Multi-turn textual feedback-based fashion image retrieval focuses on a real-world setting, where users can iteratively provide information to refine retrieval results until they find an item that fits all their requirements. In this work, we present a novel memory-based method, called FashionNTM, for such a multi-turn system. Our framework incorporates a new Cascaded Memory Neural Turing Machine (CM-NTM) approach for implicit state management, thereby learning to integrate information across all past turns to retrieve new images, for a given turn. Unlike vanilla Neural Turing Machine (NTM), our CM-NTM operates on multiple inputs, which interact with their respective memories via individual read and write heads, to learn complex relationships. Extensive evaluation results show that our proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art algorithm by 50.5%, on Multi-turn FashionIQ [60] – the only existing multi-turn fashion dataset currently, in addition to having a relative improvement of 12.6% on Multi-turn Shoes – an extension of the singleturn Shoes dataset [5] that we created in this work. Further analysis of the model in a real-world interactive setting demonstrates two important capabilities of our model – memory retention across turns, and agnosticity to turn order for non-contradictory feedback. Finally, user study results show that images retrieved by FashionNTM were favored by 83.1% over other multi-turn models.

Fashion image retrieval based on a query pair of reference image and natural language feedback is a challenging task that requires models to assess fashion related information from visual and textual modalities simultaneously. We propose a new vision-language transformer based model, FashionVLP, that brings the prior knowledge contained in large image-text corpora to the domain of fashion image retrieval, and combines visual information from multiple levels of context to effectively capture fashion-related information. While queries are encoded through the transformer layers, our asymmetric design adopts a novel attention-based approach for fusing target image features without involving text or transformer layers in the process. Extensive results show that FashionVLP achieves the state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets, with a large 23% relative improvement on the challenging FashionIQ dataset, which contains complex natural language feedback.

We present results from a large-scale experiment on pretraining encoders with non-embedding parameter counts ranging from 700M to 9.3B, their subsequent distillation into smaller models ranging from 17M-170M parameters, and their application to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component of a virtual assistant system. Though we train using 70% spoken-form data, our teacher models perform comparably to XLM-R and mT5 when evaluated on the written-form Cross-lingual Natural Language Inference (XNLI) corpus. We perform a second stage of pretraining on our teacher models using in-domain data from our system, improving error rates by 3.86% relative for intent classification and 7.01% relative for slot filling. We find that even a 170M-parameter model distilled from our Stage 2 teacher model has 2.88% better intent classification and 7.69% better slot filling error rates when compared to the 2.3B-parameter teacher trained only on public data (Stage 1), emphasizing the importance of in-domain data for pretraining. When evaluated offline using labeled NLU data, our 17M-parameter Stage 2 distilled model outperforms both XLM-R Base (85M params) and DistillBERT (42M params) by 4.23% to 6.14%, respectively. Finally, we present results from a full virtual assistant experimentation platform, where we find that models trained using our pretraining and distillation pipeline outperform models distilled from 85M-parameter teachers by 3.74%-4.91% on an automatic measurement of full-system user dissatisfaction.

The task of learning from only a few examples (called a few-shot setting) is of key importance and relevance to a real-world setting.For question answering (QA), the current state-of-the-art pre-trained models typically need fine-tuning on tens of thousands of examples to obtain good results.Their performance degrades significantly in a few-shot setting (< 100 examples).To address this, we propose a simple fine-tuning framework that leverages pre-trained text-to-text models and is directly aligned with their pre-training framework.Specifically, we construct the input as a concatenation of the question, a mask token representing the answer span and a context.Given this input, the model is fine-tuned using the same objective as that of its pre-training objective.Through experimental studies on various few-shot configurations, we show that this formulation leads to significant gains on multiple QA benchmarks (an absolute gain of 34.2 F1 points on average when there are only 16 training examples).The gains extend further when used with larger models (Eg:-72.3F1 on SQuAD using BART-large with only 32 examples) and translate well to a multilingual setting .On the multilingual TydiQA benchmark, our model outperforms the XLM-Roberta-large by an absolute margin of upto 40 F1 points and an average of 33 F1 points in a few-shot setting (<= 64 training examples).We conduct detailed ablation studies to analyze factors contributing to these gains.