Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
What You See is What You Read? Improving Text-Image Alignment Evaluation

Automatically determining whether a text and a corresponding image are semantically aligned is a significant challenge for vision-language models, with applications in generative text-to-image and image-to-text tasks. In this work, we study methods for automatic text-image alignment evaluation. We first introduce SeeTRUE: a comprehensive evaluation set, spanning multiple datasets from both text-to-image and image-to-text generation tasks, with human judgements for whether a given text-image pair is semantically aligned. We then describe two automatic methods to determine alignment: the first involving a pipeline based on question generation and visual question answering models, and the second employing an end-to-end classification approach by finetuning multimodal pretrained models. Both methods surpass prior approaches in various text-image alignment tasks, with significant improvements in challenging cases that involve complex composition or unnatural images. Finally, we demonstrate how our approaches can localize specific misalignments between an image and a given text, and how they can be used to automatically re-rank candidates in text-to-image generation.
RelationMatch: Matching In-batch Relationships for Semi-supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning has achieved notable success by leveraging very few labeled data and exploiting the wealth of information derived from unlabeled data. However, existing algorithms usually focus on aligning predictions on paired data points augmented from an identical source, and overlook the inter-point relationships within each batch. This paper introduces a novel method, RelationMatch, which exploits in-batch relationships with a matrix cross-entropy (MCE) loss function. Through the application of MCE, our proposed method consistently surpasses the performance of established state-of-the-art methods, such as FixMatch and FlexMatch, across a variety of vision datasets. Notably, we observed a substantial enhancement of 15.21% in accuracy over FlexMatch on the STL-10 dataset using only 40 labels. Moreover, we apply MCE to supervised learning scenarios, and observe consistent improvements as well.
BAD: BiAs Detection for Large Language Models in the context of candidate screening

Application Tracking Systems (ATS) have allowed talent managers, recruiters, and college admissions committees to process large volumes of potential candidate applications efficiently. Traditionally, this screening process was conducted manually, creating major bottlenecks due to the quantity of applications and introducing many instances of human bias. The advent of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and the potential of adopting methods to current automated application screening raises additional bias and fairness issues that must be addressed. In this project, we wish to identify and quantify the instances of social bias in ChatGPT and other OpenAI LLMs in the context of candidate screening in order to demonstrate how the use of these models could perpetuate existing biases and inequalities in the hiring process.
Wasserstein Gradient Flows for Optimizing Gaussian Mixture Policies

Robots often rely on a repertoire of previously-learned motion policies for performing tasks of diverse complexities. When facing unseen task conditions or when new task requirements arise, robots must adapt their motion policies accordingly. In this context, policy optimization is the \emph{de facto} paradigm to adapt robot policies as a function of task-specific objectives. Most commonly-used motion policies carry particular structures that are often overlooked in policy optimization algorithms. We instead propose to leverage the structure of probabilistic policies by casting the policy optimization as an optimal transport problem. Specifically, we focus on robot motion policies that build on Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) and formulate the policy optimization as a Wassertein gradient flow over the GMMs space. This naturally allows us to constrain the policy updates via the $L^2$-Wasserstein distance between GMMs to enhance the stability of the policy optimization process. Furthermore, we leverage the geometry of the Bures-Wasserstein manifold to optimize the Gaussian distributions of the GMM policy via Riemannian optimization. We evaluate our approach on common robotic settings: Reaching motions, collision-avoidance behaviors, and multi-goal tasks. Our results show that our method outperforms common policy optimization baselines in terms of task success rate and low-variance solutions.
CLIP-GCD: Simple Language Guided Generalized Category Discovery

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) requires a model to both classify known categories and cluster unknown categories in unlabeled data. Prior methods leveraged self-supervised pre-training combined with supervised fine-tuning on the labeled data, followed by simple clustering methods. In this paper, we posit that such methods are still prone to poor performance on out-of-distribution categories, and do not leverage a key ingredient: Semantic relationships between object categories. We therefore propose to leverage multi-modal (vision and language) models, in two complementary ways. First, we establish a strong baseline by replacing uni-modal features with CLIP, inspired by its zero-shot performance. Second, we propose a novel retrieval-based mechanism that leverages CLIP's aligned vision-language representations by mining text descriptions from a text corpus for the labeled and unlabeled set. We specifically use the alignment between CLIP's visual encoding of the image and textual encoding of the corpus to retrieve top-k relevant pieces of text and incorporate their embeddings to perform joint image+text semi-supervised clustering. We perform rigorous experimentation and ablations (including on where to retrieve from, how much to retrieve, and how to combine information), and validate our results on several datasets including out-of-distribution domains, demonstrating state-of-art results.
The Effectiveness of a Dynamic Loss Function in Neural Network Based Automated Essay Scoring

Neural networks and in particular the attention mechanism have brought significant advances to the field of Automated Essay Scoring. Many of these systems use a regression-based model which may be prone to underfitting when the model only predicts the mean of the training data. In this paper, we present a dynamic loss function that creates an incentive for the model to predict with the correct distribution, as well as predicting the correct values. Our loss function achieves this goal without sacrificing any performance achieving a Quadratic Weighted Kappa score of 0.752 on the Automated Student Assessment Prize Automated Essay Scoring dataset.
Toxicity Inspector: A Framework to Evaluate Ground Truth in Toxicity Detection Through Feedback

Toxic language is difficult to define, as it is not monolithic and has many variations in perceptions of toxicity. This challenge of detecting toxic language is increased by the highly contextual and subjectivity of its interpretation, which can degrade the reliability of datasets and negatively affect detection model performance. To fill this void, this paper introduces a toxicity inspector framework that incorporates a human-in-the-loop pipeline with the aim of enhancing the reliability of toxicity benchmark datasets by centering the evaluator's values through an iterative feedback cycle. The centerpiece of this framework is the iterative feedback process, which is guided by two metric types (hard and soft) that provide evaluators and dataset creators with insightful examination to balance the tradeoff between performance gains and toxicity avoidance.
IMAGINATOR: Pre-Trained Image+Text Joint Embeddings using Word-Level Grounding of Images

Word embeddings, i.e., semantically meaningful vector representation of words, are largely influenced by the distributional hypothesis "You shall know a word by the company it keeps" (Harris, 1954), whereas modern prediction-based neural network embeddings rely on design choices and hyperparameter optimization. Word embeddings like Word2Vec, GloVe etc. well capture the contextuality and real-world analogies but contemporary convolution-based image embeddings such as VGGNet, AlexNet, etc. do not capture contextual knowledge. The popular king-queen analogy does not hold true for most commonly used vision embeddings. In this paper, we introduce a pre-trained joint embedding (JE), named IMAGINATOR, trained on 21K distinct image objects level from 1M image+text pairs. JE is a way to encode multimodal data into a vector space where the text modality serves as the ground-ing key, which the complementary modality (in this case, the image) is anchored with. IMAGINATOR encapsulates three individual representations: (i) object-object co-location, (ii) word-object co-location, and (iii) word-object correlation. These three ways capture complementary aspects of the two modalities which are further combined to obtain the final JEs. Generated JEs are intrinsically evaluated to assess how well they capture the contextuality and real-world analogies. We also evaluate pre-trained IMAGINATOR JEs on three downstream tasks: (i) image captioning, (ii) Image2Tweet, and (iii) text-based image retrieval. IMAGINATOR establishes a new standard on the aforementioned down-stream tasks by outperforming the current SoTA on all the selected tasks. IMAGINATOR will be made publicly available. The codes are available at https://github.com/varunakk/IMAGINATOR
Reconstruction Error-based Anomaly Detection with Few Outlying Examples

Reconstruction error-based neural architectures constitute a classical deep learning approach to anomaly detection which has shown great performances. It consists in training an Autoencoder to reconstruct a set of examples deemed to represent the normality and then to point out as anomalies those data that show a sufficiently large reconstruction error. Unfortunately, these architectures often become able to well reconstruct also the anomalies in the data. This phenomenon is more evident when there are anomalies in the training set. In particular when these anomalies are labeled, a setting called semi-supervised, the best way to train Autoencoders is to ignore anomalies and minimize the reconstruction error on normal data. The goal of this work is to investigate approaches to allow reconstruction error-based architectures to instruct the model to put known anomalies outside of the domain description of the normal data. Specifically, our strategy exploits a limited number of anomalous examples to increase the contrast between the reconstruction error associated with normal examples and those associated with both known and unknown anomalies, thus enhancing anomaly detection performances. The experiments show that this new procedure achieves better performances than the standard Autoencoder approach and the main deep learning techniques for semi-supervised anomaly detection.
Exact Recovery for System Identification with More Corrupt Data than Clean Data

In this paper, we study the system identification problem for linear discrete-time systems under adversaries and analyze two lasso-type estimators. We study both asymptotic and non-asymptotic properties of these estimators in two separate scenarios, corresponding to deterministic and stochastic models for the attack times. Since the samples collected from the system are correlated, the existing results on lasso are not applicable. We show that when the system is stable and the attacks are injected periodically, the sample complexity for the exact recovery of the system dynamics is O(n), where n is the dimension of the states. When the adversarial attacks occur at each time instance with probability p, the required sample complexity for the exact recovery scales as O(\log(n)p/(1-p)^2). This result implies the almost sure convergence to the true system dynamics under the asymptotic regime. As a by-product, even when more than half of the data is compromised, our estimators still learn the system correctly. This paper provides the first mathematical guarantee in the literature on learning from correlated data for dynamical systems in the case when there is less clean data than corrupt data.
Improving Speaker Verification with Self-Pretrained Transformer Models

Recently, fine-tuning large pre-trained Transformer models using downstream datasets has received a rising interest. Despite their success, it is still challenging to disentangle the benefits of large-scale datasets and Transformer structures from the limitations of the pre-training. In this paper, we introduce a hierarchical training approach, named self-pretraining, in which Transformer models are pretrained and finetuned on the same dataset. Three pre-trained models including HuBERT, Conformer and WavLM are evaluated on four different speaker verification datasets with varying sizes. Our experiments show that these self-pretrained models achieve competitive performance on downstream speaker verification tasks with only one-third of the data compared to Librispeech pretraining, such as VoxCeleb1 and CNCeleb1. Furthermore, when pre-training only on the VoxCeleb2-dev, the Conformer model outperforms the one pre-trained on 94k hours of data using the same fine-tuning settings.
Scalable and Safe Remediation of Defective Actions in Self-Learning Conversational Systems

Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been a driving force for the state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural humanagent interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents. However, in large-scale commercial settings, it is often challenging to balance between policy improvements and experience continuity on the broad spectrum of applications handled by such system. In the literature, off-policy evaluation and guard-railing on aggregate statistics has been commonly used to address this problem. In this paper, we propose a method for curating and leveraging high-precision samples sourced from historical regression incident reports to validate, safe-guard, and improve policies prior to the online deployment. We conducted extensive experiments using data from a real-world conversational system and actual regression incidents. The proposed method is currently deployed in our production system to protect customers against broken experiences and enable long-term policy improvements.
Massively Multi-Lingual Event Understanding: Extraction, Visualization, and Search

In this paper, we present ISI-Clear, a state-of-the-art, cross-lingual, zero-shot event extraction system and accompanying user interface for event visualization & search. Using only English training data, ISI-Clear makes global events available on-demand, processing user-supplied text in 100 languages ranging from Afrikaans to Yiddish. We provide multiple event-centric views of extracted events, including both a graphical representation and a document-level summary. We also integrate existing cross-lingual search algorithms with event extraction capabilities to provide cross-lingual event-centric search, allowing English-speaking users to search over events automatically extracted from a corpus of non-English documents, using either English natural language queries (e.g. cholera outbreaks in Iran) or structured queries (e.g. find all events of type Disease-Outbreak with agent cholera and location Iran).
Generating Bayesian Network Models from Data Using Tsetlin Machines

Bayesian networks (BN) are directed acyclic graphical (DAG) models that have been adopted into many fields for their strengths in transparency, interpretability, probabilistic reasoning, and causal modeling. Given a set of data, one hurdle towards using BNs is in building the network graph from the data that properly handles dependencies, whether correlated or causal. In this paper, we propose an initial methodology for discovering network structures using Tsetlin Machines.
Measuring Non-local Brane Order with Error-corrected Parity Snapshots

Exotic quantum many-body states, such as Haldane and spin liquid phases, can exhibit remarkable features like fractional excitations and non-abelian statistics and offer new understandings of quantum entanglement in many-body quantum systems. These phases are classified by non-local correlators that can be directly measured in atomic analog quantum simulating platforms, such as optical lattices and Rydberg atom arrays. However, characterizing these phases in large systems is experimentally challenging because they are sensitive to local errors like atom loss, which suppress its signals exponentially. Additionally, protocols for systematically identifying and mitigating uncorrelated errors in analog quantum simulators are lacking. Here, we address these challenges by developing an error correction method for large-scale neutral atom quantum simulators using optical lattices. Our error correction method can distinguish correlated particle-hole pairs from uncorrelated holes in the Mott insulator. After removing the uncorrelated errors, we observe a dramatic improvement in the non-local parity correlator and find the perimeter scaling law. Furthermore, the error model provides a statistical estimation of fluctuations in site occupation, from which we measure the generalized brane correlator and confirm that it can be an order parameter for Mott insulators in two dimensions. Our work provides a promising avenue for investigating and characterizing exotic phases of matters in large-scale quantum simulators.
Token-wise Decomposition of Autoregressive Language Model Hidden States for Analyzing Model Predictions

While there is much recent interest in studying why Transformer-based large language models make predictions the way they do, the complex computations performed within each layer have made their behavior somewhat opaque. To mitigate this opacity, this work presents a linear decomposition of final hidden states from autoregressive language models based on each initial input token, which is exact for virtually all contemporary Transformer architectures. This decomposition allows the definition of probability distributions that ablate the contribution of specific input tokens, which can be used to analyze their influence on model probabilities over a sequence of upcoming words with only one forward pass from the model. Using the change in next-word probability as a measure of importance, this work first examines which context words make the biggest contribution to language model predictions. Regression experiments suggest that Transformer-based language models rely primarily on collocational associations, followed by linguistic factors such as syntactic dependencies and coreference relationships in making next-word predictions. Additionally, analyses using these measures to predict syntactic dependencies and coreferent mention spans show that collocational association and repetitions of the same token largely explain the language models' predictions on these tasks.
Solving Cosine Similarity Underestimation between High Frequency Words by L2 Norm Discounting

Cosine similarity between two words, computed using their contextualised token embeddings obtained from masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT has shown to underestimate the actual similarity between those words (Zhou et al., 2022). This similarity underestimation problem is particularly severe for highly frequent words. Although this problem has been noted in prior work, no solution has been proposed thus far. We observe that the L2 norm of contextualised embeddings of a word correlates with its log-frequency in the pretraining corpus. Consequently, the larger L2 norms associated with the highly frequent words reduce the cosine similarity values measured between them, thus underestimating the similarity scores. To solve this issue, we propose a method to discount the L2 norm of a contextualised word embedding by the frequency of that word in a corpus when measuring the cosine similarities between words. We show that the so called stop words behave differently from the rest of the words, which require special consideration during their discounting process. Experimental results on a contextualised word similarity dataset show that our proposed discounting method accurately solves the similarity underestimation problem.
ZeroPrompt: Streaming Acoustic Encoders are Zero-Shot Masked LMs

In this paper, we present ZeroPrompt (Figure 1-(a)) and the corresponding Prompt-and-Refine strategy (Figure 3), two simple but effective \textbf{training-free} methods to decrease the Token Display Time (TDT) of streaming ASR models \textbf{without any accuracy loss}. The core idea of ZeroPrompt is to append zeroed content to each chunk during inference, which acts like a prompt to encourage the model to predict future tokens even before they were spoken. We argue that streaming acoustic encoders naturally have the modeling ability of Masked Language Models and our experiments demonstrate that ZeroPrompt is engineering cheap and can be applied to streaming acoustic encoders on any dataset without any accuracy loss. Specifically, compared with our baseline models, we achieve 350 $\sim$ 700ms reduction on First Token Display Time (TDT-F) and 100 $\sim$ 400ms reduction on Last Token Display Time (TDT-L), with theoretically and experimentally equal WER on both Aishell-1 and Librispeech datasets.
Paxion: Patching Action Knowledge in Video-Language Foundation Models

Action knowledge involves the understanding of textual, visual, and temporal aspects of actions. We introduce the Action Dynamics Benchmark (ActionBench) containing two carefully designed probing tasks: Action Antonym and Video Reversal, which targets multimodal alignment capabilities and temporal understanding skills of the model, respectively. Despite recent video-language models' (VidLM) impressive performance on various benchmark tasks, our diagnostic tasks reveal their surprising deficiency (near-random performance) in action knowledge, suggesting that current models rely on object recognition abilities as a shortcut for action understanding. To remedy this, we propose a novel framework, Paxion, along with a new Discriminative Video Dynamics Modeling (DVDM) objective. The Paxion framework utilizes a Knowledge Patcher network to encode new action knowledge and a Knowledge Fuser component to integrate the Patcher into frozen VidLMs without compromising their existing capabilities. Due to limitations of the widely-used Video-Text Contrastive (VTC) loss for learning action knowledge, we introduce the DVDM objective to train the Knowledge Patcher. DVDM forces the model to encode the correlation between the action text and the correct ordering of video frames. Our extensive analyses show that Paxion and DVDM together effectively fill the gap in action knowledge understanding (~50% to 80%), while maintaining or improving performance on a wide spectrum of both object- and action-centric downstream tasks. The code and data will be made publicly available for research purposes at https://github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Paxion.git.