Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Gradient-based Weight Density Balancing for Robust Dynamic Sparse Training

Training a sparse neural network from scratch requires optimizing connections at the same time as the weights themselves. Typically, the weights are redistributed after a predefined number of weight updates, removing a fraction of the parameters of each layer and inserting them at different locations in the same layers. The density of each layer is determined using heuristics, often purely based on the size of the parameter tensor. While the connections per layer are optimized multiple times during training, the density of each layer remains constant. This leaves great unrealized potential, especially in scenarios with a high sparsity of 90% and more. We propose Global Gradient-based Redistribution, a technique which distributes weights across all layers - adding more weights to the layers that need them most. Our evaluation shows that our approach is less prone to unbalanced weight distribution at initialization than previous work and that it is able to find better performing sparse subnetworks at very high sparsity levels.
Multi-Granularity Cross-Modality Representation Learning for Named Entity Recognition on Social Media

Named Entity Recognition (NER) on social media refers to discovering and classifying entities from unstructured free-form content, and it plays an important role for various applications such as intention understanding and user recommendation. With social media posts tending to be multimodal, Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (MNER) for the text with its accompanying image is attracting more and more attention since some textual components can only be understood in combination with visual information. However, there are two drawbacks in existing approaches: 1) Meanings of the text and its accompanying image do not match always, so the text information still plays a major role. However, social media posts are usually shorter and more informal compared with other normal contents, which easily causes incomplete semantic description and the data sparsity problem. 2) Although the visual representations of whole images or objects are already used, existing methods ignore either fine-grained semantic correspondence between objects in images and words in text or the objective fact that there are misleading objects or no objects in some images. In this work, we solve the above two problems by introducing the multi-granularity cross-modality representation learning. To resolve the first problem, we enhance the representation by semantic augmentation for each word in text. As for the second issue, we perform the cross-modality semantic interaction between text and vision at the different vision granularity to get the most effective multimodal guidance representation for every word. Experiments show that our proposed approach can achieve the SOTA or approximate SOTA performance on two benchmark datasets of tweets. The code, data and the best performing models are available at https://github.com/LiuPeiP-CS/IIE4MNER
Influence Functions for Sequence Tagging Models

Many language tasks (e.g., Named Entity Recognition, Part-of-Speech tagging, and Semantic Role Labeling) are naturally framed as sequence tagging problems. However, there has been comparatively little work on interpretability methods for sequence tagging models. In this paper, we extend influence functions - which aim to trace predictions back to the training points that informed them - to sequence tagging tasks. We define the influence of a training instance segment as the effect that perturbing the labels within this segment has on a test segment level prediction. We provide an efficient approximation to compute this, and show that it tracks with the true segment influence, measured empirically. We show the practical utility of segment influence by using the method to identify systematic annotation errors in two named entity recognition corpora. Code to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/successar/Segment_Influence_Functions.
Towards Interpretable Summary Evaluation via Allocation of Contextual Embeddings to Reference Text Topics

Despite extensive recent advances in summary generation models, evaluation of auto-generated summaries still widely relies on single-score systems insufficient for transparent assessment and in-depth qualitative analysis. Towards bridging this gap, we propose the multifaceted interpretable summary evaluation method (MISEM), which is based on allocation of a summary's contextual token embeddings to semantic topics identified in the reference text. We further contribute an interpretability toolbox for automated summary evaluation and interactive visual analysis of summary scoring, topic identification, and token-topic allocation. MISEM achieves a promising .404 Pearson correlation with human judgment on the TAC'08 dataset.
The Stochastic Proximal Distance Algorithm

Stochastic versions of proximal methods have gained much attention in statistics and machine learning. These algorithms tend to admit simple, scalable forms, and enjoy numerical stability via implicit updates. In this work, we propose and analyze a stochastic version of the recently proposed proximal distance algorithm, a class of iterative optimization methods that recover a desired constrained estimation problem as a penalty parameter $\rho \rightarrow \infty$. By uncovering connections to related stochastic proximal methods and interpreting the penalty parameter as the learning rate, we justify heuristics used in practical manifestations of the proximal distance method, establishing their convergence guarantees for the first time. Moreover, we extend recent theoretical devices to establish finite error bounds and a complete characterization of convergence rates regimes. We validate our analysis via a thorough empirical study, also showing that unsurprisingly, the proposed method outpaces batch versions on popular learning tasks.
LQGNet: Hybrid Model-Based and Data-Driven Linear Quadratic Stochastic Control

Stochastic control deals with finding an optimal control signal for a dynamical system in a setting with uncertainty, playing a key role in numerous applications. The linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) is a widely-used setting, where the system dynamics is represented as a linear Gaussian statespace (SS) model, and the objective function is quadratic. For this setting, the optimal controller is obtained in closed form by the separation principle. However, in practice, the underlying system dynamics often cannot be faithfully captured by a fully known linear Gaussian SS model, limiting its performance. Here, we present LQGNet, a stochastic controller that leverages data to operate under partially known dynamics. LQGNet augments the state tracking module of separation-based control with a dedicated trainable algorithm. The resulting system preserves the operation of classic LQG control while learning to cope with partially known SS models without having to fully identify the dynamics. We empirically show that LQGNet outperforms classic stochastic control by overcoming mismatched SS models.
Multilingual Auxiliary Tasks Training: Bridging the Gap between Languages for Zero-Shot Transfer of Hate Speech Detection Models

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning has been shown to be highly challenging for tasks involving a lot of linguistic specificities or when a cultural gap is present between languages, such as in hate speech detection. In this paper, we highlight this limitation for hate speech detection in several domains and languages using strict experimental settings. Then, we propose to train on multilingual auxiliary tasks -- sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, and tasks relying on syntactic information -- to improve zero-shot transfer of hate speech detection models across languages. We show how hate speech detection models benefit from a cross-lingual knowledge proxy brought by auxiliary tasks fine-tuning and highlight these tasks' positive impact on bridging the hate speech linguistic and cultural gap between languages.
A Continuous Convolutional Trainable Filter for Modelling Unstructured Data

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is one of the most important architectures in deep learning. The fundamental building block of a CNN is a trainable filter, represented as a discrete grid, used to perform convolution on discrete input data. In this work, we propose a continuous version of a trainable convolutional filter able to work also with unstructured data. This new framework allows exploring CNNs beyond discrete domains, enlarging the usage of this important learning technique for many more complex problems. Our experiments show that the continuous filter can achieve a level of accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art discrete filter, and that it can be used in current deep learning architectures as a building block to solve problems with unstructured domains as well.
Fast and Low-Memory Deep Neural Networks Using Binary Matrix Factorization

Despite the outstanding performance of deep neural networks in different applications, they are still computationally extensive and require a great number of memories. This motivates more research on reducing the resources required for implementing such networks. An efficient approach addressed for this purpose is matrix factorization, which has been shown to be effective on different networks. In this paper, we utilize binary matrix factorization and show its great efficiency in reducing the required number of resources in deep neural networks. In effect, this technique can lead to the practical implementation of such networks.
SURFACE DEFORMATION MONITORING AND DRIVING FORCE ANALYSIS IN THE YELLOW RIVER DELTA BASED ON PS-INSAR TECHNOLOGY

Abstract. Aiming at the land subsidence in the Yellow River Delta region, based on the Sentinel-1A data of 52 scenes from 2020 to February 2022, Persistent Scatterer Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PS-InSAR) were adopted to extract the surface deformation information of the Yellow River Delta region. Firstly, the deformation characteristics of typical subsidence feature points are analyzed, and then the correlation between groundwater, precipitation and land subsidence are analyzed. The result show that the settlement area distribution of the Yellow River Delta is not uniform, mainly distributed in underground brine mining area and oil extraction area, the maximum settlement center is located in Yongan Town, the settlement amount reaches −302.7 mm, the main reason of the settlement is excessive exploitation of underground brine salt. By analyzing the correlation between groundwater, precipitation and land subsidence in the Yellow River Delta, it can be seen that the effect of groundwater content change on land subsidence was the most serious, and the correlation coefficient is 0.875. In general, the subsidence of the Yellow River Delta is mainly caused by the over-exploitation of underground fluids such as fresh water, brine and oil without timely compensation.
Adaptive Top-K in SGD for Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning

Distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with gradient compression has become a popular communication-efficient solution for accelerating distributed learning. One commonly used method for gradient compression is Top-K sparsification, which sparsifies the gradients by a fixed degree during model training. However, there has been a lack of an adaptive approach to adjust the sparsification degree to maximize the potential of the model's performance or training speed. This paper proposes a novel adaptive Top-K in SGD framework that enables an adaptive degree of sparsification for each gradient descent step to optimize the convergence performance by balancing the trade-off between communication cost and convergence error. Firstly, an upper bound of convergence error is derived for the adaptive sparsification scheme and the loss function. Secondly, an algorithm is designed to minimize the convergence error under the communication cost constraints. Finally, numerical results on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that the proposed adaptive Top-K algorithm in SGD achieves a significantly better convergence rate compared to state-of-the-art methods, even after considering error compensation.
Sufficient Invariant Learning for Distribution Shift

Machine learning algorithms have shown remarkable performance in diverse applications. However, it is still challenging to guarantee performance in distribution shifts when distributions of training and test datasets are different. There have been several approaches to improve the performance in distribution shift cases by learning invariant features across groups or domains. However, we observe that the previous works only learn invariant features partially. While the prior works focus on the limited invariant features, we first raise the importance of the sufficient invariant features. Since only training sets are given empirically, the learned partial invariant features from training sets might not be present in the test sets under distribution shift. Therefore, the performance improvement on distribution shifts might be limited. In this paper, we argue that learning sufficient invariant features from the training set is crucial for the distribution shift case. Concretely, we newly observe the connection between a) sufficient invariant features and b) flatness differences between groups or domains. Moreover, we propose a new algorithm, Adaptive Sharpness-aware Group Distributionally Robust Optimization (ASGDRO), to learn sufficient invariant features across domains or groups. ASGDRO learns sufficient invariant features by seeking common flat minima across all groups or domains. Therefore, ASGDRO improves the performance on diverse distribution shift cases. Besides, we provide a new simple dataset, Heterogeneous-CMNIST, to diagnose whether the various algorithms learn sufficient invariant features.
Video based Object 6D Pose Estimation using Transformers

We introduce a Transformer based 6D Object Pose Estimation framework VideoPose, comprising an end-to-end attention based modelling architecture, that attends to previous frames in order to estimate accurate 6D Object Poses in videos. Our approach leverages the temporal information from a video sequence for pose refinement, along with being computationally efficient and robust. Compared to existing methods, our architecture is able to capture and reason from long-range dependencies efficiently, thus iteratively refining over video sequences. Experimental evaluation on the YCB-Video dataset shows that our approach is on par with the state-of-the-art Transformer methods, and performs significantly better relative to CNN based approaches. Further, with a speed of 33 fps, it is also more efficient and therefore applicable to a variety of applications that require real-time object pose estimation. Training code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/ApoorvaBeedu/VideoPose
Active Learning for Single Neuron Models with Lipschitz Non-Linearities

We consider the problem of active learning for single neuron models, also sometimes called ``ridge functions'', in the agnostic setting (under adversarial label noise). Such models have been shown to be broadly effective in modeling physical phenomena, and for constructing surrogate data-driven models for partial differential equations. Surprisingly, we show that for a single neuron model with any Lipschitz non-linearity (such as the ReLU, sigmoid, absolute value, low-degree polynomial, among others), strong provable approximation guarantees can be obtained using a well-known active learning strategy for fitting \emph{linear functions} in the agnostic setting. % -- i.e. for the case when there is no non-linearity. Namely, we can collect samples via statistical \emph{leverage score sampling}, which has been shown to be near-optimal in other active learning scenarios. We support our theoretical results with empirical simulations showing that our proposed active learning strategy based on leverage score sampling outperforms (ordinary) uniform sampling when fitting single neuron models.
VLC-BERT: Visual Question Answering with Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge

There has been a growing interest in solving Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks that require the model to reason beyond the content present in the image. In this work, we focus on questions that require commonsense reasoning. In contrast to previous methods which inject knowledge from static knowledge bases, we investigate the incorporation of contextualized knowledge using Commonsense Transformer (COMET), an existing knowledge model trained on human-curated knowledge bases. We propose a method to generate, select, and encode external commonsense knowledge alongside visual and textual cues in a new pre-trained Vision-Language-Commonsense transformer model, VLC-BERT. Through our evaluation on the knowledge-intensive OK-VQA and A-OKVQA datasets, we show that VLC-BERT is capable of outperforming existing models that utilize static knowledge bases. Furthermore, through a detailed analysis, we explain which questions benefit, and which don't, from contextualized commonsense knowledge from COMET.
Efficient Selection of Informative Alternative Relational Query Plans for Database Education

A key learning goal of learners taking database systems course is to understand how SQL queries are processed in an RDBMS in practice. To this end, comprehension of the cost-based comparison of different plan choices to select the query execution plan (QEP) of a query is paramount. Unfortunately, off-the-shelf RDBMS typically only expose the selected QEP to users without revealing information about representative alternative query plans considered during QEP selection in a learner-friendly manner, hindering the learning process. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end and generic framework called ARENA that facilitates exploration of informative alternative query plans of a given SQL query to aid the comprehension of QEP selection. Under the hood, ARENA addresses a novel problem called alternative plan selection problem (TIPS) which aims to discover a set of k alternative plans from the underlying plan space so that the plan interestingness of the set is maximized. Specifically, we explore two variants of the problem, namely batch TIPS and incremental TIPS, to cater to diverse set of learners. Due to the computational hardness of the problem, we present a 2 approximation algorithm to address it efficiently. Exhaustive experimental study with real-world learners demonstrates the effectiveness of arena in enhancing learners' understanding of the alternative plan choices considered during QEP selection.
AugCSE: Contrastive Sentence Embedding with Diverse Augmentations

Data augmentation techniques have been proven useful in many applications in NLP fields. Most augmentations are task-specific, and cannot be used as a general-purpose tool. In our work, we present AugCSE, a unified framework to utilize diverse sets of data augmentations to achieve a better, general purpose, sentence embedding model. Building upon the latest sentence embedding models, our approach uses a simple antagonistic discriminator that differentiates the augmentation types. With the finetuning objective borrowed from domain adaptation, we show that diverse augmentations, which often lead to conflicting contrastive signals, can be tamed to produce a better and more robust sentence representation. Our methods achieve state-of-the-art results on downstream transfer tasks and perform competitively on semantic textual similarity tasks, using only unsupervised data.
The Scholz conjecture on addition chain is true for infinitely many integers with $\ell(2n)= \ell(n)$

It is known that the Scholz conjecture on addition chains is true for all integers $n$ with $\ell(2n) = \ell(n)+1$. There exists infinitely many integers with $\ell(2n) \leq \ell(n)$ and we don't know if the conjecture still holds for them. The conjecture is also proven to hold for integers $n$ with $v(n) \leq 5$ and for infinitely many integers with $v(n)=6$. There is no specific results on integers with $v(n)=7$. In \cite{thurber}, an infinite list of integers satisfying $\ell(n) = \ell(2n)$ and $v(n) = 7$ is given. In this paper, we prove that the conjecture holds for all of them.
FocusedCleaner: Sanitizing Poisoned Graphs for Robust GNN-based Node Classification

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, which will generate a poisoned graph as the input to the GNN models. We present FocusedCleaner as a poisoned graph sanitizer to effectively identify the poison injected by attackers. Specifically, FocusedCleaner provides a sanitation framework consisting of two modules: bi-level structural learning and victim node detection. In particular, the structural learning module will reverse the attack process to steadily sanitize the graph while the detection module provides ``the focus" -- a narrowed and more accurate search region -- to structural learning. These two modules will operate in iterations and reinforce each other to sanitize a poisoned graph step by step. As an important application, we show that the adversarial robustness of GNNs trained over the sanitized graph for the node classification task is significantly improved. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FocusedCleaner outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines both on poisoned graph sanitation and improving robustness.
Line Graph Contrastive Learning for Link Prediction

Link prediction tasks focus on predicting possible future connections. Most existing researches measure the likelihood of links by different similarity scores on node pairs and predict links between nodes. However, the similarity-based approaches have some challenges in information loss on nodes and generalization ability on similarity indexes. To address the above issues, we propose a Line Graph Contrastive Learning(LGCL) method to obtain rich information with multiple perspectives. LGCL obtains a subgraph view by h-hop subgraph sampling with target node pairs. After transforming the sampled subgraph into a line graph, the link prediction task is converted into a node classification task, which graph convolution progress can learn edge embeddings from graphs more effectively. Then we design a novel cross-scale contrastive learning framework on the line graph and the subgraph to maximize the mutual information of them, so that fuses the structure and feature information. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LGCL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and has better performance on generalization and robustness.
SciFact-Open: Towards open-domain scientific claim verification

While research on scientific claim verification has led to the development of powerful systems that appear to approach human performance, these approaches have yet to be tested in a realistic setting against large corpora of scientific literature. Moving to this open-domain evaluation setting, however, poses unique challenges; in particular, it is infeasible to exhaustively annotate all evidence documents. In this work, we present SciFact-Open, a new test collection designed to evaluate the performance of scientific claim verification systems on a corpus of 500K research abstracts. Drawing upon pooling techniques from information retrieval, we collect evidence for scientific claims by pooling and annotating the top predictions of four state-of-the-art scientific claim verification models. We find that systems developed on smaller corpora struggle to generalize to SciFact-Open, exhibiting performance drops of at least 15 F1. In addition, analysis of the evidence in SciFact-Open reveals interesting phenomena likely to appear when claim verification systems are deployed in practice, e.g., cases where the evidence supports only a special case of the claim. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/dwadden/scifact-open.