GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
SlideVQA: A Dataset for Document Visual Question Answering on Multiple Images
Authors: Ryota Tanaka; Kyosuke Nishida; Kosuke Nishida; Taku Hasegawa; Itsumi Saito; Kuniko Saito
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Visual question answering on document images that contain textual, visual, and layout information, called document VQA, has received much attention recently. Although many datasets have been proposed for developing document VQA systems, most of the existing datasets focus on understanding the content relationships within a single image and not across multiple images. In this study, we propose a new multi-image document VQA dataset, SlideVQA, containing 2.6k+ slide decks composed of 52k+ slide images and 14.5k questions about a slide deck. SlideVQA requires complex reasoning, including single-hop, multi-hop, and numerical reasoning, and also provides annotated arithmetic expressions of numerical answers for enhancing the ability of numerical reasoning. Moreover, we developed a new end-to-end document VQA model that treats evidence selection and question answering as a unified sequence-to-sequence format. Experiments on SlideVQA show that our model outperformed existing state-of-the-art QA models, but that it still has a large gap behind human performance. We believe that our dataset will facilitate research on document VQA.
Reducing Sentiment Bias in Pre-trained Sentiment Classification via Adaptive Gumbel Attack
Authors: Jiachen Tian; Shizhan Chen; Xiaowang Zhang; Xin Wang; Zhiyong Feng
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have recently enabled rapid progress on sentiment classification under the pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, where the fine-tuning phase aims to transfer the factual knowledge learned by PLMs to sentiment classification. However, current fine-tuning methods ignore the risk that PLMs cause the problem of sentiment bias, that is, PLMs tend to inject positive or negative sentiment from the contextual information of certain entities (or aspects) into their word embeddings, leading them to establish spurious correlations with labels. In this paper, we propose an adaptive Gumbel-attacked classifier that immunes sentiment bias from an adversarial-attack perspective. Due to the complexity and diversity of sentiment bias, we construct multiple Gumbel-attack expert networks to generate various noises from mixed Gumbel distribution constrained by mutual information minimization, and design an adaptive training framework to synthesize complex noise by confidence-guided controlling the number of expert networks. Finally, we capture these noises that effectively simulate sentiment bias based on the feedback of the classifier, and then propose a multi-channel parameter updating algorithm to strengthen the classifier to recognize these noises by fusing the parameters between the classifier and each expert network. Experimental results illustrate that our method significantly reduced sentiment bias and improved the performance of sentiment classification.
Latent Constraints on Unsupervised Text-Graph Alignment with Information Asymmetry
Authors: Jidong Tian; Wenqing Chen; Yitian Li; Caoyun Fan; Hao He; Yaohui Jin
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Unsupervised text-graph alignment (UTGA) is a fundamental task that bidirectionally generates texts and graphs without parallel data. Most available models of UTGA suffer from information asymmetry, a common phenomenon that texts and graphs include additional information invisible to each other. On the one hand, these models fail to supplement asymmetric information effectively due to the lack of ground truths. On the other hand, it is challenging to indicate asymmetric information with explicit indicators because it cannot be decoupled from the data directly. To address the challenge posed by information asymmetry, we propose the assumption that asymmetric information is encoded in unobservable latent variables and only affects the one-way generation processes. These latent variables corresponding to asymmetric information should obey prior distributions recovered approximately from original data. Therefore, we first propose a taxonomy of the latent variable that classifies the latent variable into transferrable (TV) and non-transferable (NTV) variables and further distinguish NTV as the dependent variable (DV) and the independent variable (IV). Next, we propose three latent VAE-based regularizations on TV, DV, and IV to constrain their distributions to well-designed prior distributions to introduce asymmetric information into models and enhance the preservation of shared contents. Finally, we impose the three proposed constraints on a cycle-consistent learning framework, back-translation (BT), named ConstrainedBT. Experimental results on three UTGA tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of ConstrainedBT on the information-asymmetric challenge.
M-sense: Modeling Narrative Structure in Short Personal Narratives Using Protagonist’s Mental Representations
Authors: Prashanth Vijayaraghavan; Deb Roy
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Narrative is a ubiquitous component of human communication. Understanding its structure plays a critical role in a wide variety of applications, ranging from simple comparative analyses to enhanced narrative retrieval, comprehension, or reasoning capabilities. Prior research in narratology has highlighted the importance of studying the links between cognitive and linguistic aspects of narratives for effective comprehension. This interdependence is related to the textual semantics and mental language in narratives, referring to characters' motivations, feelings or emotions, and beliefs. However, this interdependence is hardly explored for modeling narratives. In this work, we propose the task of automatically detecting prominent elements of the narrative structure by analyzing the role of characters' inferred mental state along with linguistic information at the syntactic and semantic levels. We introduce a STORIES dataset of short personal narratives containing manual annotations of key elements of narrative structure, specifically climax and resolution. To this end, we implement a computational model that leverages the protagonist's mental state information obtained from a pre-trained model trained on social commonsense knowledge and integrates their representations with contextual semantic embed-dings using a multi-feature fusion approach. Evaluating against prior zero-shot and supervised baselines, we find that our model is able to achieve significant improvements in the task of identifying climax and resolution.
Taming Continuous Posteriors for Latent Variational Dialogue Policies
Authors: Marin Vlastelica; Patrick Ernst; Gyuri Szarvas
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Utilizing amortized variational inference for latent-action reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to be an effective approach in Task-oriented Dialogue (ToD) systems for optimizing dialogue success.Until now, categorical posteriors have been argued to be one of the main drivers of performance. In this work we revisit Gaussian variational posteriors for latent-action RL and show that they can yield even better performance than categoricals. We achieve this by introducing an improved variational inference objective for learning continuous representations without auxiliary learning objectives, which streamlines the training procedure. Moreover, we propose ways to regularize the latent dialogue policy, which helps to retain good response coherence. Using continuous latent representations our model achieves state of the art dialogue success rate on the MultiWOZ benchmark, and also compares well to categorical latent methods in response coherence.
Uncertainty-Aware Self-Training for Low-Resource Neural Sequence Labeling
Authors: Jianing Wang; Chengyu Wang; Jun Huang; Ming Gao; Aoying Zhou
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Neural sequence labeling (NSL) aims at assigning labels for input language tokens, which covers a broad range of applications, such as named entity recognition (NER) and slot filling, etc. However, the satisfying results achieved by traditional supervised-based approaches heavily depend on the large amounts of human annotation data, which may not be feasible in real-world scenarios due to data privacy and computation efficiency issues. This paper presents SeqUST, a novel uncertain-aware self-training framework for NSL to address the labeled data scarcity issue and to effectively utilize unlabeled data. Specifically, we incorporate Monte Carlo (MC) dropout in Bayesian neural network (BNN) to perform uncertainty estimation at the token level and then select reliable language tokens from unlabeled data based on the model confidence and certainty. A well-designed masked sequence labeling task with a noise-robust loss supports robust training, which aims to suppress the problem of noisy pseudo labels. In addition, we develop a Gaussian-based consistency regularization technique to further improve the model robustness on Gaussian-distributed perturbed representations. This effectively alleviates the over-fitting dilemma originating from pseudo-labeled augmented data. Extensive experiments over six benchmarks demonstrate that our SeqUST framework effectively improves the performance of self-training, and consistently outperforms strong baselines by a large margin in low-resource scenarios.
Disentangled CVAEs with Contrastive Learning for Explainable Recommendation
Authors: Linlin Wang; Zefeng Cai; Gerard de Melo; Zhu Cao; Liang He
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Modern recommender systems are increasingly expected to provide informative explanations that enable users to understand the reason for particular recommendations. However, previous methods struggle to interpret the input IDs of user--item pairs in real-world datasets, failing to extract adequate characteristics for controllable generation. To address this issue, we propose disentangled conditional variational autoencoders (CVAEs) for explainable recommendation, which leverage disentangled latent preference factors and guide the explanation generation with the refined condition of CVAEs via a self-regularization contrastive learning loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method generates high-quality explanations and achieves new state-of-the-art results in diverse domains.
fmLRE: A Low-Resource Relation Extraction Model Based on Feature Mapping Similarity Calculation
Authors: Peng Wang; Tong Shao; Ke Ji; Guozheng Li; Wenjun Ke
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Low-resource relation extraction (LRE) aims to extract relations from limited labeled corpora.  Existing work takes advantages of self-training or distant supervision to expand the limited labeled data in the data-driven approaches, while the selection bias of pseudo labels may cause the error accumulation in subsequent relation classification. To address this issue, this paper proposes fmLRE, an iterative feedback method based on feature mapping similarity calculation to improve the accuracy of pseudo labels. First, it calculates the similarities between pseudo-label and real-label data of the same category in a feature mapping space based on semantic features of labeled dataset after feature projection. Then, it fine-tunes initial model according to the iterative process of reinforcement learning. Finally, the similarity is used as a threshold for screening high-precision pseudo-labels and the basis for setting different rewards, which also acts as a penalty term for the loss function of relation classifier. Experimental results demonstrate that fmLRE achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with strong baselines on two public datasets.
Towards Reliable Neural Machine Translation with Consistency-Aware Meta-Learning
Authors: Rongxiang Weng; Qiang Wang; Wensen Cheng; Changfeng Zhu; Min Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved remarkable success in producing high-quality translations. However, current NMT systems suffer from a lack of reliability, as their outputs that are often affected by lexical or syntactic changes in inputs, resulting in large variations in quality. This limitation hinders the practicality and trustworthiness of NMT. A contributing factor to this problem is that NMT models trained with the one-to-one paradigm struggle to handle the source diversity phenomenon, where inputs with the same meaning can be expressed differently. In this work, we treat this problem as a bilevel optimization problem and present a consistency-aware meta-learning (CAML) framework derived from the model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithm to address it. Specifically, the NMT model with CAML (named CoNMT) first learns a consistent meta representation of semantically equivalent sentences in the outer loop. Subsequently, a mapping from the meta representation to the output sentence is learned in the inner loop, allowing the NMT model to translate semantically equivalent sentences to the same target sentence. We conduct experiments on the NIST Chinese to English task, three WMT translation tasks, and the TED M2O task. The results demonstrate that CoNMT effectively improves overall translation quality and reliably handles diverse inputs.
Zero-Shot Face-Based Voice Conversion: Bottleneck-Free Speech Disentanglement in the Real-World Scenario
Authors: Shao-En Weng; Hong-Han Shuai; Wen-Huang Cheng
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Often a face has a voice. Appearance sometimes has a strong relationship with one's voice. In this work, we study how a face can be converted to a voice, which is a face-based voice conversion. Since there is no clean dataset that contains face and speech, voice conversion faces difficult learning and low-quality problems caused by background noise or echo. Too much redundant information for face-to-voice also causes synthesis of a general style of speech. Furthermore, previous work tried to disentangle speech with bottleneck adjustment. However, it is hard to decide on the size of the bottleneck. Therefore, we propose a bottleneck-free strategy for speech disentanglement. To avoid synthesizing the general style of speech, we utilize framewise facial embedding. It applied adversarial learning with a multi-scale discriminator for the model to achieve better quality. In addition, the self-attention module is added to focus on content-related features for in-the-wild data. Quantitative experiments show that our method outperforms previous work.
Adversarial Self-Attention for Language Understanding
Authors: Hongqiu Wu; Ruixue Ding; Hai Zhao; Pengjun Xie; Fei Huang; Min Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Deep neural models (e.g. Transformer) naturally learn spurious features, which create a ``shortcut'' between the labels and inputs, thus impairing the generalization and robustness. This paper advances self-attention mechanism to its robust variant for Transformer-based pre-trained language models (e.g. BERT). We propose Adversarial Self-Attention mechanism (ASA), which adversarially biases the attentions to effectively suppress the model reliance on features (e.g. specific keywords) and encourage its exploration of broader semantics. We conduct comprehensive evaluation across a wide range of tasks for both pre-training and fine-tuning stages. For pre-training, ASA unfolds remarkable performance gain compared to naive training for longer steps. For fine-tuning, ASA-empowered models outweigh naive models by a large margin considering both generalization and robustness.
See How You Read? Multi-Reading Habits Fusion Reasoning for Multi-Modal Fake News Detection
Authors: Lianwei Wu; Pusheng Liu; Yanning Zhang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: The existing approaches based on different neural networks automatically capture and fuse the multimodal semantics of news, which have achieved great success for fake news detection. However, they still suffer from the limitations of both shallow fusion of multimodal features and less attention to the inconsistency between different modalities. To overcome them, we propose multi-reading habits fusion reasoning networks (MRHFR) for multi-modal fake news detection. In MRHFR, inspired by people's different reading habits for multimodal news, we summarize three basic cognitive reading habits and put forward cognition-aware fusion layer to learn the dependencies between multimodal features of news, so as to deepen their semantic-level integration. To explore the inconsistency of different modalities of news, we develop coherence constraint reasoning layer from two perspectives, which first measures the semantic consistency between the comments and different modal features of the news, and then probes the semantic deviation caused by unimodal features to the multimodal news content through constraint strategy. Experiments on two public datasets not only demonstrate that MRHFR not only achieves the excellent performance but also provides a new paradigm for capturing inconsistencies between multi-modal news.
Identify Event Causality with Knowledge and Analogy
Authors: Sifan Wu; Ruihui Zhao; Yefeng Zheng; Jian Pei; Bang Liu
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Event causality identification (ECI) aims to identify the
causal relationship between events, which plays a crucial role
in deep text understanding. Due to the diversity of real-world
causality events and difficulty in obtaining sufficient training
data, existing ECI approaches have poor generalizability and
struggle to identify the relation between seldom seen events.
In this paper, we propose to utilize both external knowledge
and internal analogy to improve ECI. On the one hand, we
utilize a commonsense knowledge graph called ConceptNet
to enrich the description of an event sample and reveal the
commonalities or associations between different events. On
the other hand, we retrieve similar events as analogy exam-
ples and glean useful experiences from such analogous neigh-
bors to better identify the relationship between a new event
pair. By better understanding different events through exter-
nal knowledge and making an analogy with similar events, we
can alleviate the data sparsity issue and improve model gener-
alizability. Extensive evaluations on two benchmark datasets
show that our model outperforms other baseline methods by
around 18% on the F1-value on average
Continual Graph Convolutional Network for Text Classification
Authors: Tiandeng Wu; Qijiong Liu; Yi Cao; Yao Huang; Xiao-Ming Wu; Jiandong Ding
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Graph convolutional network (GCN) has been successfully applied to capture global non-consecutive and long-distance semantic information for text classification. However, while GCN-based methods have shown promising results in offline evaluations, they commonly follow a seen-token-seen-document paradigm by constructing a fixed document-token graph and cannot make inferences on new documents. It is a challenge to deploy them in online systems to infer steaming text data. In this work, we present a continual GCN model (ContGCN) to generalize inferences from observed documents to unobserved documents. Concretely, we propose a new all-token-any-document paradigm to dynamically update the document-token graph in every batch during both the training and testing phases of an online system. Moreover, we design an occurrence memory module and a self-supervised contrastive learning objective to update ContGCN in a label-free manner. A 3-month A/B test on Huawei public opinion analysis system shows ContGCN achieves 8.86% performance gain compared with state-of-the-art methods. Offline experiments on five public datasets also show ContGCN can improve inference quality. The source code will be released at https://github.com/Jyonn/ContGCN.
InfoCTM: A Mutual Information Maximization Perspective of Cross-Lingual Topic Modeling
Authors: Xiaobao Wu; Xinshuai Dong; Thong Nguyen; Chaoqun Liu; Liang-Ming Pan; Anh Tuan Luu
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Cross-lingual topic models have been prevalent for cross-lingual text analysis by revealing aligned latent topics. However, most existing methods suffer from producing repetitive topics that hinder further analysis and performance decline caused by low-coverage dictionaries. In this paper, we propose the Cross-lingual Topic Modeling with Mutual Information (InfoCTM). Instead of the direct alignment in previous work, we propose a topic alignment with mutual information method. This works as a regularization to properly align topics and prevent degenerate topic representations of words, which mitigates the repetitive topic issue. To address the low-coverage dictionary issue, we further propose a cross-lingual vocabulary linking method that finds more linked cross-lingual words for topic alignment beyond the translations of a given dictionary. Extensive experiments on English, Chinese, and Japanese datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, producing more coherent, diverse, and well-aligned topics and showing better transferability for cross-lingual classification tasks.
VideoDubber: Machine Translation with Speech-Aware Length Control for Video Dubbing
Authors: Yihan Wu; Junliang Guo; Xu Tan; Chen Zhang; Bohan Li; Ruihua Song; Lei He; Sheng Zhao; Arul Menezes; Jiang Bian
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Video dubbing aims to translate the original speech in a film or television program into the speech in a target language, which can be achieved with a cascaded system consisting of speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis. To ensure the translated speech to be well aligned with the corresponding video, the length/duration of the translated speech should be as close as possible to that of the original speech, which requires strict length control. Previous works usually control the number of words or characters generated by the machine translation model to be similar to the source sentence, without considering the isochronicity of speech as the speech duration of words/characters in different languages varies. In this paper, we propose VideoDubber, a machine translation system tailored for the task of video dubbing, which directly considers the speech duration of each token in translation, to match the length of source and target speech. Specifically, we control the speech length of generated sentence by guiding the prediction of each word with the duration information, including the speech duration of itself as well as how much duration is left for the remaining words. We design experiments on four language directions (German -> English, Spanish -> English, Chinese <-> English), and the results show that VideoDubber achieves better length control ability on the generated speech than baseline methods. To make up the lack of real-world datasets, we also construct a real-world test set collected from films to provide comprehensive evaluations on the video dubbing task.