<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default"><div class="gmail_default"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b>When: </b>Friday,
February 4th at <b>10:30am CT</b></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span style="color:black">Where:</span></b><span style="color:black">
Zoom Virtual Talk (</span><b><span style="color:blue"><a href="https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1KBwOci8S62CnOJ9hVGMKg" style="color:rgb(5,99,193)" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(17,85,204)">register in advance here</span></a></span></b><span style="color:black">)</span></font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span style="color:black">Who: </span></b><span style="color:black"> </span><span style="color:rgb(80,0,80)">
</span>Rowan Zellers, University of
Washington</font></p></div><div class="gmail_default"><div class="gmail_default"><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b style="color:rgb(60,64,67);letter-spacing:0.2px;white-space:pre-wrap">Title:</b><span style="color:rgb(60,64,67);letter-spacing:0.2px;white-space:pre-wrap"> Grounding Language by Seeing, Hearing, and Interacting</span><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 0.0001pt;line-height:normal;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><span style="color:rgb(60,64,67);letter-spacing:0.2px;white-space:pre-wrap"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></span></p><div><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:12pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b>Abstract:</b> As
humans, our understanding of language is grounded in a rich mental model about
“how the world works” – that we learn through perception and interaction. We
use this understanding to reason beyond what is literally said, imagining how
situations might unfold in the world. Machines today struggle at making such
connections, which limits how they can be safely used.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:12pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:12pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif">In my talk, I
will discuss three lines of work to bridge this gap between machines and
humans. I will first discuss how we might measure grounded understanding. I
will introduce a suite of approaches for constructing benchmarks, using
machines in the loop to filter out spurious biases. Next, I will introduce
PIGLeT: a model that learns physical commonsense understanding by interacting
with the world through simulation, using this knowledge to ground language.
PIGLeT learns linguistic form and meaning – together – and outperforms
text-to-text only models that are orders of magnitude larger. Finally, I will
introduce MERLOT, which learns about situations in the world by watching
millions of YouTube videos with transcribed speech. The model learns to jointly
represent video, audio, and language, together and over time – learning
multimodal and neural script knowledge representations.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:12pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:12pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif">Together, these
directions suggest a path forward for building machines that learn language
rooted in the world.</font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:12pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"> </font></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:12pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b>Bio:</b> Rowan
Zellers is a final year PhD candidate at the University of Washington in
Computer Science & Engineering, advised by Yejin Choi and Ali Farhadi. His
research focuses on enabling machines to understand language, vision, sound,
and the world beyond these modalities. He has been recognized through NSF
Graduate Fellowship and a NeurIPS 2021 outstanding paper award. His work has
appeared in several media outlets, including Wired, the Washington Post, and
the New York Times. In the past, he graduated from Harvey Mudd College with a
B.S. in Computer Science & Mathematics, and has interned at the Allen
Institute for AI.</font></p></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div></div></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span style="color:rgb(17,17,17)"><b>Host</b>: </span><a href="mailto:klivescu@ttic.edu" target="_blank"><b>Karen Livescu</b></a></font></div><div class="gmail_default"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br></div></div></div><div><div dir="ltr" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:x-small">Mary C. Marre</span><br></div><div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" size="1">Faculty Administrative Support</font></div><div><i><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6" size="1"><b>Toyota Technological Institute</b></font></i></div><div><i><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6" size="1">6045 S. Kenwood Avenue</font></i></div><div><font size="1"><i><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" color="#3d85c6">Chicago, IL 60637</font></i><br></font></div><div><b><i><a href="mailto:mmarre@ttic.edu" target="_blank"><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" size="1">mmarre@ttic.edu</font></a></i></b></div></div></div></div></div></div>