In hospitals, data are siloed to specific information systems that make the same information available under different modalities such as the different medical imaging exams the patient undergoes (CT scans, MRI, PET, Ultrasound, etc.) and their associated radiology reports. This offers unique opportunities to obtain and use at train-time those multiple views of the same information that might not always be available at test-time.In this paper, we propose an innovative framework that makes the most of available data by learning good representations of a multi-modal input that are resilient to modality dropping at test-time, using recent advances in mutual information maximization. By maximizing cross-modal information at train time, we are able to outperform several state-of-the-art baselines in two different settings, medical image classification, and segmentation. In particular, our method is shown to have a strong impact on the inference-time performance of weaker modalities.

Synthesizing images from a given text description involves engaging two types of information: the content, which includes information explicitly described in the text (e.g., color, composition, etc.), and the style, which is usually not well described in the text (e.g., location, quantity, size, etc.). However, in previous works, it is typically treated as a process of generating images only from the content, i.e., without considering learning meaningful style representations. In this paper, we aim to learn two variables that are disentangled in the latent space, representing content and style respectively. We achieve this by augmenting current text-to-image synthesis frameworks with a dual adversarial inference mechanism. Through extensive experiments, we show that our model learns, in an unsupervised manner, style representations corresponding to certain meaningful information present in the image that are not well described in the text. The new framework also improves the quality of synthesized images when evaluated on Oxford-102, CUB and COCO datasets.

We investigate the integration of a planning mechanism into sequence-to-sequence models using attention. We develop a model which can plan ahead in the future when it computes its alignments between input and output sequences, constructing a matrix of proposed future alignments and a commitment vector that governs whether to follow or recompute the plan. This mechanism is inspired by the recently proposed strategic attentive reader and writer (STRAW) model for Reinforcement Learning. Our proposed model is end-to-end trainable using primarily differentiable operations. We show that it outperforms a strong baseline on character-level translation tasks from WMT'15, the algorithmic task of finding Eulerian circuits of graphs, and question generation from the text. Our analysis demonstrates that the model computes qualitatively intuitive alignments, converges faster than the baselines, and achieves superior performance with fewer parameters.