Self-Supervised Language-and-Vision Reasoning

GT NLP Seminar is an interactive talk series held bi-weekly, on Fridays 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm, where students/faculty/staff with interest in Natural Language Processing at Georgia Tech meet together, have lunch and listen to talks about recent NLP research in a wide range of topics. Our speakers come from both inside Georgia Tech or outside, and will usually give a 45-minute talk, followed by a 15-minute QA/discussion session. Learn more about the series: https://sites.google.com/view/nlpseminar/home "Self-Supervised Language-and-Vision Reasoning" is a talk given by William Wang. Wang is the Director of UC Santa Barbara's Natural Language Processing group and Center for Responsible Machine Learning. He is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Designs, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Abstract: A key challenge for Artificial Intelligence research is to go beyond static observational data, and consider more challenging settings that involve dynamic actions and incremental decision-making. In this talk, I will introduce our recent work on visually-grounded language reasoning via the studies of vision-and-language navigation. In particular, I will emphasize three benefits of self-supervised learning that: (1) improves generalization in unseen environments; (2) creates counterfactuals to augment observational data; (3) enables transfer learning for challenging settings. I will conclude by briefly introducing other reasoning problems that my groups are working on recently.