fga-ndcg

Factor Graph Attention — NDCG variant

• A general multimodal attention approach inspired by probabilistic graphical models.
• Achieves a state-of-the-art performance (MRR) on visual dialog task.

This is Factor Graph Attention (CVPR'19) finetuned on the dense relevance annotations, which optimizes NDCG. Code: idansc/fga.

For the MRR-oriented model, see Idan/fga.

Why there are two models

The sparse training label calls one of the 100 candidates correct and the other 99 equally wrong. That is what MRR measures. But for "is it daytime?" the candidate list contains yes, yeah, it is and yes it is, and the label picks one arbitrarily. NDCG instead scores against the graded relevance five annotators assigned to every candidate.

Training on the graded signal moves NDCG a long way and costs MRR, because the two metrics genuinely disagree about what a good ranking is. That tension is the subject of the 2020 challenge submission, https://github.com/idansc/mrr-ndcg.

Results

On VisDial v1.0 val. The baseline is the MRR model this was finetuned from:

This checkpoint is the pure-dense end of that trade-off: the best NDCG, and the worst MRR. If you want one model that is respectable at both, the sparse_weight=1.0 row gives up 2.5 NDCG to recover 14 MRR, and is reproducible with --sparse_weight 1.0.

Trained for 5 epochs at lr 1e-4 on the 2,000-image dense subset of train. The val annotations are never trained on — they are the evaluation set.

On the objective

The loss is a soft-label cross entropy: the relevance vector is normalized into a distribution and matched against the model's log-softmax over the candidates,

loss = -sum_i p_i log q_i,     p = relevance / sum(relevance)

which is the cross entropy the sparse loss already computes, generalized from a one-hot target to a graded one.

A smooth approximation of NDCG itself (ApproxNDCG, Qin et al.) was also tried and is implemented in the repo. It is worse on this task — +6.0 NDCG against +12.6, while losing more MRR — most likely because it concentrates its gradient on the few positions the discount rewards, whereas the soft cross entropy draws signal from all 100 candidates, which matters when there are only 2,000 training examples.

Usage

from fga import FGAForVisualDialog

model = FGAForVisualDialog.from_pretrained("Idan/fga-ndcg")
outputs = model(**batch)
ranking = outputs.logits.argsort(dim=-1, descending=True)

Install with pip install git+https://github.com/idansc/fga.git.

Reproduce with:

python scripts/finetune_dense.py \
    --model_name_or_path <sparse checkpoint> \
    --train_dense_path data/visdial_1.0_train_dense_annotations.json \
    --output_dir models/fga-ndcg \
    --loss soft_ce --sparse_weight 0.0 \
    --learning_rate 1e-4 --num_train_epochs 5

Citation

Please cite Factor Graph Attention if you use this work in your research:

@inproceedings{schwartz2019factor,
  title={Factor graph attention},
  author={Schwartz, Idan and Yu, Seunghak and Hazan, Tamir and Schwing, Alexander G},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
  pages={2039--2048},
  year={2019}
}