OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
ERNIE-Layout: Layout Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recent years have witnessed the rise and success of pre-training techniques in visually-rich document understanding. However, most existing methods lack the systematic mining and utilization of layout-centered knowledge, leading to sub-optimal performances. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-Layout, a novel document pre-training solution with layout knowledge enhancement in the whole workflow, to learn better representations that combine the features from text, layout, and image. Specifically, we first rearrange input sequences in the serialization stage, and then present a correlative pre-training task, reading order prediction, to learn the proper reading order of documents. To improve the layout awareness of the model, we integrate a spatial-aware disentangled attention into the multi-modal transformer and a replaced regions prediction task into the pre-training phase. Experimental results show that ERNIE-Layout achieves superior performance on various downstream tasks, setting new state-of-the-art on key information extraction, document image classification, and document question answering datasets. The code and models are publicly available at http://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleNLP/tree/develop/model_zoo/ernie-layout.
Privacy of federated QR decomposition using additive secure multiparty computation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2022
Year: 2022

Federated learning (FL) is a privacy-aware data mining strategy keeping the private data on the owners' machine and thereby confidential. The clients compute local models and send them to an aggregator which computes a global model. In hybrid FL, the local parameters are additionally masked using secure aggregation, such that only the global aggregated statistics become available in clear text, not the client specific updates. Federated QR decomposition has not been studied extensively in the context of cross-silo federated learning. In this article, we investigate the suitability of three QR decomposition algorithms for cross-silo FL and suggest a privacy-aware QR decomposition scheme based on the Gram-Schmidt algorithm which does not blatantly leak raw data. We apply the algorithm to compute linear regression in a federated manner.
Focusing on Context is NICE: Improving Overshadowed Entity Disambiguation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Entity disambiguation (ED) is the task of mapping an ambiguous entity mention to the corresponding entry in a structured knowledge base. Previous research showed that entity overshadowing is a significant challenge for existing ED models: when presented with an ambiguous entity mention, the models are much more likely to rank a more frequent yet less contextually relevant entity at the top. Here, we present NICE, an iterative approach that uses entity type information to leverage context and avoid over-relying on the frequency-based prior. Our experiments show that NICE achieves the best performance results on the overshadowed entities while still performing competitively on the frequent entities.
FCT-GAN: Enhancing Table Synthesis via Fourier Transform
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Synthetic tabular data emerges as an alternative for sharing knowledge while adhering to restrictive data access regulations, e.g., European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Mainstream state-of-the-art tabular data synthesizers draw methodologies from Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which are composed of a generator and a discriminator. While convolution neural networks are shown to be a better architecture than fully connected networks for tabular data synthesizing, two key properties of tabular data are overlooked: (i) the global correlation across columns, and (ii) invariant synthesizing to column permutations of input data. To address the above problems, we propose a Fourier conditional tabular generative adversarial network (FCT-GAN). We introduce feature tokenization and Fourier networks to construct a transformer-style generator and discriminator, and capture both local and global dependencies across columns. The tokenizer captures local spatial features and transforms original data into tokens. Fourier networks transform tokens to frequency domains and element-wisely multiply a learnable filter. Extensive evaluation on benchmarks and real-world data shows that FCT-GAN can synthesize tabular data with high machine learning utility (up to 27.8% better than state-of-the-art baselines) and high statistical similarity to the original data (up to 26.5% better), while maintaining the global correlation across columns, especially on high dimensional dataset.
CIKQA: Learning Commonsense Inference with a Unified Knowledge-in-the-loop QA Paradigm
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, the community has achieved substantial progress on many commonsense reasoning benchmarks. However, it is still unclear what is learned from the training process: the knowledge, inference capability, or both? We argue that due to the large scale of commonsense knowledge, it is infeasible to annotate a large enough training set for each task to cover all commonsense for learning. Thus we should separate the commonsense knowledge acquisition and inference over commonsense knowledge as two separate tasks. In this work, we focus on investigating models' commonsense inference capabilities from two perspectives: (1) Whether models can know if the knowledge they have is enough to solve the task; (2) Whether models can develop commonsense inference capabilities that generalize across commonsense tasks. We first align commonsense tasks with relevant knowledge from commonsense knowledge bases and ask humans to annotate whether the knowledge is enough or not. Then, we convert different commonsense tasks into a unified question answering format to evaluate models' generalization capabilities. We name the benchmark as Commonsense Inference with Knowledge-in-the-loop Question Answering (CIKQA).
What can we learn about a generated image corrupting its latent representation?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) offer an effective solution to the image-to-image translation problem, thereby allowing for new possibilities in medical imaging. They can translate images from one imaging modality to another at a low cost. For unpaired datasets, they rely mostly on cycle loss. Despite its effectiveness in learning the underlying data distribution, it can lead to a discrepancy between input and output data. The purpose of this work is to investigate the hypothesis that we can predict image quality based on its latent representation in the GANs bottleneck. We achieve this by corrupting the latent representation with noise and generating multiple outputs. The degree of differences between them is interpreted as the strength of the representation: the more robust the latent representation, the fewer changes in the output image the corruption causes. Our results demonstrate that our proposed method has the ability to i) predict uncertain parts of synthesized images, and ii) identify samples that may not be reliable for downstream tasks, e.g., liver segmentation task.
Event-based Non-Rigid Reconstruction from Contours
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Visual reconstruction of fast non-rigid object deformations over time is a challenge for conventional frame-based cameras. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for reconstructing such deformations using measurements from event-based cameras. Under the assumption of a static background, where all events are generated by the motion, our approach estimates the deformation of objects from events generated at the object contour in a probabilistic optimization framework. It associates events to mesh faces on the contour and maximizes the alignment of the line of sight through the event pixel with the associated face. In experiments on synthetic and real data, we demonstrate the advantages of our method over state-of-the-art optimization and learning-based approaches for reconstructing the motion of human hands. A video of the experiments is available at https://youtu.be/gzfw7i5OKjg
FontTransformer: Few-shot High-resolution Chinese Glyph Image Synthesis via Stacked Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Automatic generation of high-quality Chinese fonts from a few online training samples is a challenging task, especially when the amount of samples is very small. Existing few-shot font generation methods can only synthesize low-resolution glyph images that often possess incorrect topological structures or/and incomplete strokes. To address the problem, this paper proposes FontTransformer, a novel few-shot learning model, for high-resolution Chinese glyph image synthesis by using stacked Transformers. The key idea is to apply the parallel Transformer to avoid the accumulation of prediction errors and utilize the serial Transformer to enhance the quality of synthesized strokes. Meanwhile, we also design a novel encoding scheme to feed more glyph information and prior knowledge to our model, which further enables the generation of high-resolution and visually-pleasing glyph images. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to other existing approaches in the few-shot Chinese font synthesis task.
DinoDroid: Testing Android Apps Using Deep Q-Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

The large demand of mobile devices creates significant concerns about the quality of mobile applications (apps). Developers need to guarantee the quality of mobile apps before it is released to the market. There have been many approaches using different strategies to test the GUI of mobile apps. However, they still need improvement due to their limited effectiveness. In this paper, we propose DinoDroid, an approach based on deep Q-networks to automate testing of Android apps. DinoDroid learns a behavior model from a set of existing apps and the learned model can be used to explore and generate tests for new apps. DinoDroid is able to capture the fine-grained details of GUI events (e.g., the content of GUI widgets) and use them as features that are fed into deep neural network, which acts as the agent to guide app exploration. DinoDroid automatically adapts the learned model during the exploration without the need of any modeling strategies or pre-defined rules. We conduct experiments on 64 open-source Android apps. The results showed that DinoDroid outperforms existing Android testing tools in terms of code coverage and bug detection.
Changing the Representation: Examining Language Representation for Neural Sign Language Production
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Neural Sign Language Production (SLP) aims to automatically translate from spoken language sentences to sign language videos. Historically the SLP task has been broken into two steps; Firstly, translating from a spoken language sentence to a gloss sequence and secondly, producing a sign language video given a sequence of glosses. In this paper we apply Natural Language Processing techniques to the first step of the SLP pipeline. We use language models such as BERT and Word2Vec to create better sentence level embeddings, and apply several tokenization techniques, demonstrating how these improve performance on the low resource translation task of Text to Gloss. We introduce Text to HamNoSys (T2H) translation, and show the advantages of using a phonetic representation for sign language translation rather than a sign level gloss representation. Furthermore, we use HamNoSys to extract the hand shape of a sign and use this as additional supervision during training, further increasing the performance on T2H. Assembling best practise, we achieve a BLEU-4 score of 26.99 on the MineDGS dataset and 25.09 on PHOENIX14T, two new state-of-the-art baselines.
Improving Radiology Report Generation Systems by Removing Hallucinated References to Non-existent Priors
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Current deep learning models trained to generate radiology reports from chest radiographs are capable of producing clinically accurate, clear, and actionable text that can advance patient care. However, such systems all succumb to the same problem: making hallucinated references to non-existent prior reports. Such hallucinations occur because these models are trained on datasets of real-world patient reports that inherently refer to priors. To this end, we propose two methods to remove references to priors in radiology reports: (1) a GPT-3-based few-shot approach to rewrite medical reports without references to priors; and (2) a BioBERT-based token classification approach to directly remove words referring to priors. We use the aforementioned approaches to modify MIMIC-CXR, a publicly available dataset of chest X-rays and their associated free-text radiology reports; we then retrain CXR-RePaiR, a radiology report generation system, on the adapted MIMIC-CXR dataset. We find that our re-trained model--which we call CXR-ReDonE--outperforms previous report generation methods on clinical metrics, achieving an average BERTScore of 0.2351 (2.57% absolute improvement). We expect our approach to be broadly valuable in enabling current radiology report generation systems to be more directly integrated into clinical pipelines.
TaskMix: Data Augmentation for Meta-Learning of Spoken Intent Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Meta-Learning has emerged as a research direction to better transfer knowledge from related tasks to unseen but related tasks. However, Meta-Learning requires many training tasks to learn representations that transfer well to unseen tasks; otherwise, it leads to overfitting, and the performance degenerates to worse than Multi-task Learning. We show that a state-of-the-art data augmentation method worsens this problem of overfitting when the task diversity is low. We propose a simple method, TaskMix, which synthesizes new tasks by linearly interpolating existing tasks. We compare TaskMix against many baselines on an in-house multilingual intent classification dataset of N-Best ASR hypotheses derived from real-life human-machine telephony utterances and two datasets derived from MTOP. We show that TaskMix outperforms baselines, alleviates overfitting when task diversity is low, and does not degrade performance even when it is high.
A Keyword Based Approach to Understanding the Overpenalization of Marginalized Groups by English Marginal Abuse Models on Twitter
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Harmful content detection models tend to have higher false positive rates for content from marginalized groups. In the context of marginal abuse modeling on Twitter, such disproportionate penalization poses the risk of reduced visibility, where marginalized communities lose the opportunity to voice their opinion on the platform. Current approaches to algorithmic harm mitigation, and bias detection for NLP models are often very ad hoc and subject to human bias. We make two main contributions in this paper. First, we design a novel methodology, which provides a principled approach to detecting and measuring the severity of potential harms associated with a text-based model. Second, we apply our methodology to audit Twitter's English marginal abuse model, which is used for removing amplification eligibility of marginally abusive content. Without utilizing demographic labels or dialect classifiers, we are still able to detect and measure the severity of issues related to the over-penalization of the speech of marginalized communities, such as the use of reclaimed speech, counterspeech, and identity related terms. In order to mitigate the associated harms, we experiment with adding additional true negative examples and find that doing so provides improvements to our fairness metrics without large degradations in model performance.
AdaNorm: Adaptive Gradient Norm Correction based Optimizer for CNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimizers are generally used to train the convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In recent years, several adaptive momentum based SGD optimizers have been introduced, such as Adam, diffGrad, Radam and AdaBelief. However, the existing SGD optimizers do not exploit the gradient norm of past iterations and lead to poor convergence and performance. In this paper, we propose a novel AdaNorm based SGD optimizers by correcting the norm of gradient in each iteration based on the adaptive training history of gradient norm. By doing so, the proposed optimizers are able to maintain high and representive gradient throughout the training and solves the low and atypical gradient problems. The proposed concept is generic and can be used with any existing SGD optimizer. We show the efficacy of the proposed AdaNorm with four state-of-the-art optimizers, including Adam, diffGrad, Radam and AdaBelief. We depict the performance improvement due to the proposed optimizers using three CNN models, including VGG16, ResNet18 and ResNet50, on three benchmark object recognition datasets, including CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and TinyImageNet. Code: https://github.com/shivram1987/AdaNorm.
On Text Style Transfer via Style Masked Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Text Style Transfer (TST) is performable through approaches such as latent space disentanglement, cycle-consistency losses, prototype editing etc. The prototype editing approach, which is known to be quite successful in TST, involves two key phases a) Masking of source style-associated tokens and b) Reconstruction of this source-style masked sentence conditioned with the target style. We follow a similar transduction method, in which we transpose the more difficult direct source to target TST task to a simpler Style-Masked Language Model (SMLM) Task, wherein, similar to BERT \cite{bert}, the goal of our model is now to reconstruct the source sentence from its style-masked version. We arrive at the SMLM mechanism naturally by formulating prototype editing/ transduction methods in a probabilistic framework, where TST resolves into estimating a hypothetical parallel dataset from a partially observed parallel dataset, wherein each domain is assumed to have a common latent style-masked prior. To generate this style-masked prior, we use "Explainable Attention" as our choice of attribution for a more precise style-masking step and also introduce a cost-effective and accurate "Attribution-Surplus" method of determining the position of masks from any arbitrary attribution model in O(1) time. We empirically show that this non-generational approach well suites the "content preserving" criteria for a task like TST, even for a complex style like Discourse Manipulation. Our model, the Style MLM, outperforms strong TST baselines and is on par with state-of-the-art TST models, which use complex architectures and orders of more parameters.
Token-Label Alignment for Vision Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Data mixing strategies (e.g., CutMix) have shown the ability to greatly improve the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). They mix two images as inputs for training and assign them with a mixed label with the same ratio. While they are shown effective for vision transformers (ViTs), we identify a token fluctuation phenomenon that has suppressed the potential of data mixing strategies. We empirically observe that the contributions of input tokens fluctuate as forward propagating, which might induce a different mixing ratio in the output tokens. The training target computed by the original data mixing strategy can thus be inaccurate, resulting in less effective training. To address this, we propose a token-label alignment (TL-Align) method to trace the correspondence between transformed tokens and the original tokens to maintain a label for each token. We reuse the computed attention at each layer for efficient token-label alignment, introducing only negligible additional training costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves the performance of ViTs on image classification, semantic segmentation, objective detection, and transfer learning tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/Euphoria16/TL-Align.
Inner speech recognition through electroencephalographic signals
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

This work focuses on inner speech recognition starting from EEG signals. Inner speech recognition is defined as the internalized process in which the person thinks in pure meanings, generally associated with an auditory imagery of own inner "voice". The decoding of the EEG into text should be understood as the classification of a limited number of words (commands) or the presence of phonemes (units of sound that make up words). Speech-related BCIs provide effective vocal communication strategies for controlling devices through speech commands interpreted from brain signals, improving the quality of life of people who have lost the capability to speak, by restoring communication with their environment. Two public inner speech datasets are analysed. Using this data, some classification models are studied and implemented starting from basic methods such as Support Vector Machines, to ensemble methods such as the eXtreme Gradient Boosting classifier up to the use of neural networks such as Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM). With the LSTM and BiLSTM models, generally not used in the literature of inner speech recognition, results in line with or superior to those present in the stateof-the-art are obtained.
VR-SFT: Reproducing Swinging Flashlight Test in Virtual Reality to Detect Relative Afferent Pupillary Defect
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2022
Year: 2022

The relative afferent asymmetry between two eyes can be diagnosed using swinging flashlight test, also known as the alternating light test. This remains one of the most used clinical tests to this day. Despite the swinging flashlight test's straightforward approach, a number of factors can add variability into the clinical methodology and reduce the measurement's validity and reliability. This includes small and poorly responsive pupils, dark iris, anisocoria, uneven illumination in both eyes. Due to these limitations, the true condition of relative afferent asymmetry may create confusion and various observers may quantify the relative afferent pupillary defect differently. Consequently, the results of the swinging flashlight test are subjective and ambiguous. In order to eliminate the limitations of traditional swinging flashlight test and introduce objectivity, we propose a novel approach to the swinging flashlight exam, VR-SFT, by making use of virtual reality (VR). We suggest that the clinical records of the subjects and the results of VR-SFT are comparable. In this paper, we describe how we exploit the features of immersive VR experience to create a reliable and objective swinging flashlight test.
Better Approximation for Interdependent SOS Valuations
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

Submodular over signal (SOS) defines a family of interesting functions for which there exist truthful mechanisms with constant approximation to the social welfare for agents with interdependent valuations. The best-known truthful auction is of $4$-approximation and a lower bound of 2 was proved. We propose a new and simple truthful mechanism to achieve an approximation ratio of 3.315.