Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Networks: A Chinese Corpus, Systems and an Explanation Tool

Recently, more and more data have been generated in the online world, filled with offensive language such as threats, swear words or straightforward insults. It is disgraceful for a progressive society, and then the question arises on how language resources and technologies can cope with this challenge. However, previous work only analyzes the problem as a whole but fails to detect particular types of offensive content in a more fine-grained way, mainly because of the lack of annotated data. In this work, we present a densely annotated data-set COLA (Categorizing Offensive LAnguage), consists of fine-grained insulting language, antisocial language and illegal language. We study different strategies for automatically identifying offensive language on COLA data. Further, we design a capsule system with hierarchical attention to aggregate and fully utilize information, which obtains a state-of-the-art result. Results from experiments prove that our hierarchical attention capsule network (HACN) performs significantly better than existing methods in offensive classification with the precision of 94.37% and recall of 95.28%. We also explain what our model has learned with an explanation tool called Integrated Gradients. Meanwhile, our system’s processing speed can handle each sentence in 10 ms, suggesting the potential for efficient deployment in real situations.
Privacy Amplification via Random Check-Ins

Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) forms a fundamental building block in many applications for learning over sensitive data. Two standard approaches, privacy amplification by subsampling, and privacy amplification by shuffling, permit adding lower noise in DP-SGD than via na\ive schemes. A key assumption in both these approaches is that the elements in the data set can be uniformly sampled, or be uniformly permuted -- constraints that may become prohibitive when the data is processed in a decentralized or distributed fashion. In this paper, we focus on conducting iterative methods like DP-SGD in the setting of federated learning (FL) wherein the data is distributed among many devices (clients). Our main contribution is the \emph{random check-in} distributed protocol, which crucially relies only on randomized participation decisions made locally and independently by each client. It has privacy/accuracy trade-offs similar to privacy amplification by subsampling/shuffling. However, our method does not require server-initiated communication, or even knowledge of the population size. To our knowledge, this is the first privacy amplification tailored for a distributed learning framework, and it may have broader applicability beyond FL. Along the way, we extend privacy amplification by shuffling to incorporate $(\epsilon,\delta)$-DP local randomizers, and exponentially improve its guarantees. In practical regimes, this improvement allows for similar privacy and utility using data from an order of magnitude fewer users.
Differentiable Causal Discovery from Interventional Data

Discovering causal relationships in data is a challenging task that involves solving a combinatorial problem for which the solution is not always identifiable. A new line of work reformulates the combinatorial problem as a continuous constrained optimization one, enabling the use of different powerful optimization techniques. However, methods based on this idea do not yet make use of interventional data, which can significantly alleviate identifiability issues. In this work, we propose a neural network-based method for this task that can leverage interventional data. We illustrate the flexibility of the continuous-constrained framework by taking advantage of expressive neural architectures such as normalizing flows. We show that our approach compares favorably to the state of the art in a variety of settings, including perfect and imperfect interventions for which the targeted nodes may even be unknown.
A Self-Tuning Actor-Critic Algorithm

Reinforcement learning algorithms are highly sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, typically requiring significant manual effort to identify hyperparameters that perform well on a new domain. In this paper, we take a step towards addressing this issue by using metagradients to automatically adapt hyperparameters online by meta-gradient descent (Xu et al., 2018). We apply our algorithm, Self-Tuning Actor-Critic (STAC), to self-tune all the differentiable hyperparameters of an actor-critic loss function, to discover auxiliary tasks, and to improve off-policy learning using a novel leaky V-trace operator. STAC is simple to use, sample efficient and does not require a significant increase in compute. Ablative studies show that the overall performance of STAC improved as we adapt more hyperparameters. When applied to the Arcade Learning Environment (Bellemare et al. 2012), STAC improved the median human normalized score in 200M steps from 243% to 364%. When applied to the DM Control suite (Tassa et al., 2018), STAC improved the mean score in 30M steps from 217 to 389 when learning with features, from 108 to 202 when learning from pixels, and from 195 to 295 in the Real-World Reinforcement Learning Challenge (Dulac-Arnold et al., 2020).
Beyond Individualized Recourse: Interpretable and Interactive Summaries of Actionable Recourses

As predictive models are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes decision-making, there has been a lot of interest in developing algorithms which can provide recourses to affected individuals. While developing such tools is important, it is even more critical to analyse and interpret a predictive model, and vet it thoroughly to ensure that the recourses it offers are meaningful and non-discriminatory before it is deployed in the real world. To this end, we propose a novel model agnostic framework called Actionable Recourse Summaries (AReS) to construct global counterfactual explanations which provide an interpretable and accurate summary of recourses for the entire population. We formulate a novel objective which simultaneously optimizes for correctness of the recourses and interpretability of the explanations, while minimizing overall recourse costs across the entire population. More specifically, our objective enables us to learn, with optimality guarantees on recourse correctness, a small number of compact rule sets each of which capture recourses for well defined subpopulations within the data. We also demonstrate theoretically that several of the prior approaches proposed to generate recourses for individuals are special cases of our framework. Experimental evaluation with real world datasets and user studies demonstrate that our framework can provide decision makers with a comprehensive overview of recourses corresponding to any black box model, and consequently help detect undesirable model biases and discrimination.
Simplifying Hamiltonian and Lagrangian Neural Networks via Explicit Constraints

Reasoning about the physical world requires models that are endowed with the right inductive biases to learn the underlying dynamics. Recent works improve generalization for predicting trajectories by learning the Hamiltonian or Lagrangian of a system rather than the differential equations directly. While these methods encode the constraints of the systems using generalized coordinates, we show that embedding the system into Cartesian coordinates and enforcing the constraints explicitly with Lagrange multipliers dramatically simplifies the learning problem. We introduce a series of challenging chaotic and extended-body systems, including systems with N-pendulums, spring coupling, magnetic fields, rigid rotors, and gyroscopes, to push the limits of current approaches. Our experiments show that Cartesian coordinates with explicit constraints lead to a 100x improvement in accuracy and data efficiency.
The NetHack Learning Environment

Progress in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms goes hand-in-hand with the development of challenging environments that test the limits of current methods. While existing RL environments are either sufficiently complex or based on fast simulation, they are rarely both. Here, we present the NetHack Learning Environment (NLE), a scalable, procedurally generated, stochastic, rich, and challenging environment for RL research based on the popular single-player terminal-based roguelike game, NetHack. We argue that NetHack is sufficiently complex to drive long-term research on problems such as exploration, planning, skill acquisition, and language-conditioned RL, while dramatically reducing the computational resources required to gather a large amount of experience. We compare NLE and its task suite to existing alternatives, and discuss why it is an ideal medium for testing the robustness and systematic generalization of RL agents. We demonstrate empirical success for early stages of the game using a distributed Deep RL baseline and Random Network Distillation exploration, alongside qualitative analysis of various agents trained in the environment. NLE is open source at this https URL.
Efficient Marginalization of Discrete and Structured Latent Variables via Sparsity

Training neural network models with discrete (categorical or structured) latent variables can be computationally challenging, due to the need for marginalization over large or combinatorial sets. To circumvent this issue, one typically resorts to sampling-based approximations of the true marginal, requiring noisy gradient estimators (e.g., score function estimator) or continuous relaxations with lower-variance reparameterized gradients (e.g., Gumbel-Softmax). In this paper, we propose a new training strategy which replaces these estimators by an exact yet efficient marginalization. To achieve this, we parameterize discrete distributions over latent assignments using differentiable sparse mappings: sparsemax and its structured counterparts. In effect, the support of these distributions is greatly reduced, which enables efficient marginalization. We report successful results in three tasks covering a range of latent variable modeling applications: a semisupervised deep generative model, a latent communication game, and a generative model with a bit-vector latent representation. In all cases, we obtain good performance while still achieving the practicality of sampling-based approximations.
Learning Augmented Energy Minimization via Speed Scaling

As power management has become a primary concern in modern data centers, computing resources are being scaled dynamically to minimize energy consumption. We initiate the study of a variant of the classic online speed scaling problem, in which machine learning predictions about the future can be integrated naturally. Inspired by recent work on learning-augmented online algorithms, we propose an algorithm which incorporates predictions in a black-box manner and outperforms any online algorithm if the accuracy is high, yet maintains provable guarantees if the prediction is very inaccurate. We provide both theoretical and experimental evidence to support our claims.
Variational Bayesian Unlearning

This paper studies the problem of approximately unlearning a Bayesian model from a small subset of the training data to be erased. We frame this problem as one of minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the approximate posterior belief of model parameters after directly unlearning from erased data vs. the exact posterior belief from retraining with remaining data. Using the variational inference (VI) framework, we show that it is equivalent to minimizing an evidence upper bound which trades off between fully unlearning from erased data vs. not entirely forgetting the posterior belief given the full data (i.e., including the remaining data); the latter prevents catastrophic unlearning that can render the model useless. In model training with VI, only an approximate (instead of exact) posterior belief given the full data can be obtained, which makes unlearning even more challenging. We propose two novel tricks to tackle this challenge. We empirically demonstrate our unlearning methods on Bayesian models such as sparse Gaussian process and logistic regression using synthetic and real-world datasets.
Just Pick a Sign: Optimizing Deep Multitask Models with Gradient Sign Dropout

The vast majority of deep models use multiple gradient signals, typically corresponding to a sum of multiple loss terms, to update a shared set of trainable weights. However, these multiple updates can impede optimal training by pulling the model in conflicting directions. We present Gradient Sign Dropout (GradDrop), a probabilistic masking procedure which samples gradients at an activation layer based on their level of consistency. GradDrop is implemented as a simple deep layer that can be used in any deep net and synergizes with other gradient balancing approaches. We show that GradDrop outperforms the state-of-the-art multiloss methods within traditional multitask and transfer learning settings, and we discuss how GradDrop reveals links between optimal multiloss training and gradient stochasticity.
Optimistic Dual Extrapolation for Coherent Non-monotone Variational Inequalities

The optimization problems associated with training generative adversarial neural networks can be largely reduced to certain {\em non-monotone} variational inequality problems (VIPs), whereas existing convergence results are mostly based on monotone or strongly monotone assumptions. In this paper, we propose {\em optimistic dual extrapolation (OptDE)}, a method that only performs {\em one} gradient evaluation per iteration. We show that OptDE is provably convergent to {\em a strong solution} under different coherent non-monotone assumptions. In particular, when a {\em weak solution} exists, the convergence rate of our method is $O(1/{\epsilon^{2}})$, which matches the best existing result of the methods with two gradient evaluations. Further, when a {\em $\sigma$-weak solution} exists, the convergence guarantee is improved to the linear rate $O(\log\frac{1}{\epsilon})$. Along the way--as a byproduct of our inquiries into non-monotone variational inequalities--we provide the near-optimal $O\big(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\log \frac{1}{\epsilon}\big)$ convergence guarantee in terms of restricted strong merit function for monotone variational inequalities. We also show how our results can be naturally generalized to the stochastic setting, and obtain corresponding new convergence results. Taken together, our results contribute to the broad landscape of variational inequality--both non-monotone and monotone alike--by providing a novel and more practical algorithm with the state-of-the-art convergence guarantees.
Learning Structural Similarity of User Interface Layouts Using Graph Networks

We propose a novel representation learning technique for measuring the similarity of user interface designs. A triplet network is used to learn a search embedding for layout similarity, with a hybrid encoder-decoder backbone comprising a graph convolutional network (GCN) and convolutional decoder (CNN). The properties of interface components and their spatial relationships are encoded via a graph which also models the containment (nesting) relationships of interface components. We supervise the training of a dual reconstruction and pair-wise loss using an auxiliary measure of layout similarity based on intersection over union (IoU) distance. The resulting embedding is shown to exceed state of the art performance for visual search of user interface layouts over the public Rico dataset, and an auto-annotated dataset of interface layouts collected from the web. We release the codes and dataset ( https://github.com/dips4717/gcn-cnn .)
Counterfactual Data Augmentation using Locally Factored Dynamics

Many dynamic processes, including common scenarios in robotic control and reinforcement learning (RL), involve a set of interacting subprocesses. Though the subprocesses are not independent, their interactions are often sparse, and the dynamics at any given time step can often be decomposed into locally independent causal mechanisms. Such local causal structures can be leveraged to improve the sample efficiency of sequence prediction and off-policy reinforcement learning. We formalize this by introducing local causal models (LCMs), which are induced from a global causal model by conditioning on a subset of the state space. We propose an approach to inferring these structures given an object-oriented state representation, as well as a novel algorithm for Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CoDA). CoDA uses local structures and an experience replay to generate counterfactual experiences that are causally valid in the global model. We find that CoDA significantly improves the performance of RL agents in locally factored tasks, including the batch-constrained and goal-conditioned settings.
A Systematic Literature Review on Agile Coaching and the Role of the Agile Coach

There has been a recent increase in the use of agile coaches in organizations. Although the use of the job title is popular, empirical knowledge about the tasks, responsibilities and skills of an agile coach is lacking. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review on agile coaching and the role of the agile coach. The initial search resulted in a total of 209 studies identified on the topic. Based on our inclusion and exclusion criteria, a total of 67 studies were selected as primary studies. Our findings suggest that agile coaching facilitates the adoption and sustainability of agile methods and deals with agile adoption challenges. Agile coaches help in training and developing software development teams and all the stakeholders involved in the agile adoption process. The primary skills of an agile coach identified herein are leadership qualities, project management skills, technical skills, and expertise in agile methods. Based on the findings, it can be argued that agile coaches play a significant role in addressing challenges in an agile transformation such as resistance to change. Coaches focus on removing barriers to team autonomy in agile teams and making agile meetings more valuable.
Bölen: software module clustering method using the combination of shuffled frog leaping and genetic algorithm

Purpose Software module clustering is one of the reverse engineering techniques, which is considered to be an effective technique for presenting software architecture and structural information. The objective of clustering software modules is to achieve minimum coupling among different clusters and create maximum cohesion among the modules of each cluster. Finding the best clustering is considered to be a multi-objective N - P hard optimization-problem, and for solving this problem, different meta-heuristic algorithms have been previously proposed. Achieving higher module lustering quality (MQ), obtaining higher success rate for achieving the best clustering quality and improving convergence speed are the main objectives of this study. Design/methodology/approach In this study, a method (Bölen) is proposed for clustering software modules which combines the two algorithms of shuffled frog leaping and genetic algorithm. Findings The results of conducted experiments using traditional data sets confirm that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods in terms of convergence speed, module clustering quality and stability of the results. Originality/value The study proposes SFLA_GA algorithm for optimizing software module clustering, implementing SFLA algorithm in a discrete form by two operators of the genetic algorithm and achieving the above-mentioned purposes in this study. The aim is to achieve higher performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison with other algorithms.
Analysis of Bayesian Networks via Prob-Solvable Loops

Prob-solvable loops are probabilistic programs with polynomial assignments over random variables and parametrised distributions, for which the full automation of moment-based invariant generation is decidable. In this paper we extend Prob-solvable loops with new features essential for encoding Bayesian networks (BNs). We show that various BNs, such as discrete, Gaussian, conditional linear Gaussian and dynamic BNs, can be naturally encoded as Prob-solvable loops. Thanks to these encodings, we can automatically solve several BN related problems, including exact inference, sensitivity analysis, filtering and computing the expected number of rejecting samples in sampling-based procedures. We evaluate our work on a number of BN benchmarks, using automated invariant generation within Prob-solvable loop analysis.
UBITect: a precise and scalable method to detect use-before-initialization bugs in Linux kernel

Use-before-Initialization (UBI) bugs in the Linux kernel have serious security impacts, such as information leakage and privilege escalation. Developers are adopting forced initialization to cope with UBI bugs, but this approach can still lead to undefined behaviors (e.g., NULL pointer dereference). As it is hard to infer correct initialization values, we believe that the best way to mitigate UBI bugs is detection and manual patching. Precise detection of UBI bugs requires path-sensitive analysis. The detector needs to track an associated variable's initialization status along all the possible program execution paths to its uses. However, such exhaustive analysis prevents the detection from scaling to the whole Linux kernel. This paper presents UBITect, a UBI bug finding tool which combines flow-sensitive type qualifier analysis and symbolic execution to perform precise and scalable UBI bug detection. The scalable qualifier analysis guides symbolic execution to analyze variables that are likely to cause UBI bugs. UBITect also does not require manual effort for annotations and hence, it can be directly applied to the kernel without any source code or intermediate representation (IR) change. On the Linux kernel version 4.14, UBITect reported 190 bugs, among which 78 bugs were deemed by us as true positives and 52 were confirmed by Linux maintainers.
Machine Learning for Malicious URL Detection

In recent years, Web-based attacks have become one of the most common threats. Threat actors tend to use malicious URLs to intentionally deceive users and launch attacks. Several approaches such as blacklisting have been implemented to detect malicious URLs. These unreliable approaches were also accompanied with strenuous task of maintaining an up-to-date blacklist URL database. To detect malicious URLs, machine learning techniques have been explored in recent years. This method analyzes different features of a URL and trains a prediction model on an already existing dataset of both malicious and benign URLs. This paper proposes a MuD (Malicious URL Detection) model which utilizes three supervised machine learning classifiers—support vector machine, logistic regression and Naive Bayes—to effectively and accurately detect malicious URLs. The preliminary results indicate that Naïve Bayes algorithm produced best results.