Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Forecasting with jury-based probabilistic argumentation

Probabilistic Argumentation naturally supports the integration of quantitative (probabilistic) reasoning and qualitative argumentation. Meanwhile, Jury-based Probabilistic Argumentation supports the combination of opinions by different reasoners. We show how Jury-based Probabilistic Abstract Argumentation (JPAA) and a form of Jury-based Probabilistic Assumption-based Argumentation (JPABA) can naturally support forecasting, whereby subjective probability estimates are combined to make predictions about future events. The form of JPABA we consider is an instance of JPAA and results from integrating Assumption-Based Argumentation (ABA) and probability spaces expressed by Bayesian networks. We show how JPAA and (the considered form of) JPABA can support forecasting by allowing different forecasters to determine the probability of arguments (and, in JPABA, sentences) with respect to their own probability spaces, while sharing arguments (and, in JPABA, their components). We show in turn how this supports the aggregation of individual forecasts into group forecasts.
Towards Robust Gan-Generated Image Detection: A Multi-View Completion Representation

GAN-generated image detection now becomes the first line of defense against the malicious uses of machine-synthesized image manipulations such as deepfakes. Although some existing detectors work well in detecting clean, known GAN samples, their success is largely attributable to overfitting unstable features such as frequency artifacts, which will cause failures when facing unknown GANs or perturbation attacks. To overcome the issue, we propose a robust detection framework based on a novel multi-view image completion representation. The framework first learns various view-to-image tasks to model the diverse distributions of genuine images. Frequency-irrelevant features can be represented from the distributional discrepancies characterized by the completion models, which are stable, generalized, and robust for detecting unknown fake patterns. Then, a multi-view classification is devised with elaborated intra- and inter-view learning strategies to enhance view-specific feature representation and cross-view feature aggregation, respectively. We evaluated the generalization ability of our framework across six popular GANs at different resolutions and its robustness against a broad range of perturbation attacks. The results confirm our method's improved effectiveness, generalization, and robustness over various baselines.
Statistically Significant Concept-based Explanation of Image Classifiers via Model Knockoffs

A concept-based classifier can explain the decision process of a deep learning model by human understandable concepts in image classification problems. However, sometimes concept-based explanations may cause false positives, which misregards unrelated concepts as important for the prediction task. Our goal is to find the statistically significant concept for classification to prevent misinterpretation. In this study, we propose a method using a deep learning model to learn the image concept and then using the knockoff sample to select the important concepts for prediction by controlling the False Discovery Rate (FDR) under a certain value. We evaluate the proposed method in our experiments on both synthetic and real data. Also, it shows that our method can control the FDR properly while selecting highly interpretable concepts to improve the trustworthiness of the model.
Dynamic Belief for Decentralized Multi-Agent Cooperative Learning

Decentralized multi-agent cooperative learning is a practical task due to the partially observed setting both in training and execution. Every agent learns to cooperate without access to the observations and policies of others. However, the decentralized training of multi-agent is of great difficulty due to non-stationarity, especially when other agents' policies are also in learning during training. To overcome this, we propose to learn a dynamic policy belief for each agent to predict the current policies of other agents and accordingly condition the policy of its own. To quickly adapt to the development of others' policies, we introduce a historical context to learn the belief inference according to a few recent action histories of other agents and a latent variational inference to model their policies by a learned distribution. We evaluate our method on the StarCraft II micro management task (SMAC) and demonstrate its superior performance in the decentralized training settings and comparable results with the state-of-the-art CTDE methods.
Sketch Recognition via Part-based Hierarchical Analogical Learning

Sketch recognition has been studied for decades, but it is far from solved. Drawing styles are highly variable across people and adapting to idiosyncratic visual expressions requires data-efficient learning. Explainability also matters, so that users can see why a system got confused about something. This paper introduces a novel part-based approach for sketch recognition, based on hierarchical analogical learning, a new method to apply analogical learning to qualitative representations. Given a sketched object, our system automatically segments it into parts and constructs multi-level qualitative representations of them. Our approach performs analogical generalization at multiple levels of part descriptions and uses coarse-grained results to guide interpretation at finer levels. Experiments on the Berlin TU dataset and the Coloring Book Objects dataset show that the system can learn explainable models in a data-efficient manner.
Choosing Well Your Opponents: How to Guide the Synthesis of Programmatic Strategies

This paper introduces Local Learner (2L), an algorithm for providing a set of reference strategies to guide the search for programmatic strategies in two-player zero-sum games. Previous learning algorithms, such as Iterated Best Response (IBR), Fictitious Play (FP), and Double-Oracle (DO), can be computationally expensive or miss important information for guiding search algorithms. 2L actively selects a set of reference strategies to improve the search signal. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of our approach while guiding a local search algorithm for synthesizing strategies in three games, including MicroRTS, a challenging real-time strategy game. Results show that 2L learns reference strategies that provide a stronger search signal than IBR, FP, and DO. We also simulate a tournament of MicroRTS, where a synthesizer using 2L outperformed the winners of the two latest MicroRTS competitions, which were programmatic strategies written by human programmers.
FedNoRo: Towards Noise-Robust Federated Learning by Addressing Class Imbalance and Label Noise Heterogeneity

Federated noisy label learning (FNLL) is emerging as a promising tool for privacy-preserving multi-source decentralized learning. Existing research, relying on the assumption of class-balanced global data, might be incapable to model complicated label noise, especially in medical scenarios. In this paper, we first formulate a new and more realistic federated label noise problem where global data is class-imbalanced and label noise is heterogeneous, and then propose a two-stage framework named FedNoRo for noise-robust federated learning. Specifically, in the first stage of FedNoRo, per-class loss indicators followed by Gaussian Mixture Model are deployed for noisy client identification. In the second stage, knowledge distillation and a distance-aware aggregation function are jointly adopted for noise-robust federated model updating. Experimental results on the widely-used ICH and ISIC2019 datasets demonstrate the superiority of FedNoRo against the state-of-the-art FNLL methods for addressing class imbalance and label noise heterogeneity in real-world FL scenarios.
Topological Planning with Post-unique and Unary Actions

We are interested in realistic planning problems to model the behavior of Non-Playable Characters (NPCs) in video games. Search-based action planning, introduced by the game F.E.A.R. in 2005, has an exponential time complexity allowing to control only a dozen NPCs between two frames. A close study of the plans generated in first-person shooters shows that: (1) actions are unary, (2) actions are contextually post-unique and (3) there is no two instances of the same action in an NPC’s plan. By considering (1), (2) and (3) as restrictions, we introduce new classes of problems with the Simplified Action Structure formalism which indeed allow to model realistic problems and whose instances are solvable by a linear-time algorithm. We also experimentally show that our algorithm is capable of managing millions of NPCs per frame.
Action Recognition with Multi-stream Motion Modeling and Mutual Information Maximization

Action recognition has long been a fundamental and intriguing problem in artificial intelligence. The task is challenging due to the high dimensionality nature of an action, as well as the subtle motion details to be considered. Current state-of-the-art approaches typically learn from articulated motion sequences in the straightforward 3D Euclidean space. However, the vanilla Euclidean space is not efficient for modeling important motion characteristics such as the joint-wise angular acceleration, which reveals the driving force behind the motion. Moreover, current methods typically attend to each channel equally and lack theoretical constrains on extracting task-relevant features from the input. In this paper, we seek to tackle these challenges from three aspects: (1) We propose to incorporate an acceleration representation, explicitly modeling the higher-order variations in motion. (2) We introduce a novel Stream-GCN network equipped with multi-stream components and channel attention, where different representations (i.e., streams) supplement each other towards a more precise action recognition while attention capitalizes on those important channels. (3) We explore feature-level supervision for maximizing the extraction of task-relevant information and formulate this into a mutual information loss. Empirically, our approach sets the new state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets, NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA.
Differentiable Model Selection for Ensemble Learning

Model selection is a strategy aimed at creating accurate and robust models by identifying the optimal model for classifying any particular input sample. This paper proposes a novel framework for differentiable selection of groups of models by integrating machine learning and combinatorial optimization. The framework is tailored for ensemble learning with a strategy that learns to combine the predictions of appropriately selected pre-trained ensemble models. It does so by modeling the ensemble learning task as a differentiable selection program trained end-to-end over a pretrained ensemble to optimize task performance. The proposed framework demonstrates its versatility and effectiveness, outperforming conventional and advanced consensus rules across a variety of classification tasks.
Enriching Phrases with Coupled Pixel and Object Contexts for Panoptic Narrative Grounding

Panoptic narrative grounding (PNG) aims to segment things and stuff objects in an image described by noun phrases of a narrative caption. As a multimodal task, an essential aspect of PNG is the visual-linguistic interaction between image and caption. The previous two-stage method aggregates visual contexts from offline-generated mask proposals to phrase features, which tend to be noisy and fragmentary. The recent one-stage method aggregates only pixel contexts from image features to phrase features, which may incur semantic misalignment due to lacking object priors. To realize more comprehensive visual-linguistic interaction, we propose to enrich phrases with coupled pixel and object contexts by designing a Phrase-Pixel-Object Transformer Decoder (PPO-TD), where both fine-grained part details and coarse-grained entity clues are aggregated to phrase features. In addition, we also propose a Phrase-Object Contrastive Loss (POCL) to pull closer the matched phrase-object pairs and push away unmatched ones for aggregating more precise object contexts from more phrase-relevant object tokens. Extensive experiments on the PNG benchmark show our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance with large margins.
Efficient NLP Model Finetuning via Multistage Data Filtering

As model finetuning is central to the modern NLP, we set to maximize its efficiency. Motivated by redundancy in training examples and the sheer sizes of pretrained models, we exploit a key opportunity: training only on important data. To this end, we set to filter training examples in a streaming fashion, in tandem with training the target model. Our key techniques are two: (1) automatically determine a training loss threshold for skipping backward training passes; (2) run a meta predictor for further skipping forward training passes. We integrate the above techniques in a holistic, three-stage training pro- cess. On a diverse set of benchmarks, our method reduces the required training examples by up to 5.3× and training time by up to 6.8×, while only seeing minor accuracy degradation. Our method is effective even for training one epoch, where each training example is encountered only once. It is simple to implement and is compatible with the existing finetuning techniques. Code is available at: https://github.com/xo28/efficient-NLP-multistage-training
SmartBERT: A Promotion of Dynamic Early Exiting Mechanism for Accelerating BERT Inference

Dynamic early exiting has been proven to improve the inference speed of the pre-trained language model like BERT. However, all samples must go through all consecutive layers before early exiting and more complex samples usually go through more layers, which still exists redundant computation. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic early exiting combined with layer skipping for BERT inference named SmartBERT, which adds a skipping gate and an exiting operator into each layer of BERT. SmartBERT can adaptively skip some layers and adaptively choose whether to exit. Besides, we propose cross-layer contrastive learning and combine it into our training phases to boost the intermediate layers and classifiers which would be beneficial for early exiting. To keep the inconsistent usage of skipping gates between training and inference phases, we propose a hard weight mechanism during training phase. We conduct experiments on eight classification datasets of the GLUE benchmark. Experimental results show that SmartBERT achieves 2-3× computation reduction with minimal accuracy drops compared with BERT and our method outperforms previous methods in both efficiency and accuracy. Moreover, in some complex datasets, we prove that the early exiting based on entropy hardly works, and the skipping mechanism is essential for reducing computation.
Annealing Genetic-based Preposition Substitution for Text Rubbish Example Generation

Modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) models expose under-sensitivity towards text rubbish examples. The text rubbish example is the heavily modified input text which is nonsensical to humans but does not change the model’s prediction. Prior work crafts rubbish examples by iteratively deleting words and determining the deletion order with beam search. However, the produced rubbish examples usually cause a reduction in model confidence and sometimes deliver human-readable text. To address these problems, we propose an Annealing Genetic based Preposition Substitution (AGPS) algorithm for text rubbish sample generation with two major merits. Firstly, the AGPS crafts rubbish text examples by substituting input words with meaningless prepositions instead of directly removing them, which brings less degradation to the model’s confidence. Secondly, we design an Annealing Genetic algorithm to optimize the word replacement priority, which allows the Genetic Algorithm (GA) to jump out the local optima with probabilities. This is significant in achieving better objectives, i.e., a high word modification rate and a high model confidence. Experimental results on five popular datasets manifest the superiority of AGPS compared with the baseline and expose the fact: the NLP models can not really understand the semantics of sentences, as they give the same prediction with even higher confidence for the nonsensical preposition sequences.
Unveiling Concepts Learned by a World-Class Chess-Playing Agent

In recent years, the state-of-the-art agents for playing abstract board games, like chess and others, have moved from using intricate hand-crafted models for evaluating the merits of individual game states toward using neural networks (NNs). This development has eased the encapsulation of the relevant domain-specific knowledge and resulted in much-improved playing strength. However, this has come at the cost of making the resulting models ill-interpretable and challenging to understand and use for enhancing human knowledge. Using a world-class superhuman-strength chess-playing engine as our testbed, we show how recent model probing interpretability techniques can shed light on concepts learned by the engine's NN. Furthermore, to gain additional insight, we contrast the game-state evaluations of the NN to that of its counterpart hand-crafted evaluation model and identify and explain some of the main differences.
Bipolar Abstract Dialectical Frameworks Are Covered by Kleene’s Three-valued Logic

Abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs) are one of the most powerful generalizations of classical Dung-style argumentation frameworks (AFs). The additional expressive power comes with an increase in computational complexity, namely one level up in the polynomial hierarchy in comparison to their AF counterparts. However, there is one important subclass, so-called bipolar ADFs (BADFs) which are as complex as classical AFs while offering strictly more modeling capacities. This property makes BADFs very attractive from a knowledge representation point of view and is the main reason why this class has received much attention recently. The semantics of ADFs rely on the Gamma-operator which takes as an input a three-valued interpretation and returns a new one. However, in order to obtain the output the original definition requires to consider any two-valued completion of a given three-valued interpretation. In this paper we formally prove that in case of BADFs we may bypass the computationally intensive procedure via applying Kleene's three-valued logic K. We therefore introduce the so-called bipolar disjunctive normal form which is simply a disjunctive normal form where any used atom possesses either a positive or a negative polarity. We then show that: First, this normal form is expressive enough to represent any BADF and secondly, the computation can be done via Kleene's K instead of dealing with two-valued completions. Inspired by the main correspondence result we present some first experiments showing the computational benefit of using Kleene.
iRe2f: Rethinking Effective Refinement in Language Structure Prediction via Efficient Iterative Retrospecting and Reasoning

Refinement plays a critical role in language structure prediction, a process that deals with complex situations such as structural edge interdependencies. Since language structure prediction usually modeled as graph parsing, typical refinement methods involve taking an initial parsing graph as input and refining it using language input and other relevant information. Intuitively, a refinement component, i.e., refiner, should be lightweight and efficient, as it is only responsible for correcting faults in the initial graph. However, current refiners add a significant burden to the parsing process due to their reliance on time-consuming encoding-decoding procedure on the language input and graph. To make the refiner more practical for real-world applications, this paper proposes a lightweight but effective iterative refinement framework, iRe^2f, based on iterative retrospecting and reasoning without involving the re-encoding process on the graph. iRe^2f iteratively refine the parsing graph based on interaction between graph and sequence and efficiently learns the shortcut to update the sequence and graph representations in each iteration. The shortcut is calculated based on the graph representation in the latest iteration. iRe^2f reduces the number of refinement parameters by 90% compared to the previous smallest refiner. Experiments on a variety of language structure prediction tasks show that iRe^2f performs comparably or better than current state-of-the-art refiners, with a significant increase in efficiency.
MAT: Mixed-Strategy Game of Adversarial Training in Fine-tuning

Fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained language models has been demonstrated effective for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Previous studies have established that incorporating adversarial training during the fine-tuning stage can significantly enhance model generalization and robustness. However, from the perspective of game theory, such utilizations of adversarial training correspond to pure-strategy games, which are inherently limited in terms of the scope of their strategies, thereby still having room for improvement. In order to push the performance boundaries, we propose a novel Mixed-strategy Adversarial Training algorithm (MAT). Methodologically, we derive the Nash equilibrium of a mixed-strategy game for adversarial training using Entropy Mirror Descent to establish MAT by sampling method. To verify the effectiveness of MAT, we conducted extensive benchmark experiments on large-scale pre-trained models, such as BERT and RoBERTa. MAT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both the GLUE and ANLI benchmarks in terms of generalization and robustness.
Local and Global: Temporal Question Answering via Information Fusion

Many models that leverage knowledge graphs (KGs) have recently demonstrated remarkable success in question answering (QA) tasks. In the real world, many facts contained in KGs are time-constrained thus temporal KGQA has received increasing attention. Despite the fruitful efforts of previous models in temporal KGQA, they still have several limitations. (I) They neither emphasize the graph structural information between entities in KGs nor explicitly utilize a multi-hop relation path through graph neural networks to enhance answer prediction. (II) They adopt pre-trained language models (LMs) to obtain question representations, focusing merely on the global information related to the question while not highlighting the local information of the entities in KGs. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel model that simultaneously explores both Local information and Global information for the task of temporal KGQA (LGQA). Specifically, we first introduce an auxiliary task in the temporal KG embedding procedure to make timestamp embeddings time-order aware. Then, we design information fusion layers that effectively incorporate local and global information to deepen question understanding. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmarks, and LGQA significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models, especially in difficult questions. Moreover, LGQA can generate interpretable and trustworthy predictions.