 2D pose can be projected from different 3D poses.

The first observation motivates the need for view-invariance. To accomplish this, we define the matching probability, i.e., the likelihood that different 2D poses were projected from the same, or similar 3D poses. The matching probability predicted by Pr-VIPE for matching pose pairs should be higher than for non-matching pairs.

To address the second observation, Pr-VIPE utilizes a probabilistic embedding formulation. Because many 3D poses can project to the same or similar 2D poses, the model input exhibits an inherent ambiguity that is difficult to capture through deterministic mapping point-to-point in embedding space. Therefore, we map a 2D pose through a probabilistic mapping to an embedding distribution, of which we use the variance to represent the uncertainty of the input 2D pose. As an example, in the figure below the third 2D view of the 3D pose on the left is similar to the first 2D view of a different 3D pose on the right, so we map them into a similar location in the embedding space with large variances.

Pr-VIPE enables vision systems to recognize 2D poses across views. We embed 2D poses using Pr-VIPE such that the embeddings are (1) view-invariant (2D projections of similar 3D poses are embedded close together) and (2) probabilistic. By embedding detected 2D poses, Pr-VIPE enables direct retrieval of pose images from different views, and can also be applied to action recognition and video alignment.

View-Invariance
During training, we use 2D poses from two sources: multi-view images and projections of groundtruth 3D poses. Triplets of 2D poses (anchor, positive, and negative) are selected from a batch, where the anchor and positive are two different projections of the same 3D pose, and the negative is a projection of a non-matching 3D pose. Pr-VIPE then estimates the matching probability of 2D pose pairs from their embeddings.
During training, we push the matching probability of positive pairs to be close to 1 with a positive pairwise loss in which we minimize the embedding distance between positive pairs, and the matching probability of negative pairs to be small by maximizing the ratio of the matching probabilities between positive and negative pairs with a triplet ratio loss.

Overview of the Pr-VIPE model. During training, we apply three losses (triplet ratio loss, positive pairwise loss, and a prior loss that applies a unit Gaussian prior to our embeddings). During inference, the model maps an input 2D pose to a probabilistic, view-invariant embedding.

Probabilistic Embedding
Pr-VIPE maps a 2D pose to a probabilistic embedding as a multivariate Gaussian distribution using a sampling-based approach for similarity score computation between two distributions. During training, we use a Gaussian prior loss to regularize the predicted distribution.

Evaluation
We propose a new cross-view pose retrieval benchmark to evaluate the view-invariance property of the embedding. Given a monocular pose image, cross-view retrieval aims to retrieve the same pose from different views without using camera parameters. The results demonstrate that Pr-VIPE retrieves poses more accurately across views compared to baseline methods in both evaluated datasets (Human3.6M, MPI-INF-3DHP).

Pr-VIPE retrieves poses across different views more accurately relative to the baseline method (3D pose estimation).

Common 3D pose estimation methods (such as the simple baseline used for comparison above, SemGCN, and EpipolarPose, amongst many others), predict 3D poses in camera coordinates, which are not directly view-invariant. Thus, rigid alignment between every query-index pair is required for retrieval using estimated 3D poses, which is computationally expensive due to the need for singular value decomposition (SVD). In contrast, Pr-VIPE embeddings can be directly used for distance computation in Euclidean space, without any post-processing.

Applications
View-invariant pose embedding can be applied to many image and video related tasks. Below, we show Pr-VIPE applied to cross-view retrieval on in-the-wild images without using camera parameters.

We can retrieve in-the-wild images from different views without using camera parameters by embedding the detected 2D pose using Pr-VIPE. Using the query image (top row), we search for a matching pose from a different camera view and we show the nearest neighbor retrieval (bottom row). This enables us to search for matching poses across camera views more easily.

The same Pr-VIPE model can also be used for video alignment. To do so, we stack Pr-VIPE embeddings within a small time window, and use the dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithm to align video pairs.

Manual video alignment is difficult and time-consuming. Here, Pr-VIPE is applied to automatically align videos of the same action repeated from different views.

The video alignment distance calculated via DTW can then be used for action recognition by classifying videos using nearest neighbor search. We evaluate the Pr-VIPE embedding using the Penn Action dataset and demonstrate that using the Pr-VIPE embedding without fine-tuning on the target dataset, yields highly competitive recognition accuracy. In addition, we show that Pr-VIPE even achieves relatively accurate results using only videos from a single view in the index set.

Pr-VIPE recognizes action across views using pose inputs only, and is comparable to or better than methods using pose only or with additional context information (such as Iqbal et al., Liu and Yuan, Luvizon et al., and Du et al.). When action labels are only available for videos from a single view, Pr-VIPE (1-view only) can still achieve relatively accurate results.

Conclusion
We introduce the Pr-VIPE model for mapping 2D human poses to a view-invariant probabilistic embedding space, and show that the learned embeddings can be directly used for pose retrieval, action recognition, and video alignment. Our cross-view retrieval benchmark can be used to test the view-invariant property of other embeddings. We look forward to hearing about what you can do with pose embeddings!

Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Jiaping Zhao, Liang-Chieh Chen, Long Zhao (Rutgers University), Liangzhe Yuan, Yuxiao Wang, Florian Schroff, Hartwig Adam, and the Mobile Vision team for the wonderful collaboration and support.